From here:

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

Dear Integrity members and friends:

By now you have read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advent letter. In contrast to the well-known hymn quoted above, Rowan Williams’ letter gives LGBT Anglicans scant hope of liberty from the bonds of ecclesiastical discrimination. He erroneously states that Lambeth Conference 1998 Resolution 1.10””which rejects “homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture”””is the clear consensus of the entire Anglican Communion. He decries General Convention 2003’s approval of the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson and its affirmation of local rites for blessing same-gender relationships. He expresses frustration at our House of Bishop’s failure to implement clear moratoria on additional LGBT bishops or blessing rites. He denigrates the Episcopal Church’s polity””which includes all orders of ministry in decision making. He defends his decision not to invite Bishop Robinson to the 2008 Lambeth Conference. He expresses his intention to appoint yet another task force to talk about LGBT Anglicans rather to us””again ignoring the now 30-year old commitment to listen to our witness. With prophetic leaders like Rowan Williams at the helm of the Anglican Communion, one could despair that LGBT Anglicans will continue to mourn in exile until Jesus comes again!
But, lo, we are promised that Emmanual will come to us. Despite the present oppressive reality, we are invited to rejoice in our future liberation. There are glimmers of hope. For example, a broad coalition of individuals and organizations around the world is emerging to ensure that the voices of fairness and inclusion are heard at the Lambeth Conference next summer. Groundwork is also being done to move beyond B033 and advance marriage equality at General Convention 2009.

You can help Integrity prepare for our witness at the Lambeth Conference and beyond by making a year-end donation for this important work. Secure, online gifts can be made by going to www.integrityusa.org and clicking the blue DONATE NOW button in the left margin. All contributions to Integrity are tax deductible.

Integrity remains committed to the full inclusion of all of the baptized into the Body of Christ. With your prayers, witness, and support we will continue to work within the Episcopal Church to accomplish that Gospel Agenda.

Blessings,

The Rev. Susan Russell, President

(For more information on the Chicago consultation, please read this).

From email:

The following statement, in response to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advent Letter, comes from the steering committee of the Chicago Consultation, an international Anglican group that favors the
full inclusion of gay and lesbian Christians in the Anglican Communion. The Consultation has more than 50 members, including two Primates of the Anglican Communion, 10 diocesan bishops in the
Episcopal Church, and representatives from Brazil, Canada, England, Ghana and New Zealand. It recently completed its initial meeting at Seabury-Western Seminary in Evanston, Ill. For more information see the attached release.

From the steering committee of the Chicago Consultation:

“The archbishop’s lengthy letter contains not a word of comfort to gay and lesbian Christians. In asserting the Communion’s opposition to homophobia, he gives political cover to Archbishop Peter Akinola
and other Primates whose anti-gay activities are a matter of public record. We are especially troubled by the absence of openly gay members on the bodies that may ultimately resolve the issues at hand.
The archbishop’s unwillingness to include gay and lesbian Christians in this process perpetuates the bigotry he purports to deplore.”

More meetings, more conversation, all the way to Lambeth, and most likely beyond.

It appears that Dr, Williams has taken the position that the consensus of the Communion is against TEC, and so in order to “articulate the mind of the Communion,” Dr. Williams has adopted that position. The only reason he will not give up on TEC, will not agree that the mission and ministry has failed, is because of the existence of the “Windsor” bishops and others who follow the Communion’s consensus.

Dr. Williams has polled the Communion, and has now come out in support of what he considers the majority view. It is rather ironic that he would make his stand on such a basis, while at the same time calling into question TEC’s democratic model.

This letter will probably manage to hold the Communion together through Lambeth, although it is doubtful if it will be enough to carry us through GC2009.

Dr. Williams has chosen to support those who would exclude others from the Church based on the questionable translation of seven verses from scripture. The concrete act which exemplifies his decision to support that position is his insistence on continuing to exclude Bp. Robinson from Lambeth. He seems to not recognize that by barring Bp. Robinson, he has silenced the most qualified representative of those being persecuted in the Church today. In so doing, it is Dr. Williams who has expressed a “refusal of the cross – and so of the resurrection.”

Read it all.

From Stand Firm:

The main disconnect for me in the Archbishop’s letter is this: On the one hand, in reference to TEC’s response to the Windsor Report and the Lambeth Resolutions, he acknowledges that “it is extremely unlikely that further meetings will produce any more substantial consensus than that which is now before us.” I believe he is correct. TEC is not going to turn back from its present course. It is not going to abide by the consensus of the Anglican Communion on matters of sexuality.

But on the other hand, he then goes on to call for “professionally facilitated conversations between the leadership of The Episcopal Church and those with whom they are most in dispute” in the hope of somehow gaining “a better level of mutual understanding.” This hope is in vain. TEC does not negotiate with those with whom they are in dispute; they litigate. Numerous meetings have produced no acceptable solution for the minority to remain with integrity within TEC.

The best assistance that the Archbishop can offer to address the situation in TEC is to host a mediation that seeks a negotiated settlement for separation, without rancor or litigation.

Mike Huckabee, who has joked about his lack of foreign policy experience, is criticizing the Bush administration’s efforts, denouncing a go-it-alone “arrogant bunker mentality” and questioning decisions on Iraq.

Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor now running for the Republican presidential nomination, lays out a policy plan that is long on optimism but short on details in the January-February issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, which is published by the Council on Foreign Relations. A copy of his article was released Friday.

“American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out,” Huckabee said. “The Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad. My administration will recognize that the United States’ main fight today does not pit us against the world but pits the world against the terrorists.”

In one specific criticism, Huckabee said Bush did not send enough troops to invade Iraq. And he accused the president of marginalizing Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, who said at the outset of the war that it might take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to control Iraq after the invasion. “I would have met with Shinseki privately and carefully weighed his advice,” Huckabee said.

Read it all.

The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, sent a lengthy letter to the members of his warring Anglican Communion on Friday, saying that both sides had violated the Communion’s boundaries and put the church in crisis.

He criticized the American branch, the Episcopal Church, for departing from the Communion’s consensus on Scripture by ordaining an openly gay bishop and blessing same-sex unions, “in the name of the church.”

But the archbishop faulted conservative prelates in Africa, Asia and Latin America for annexing American parishes and an entire California diocese that have recently left the Episcopal Church, and for ordaining conservative Americans as bishops and priests.

“There can be no doubt that these ordinations have not been encouraged or legitimized by the Communion over all,” the archbishop wrote, contradicting those conservatives who said they were acting with his approval.

Of all the new moves, he wrote: “On the ground, it creates rivalry and confusion. It opens the door to complex and unedifying legal wrangles in civil courts.”

In many ways, the letter was an acknowledgment that the Anglican Communion’s factions have fought to a standstill. A meeting of American bishops in New Orleans in September did not produce the clear reversal and apology that conservatives have demanded.

In response to that meeting, leaders of the international provinces came to no consensus, he wrote.

Read it all.

Germany has sought to nurture tolerance as a national characteristic since World War Two, but it doesn’t stretch to the Church of Scientology. A new Forsa poll shows 74 percent of Germans think Scientology should be banned. The survey comes hard on the heels of a declaration from federal and regional ministers that the movement is unconstitutional. That announcement, the culmination of a row with Scientology dating back to the 1970s, opens the way for a possible ban.

Germany is not alone in refusing to recognise the Church of Scientology as a religion, but it goes further than many other countries in its rejection of the body. It see Scientology as a cult masquerading as a church to make money, a view Scientologists reject.

Agents of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a kind of German FBI, are already gathering information on Scientology and a whole chapter is devoted to it in the intelligence agency’s 2006 report. It describes the movement as having a “totalitarian character” because it seeks to exert control over its members. But the agency is not sure the government will be able to get enough evidence to ban it.

Read it all.

We are making it unsticky now, so to find it go here.

This is a thoughtful, prayerful letter and deserves to be treated as such by all Anglicans. It cannot possibly have been easy to put together.

There is much here to be welcomed.

First, he shows a profound awareness of the gift of the Anglican communion and its fragility at the present time, and desires our unity in Christ. Unity plays a strong role in the New Testament. To be part of the third largest Christian family in the world is an awesome responsibility and privilege. If Anglicanism falls apart, everyone loses. I simply cannot say how strongly some reasserters need to hear this message. Dr.Williams says he writes this “out of the profound conviction that the existence of our Communion is truly a gift of God to the wholeness of Christ’s Church and that all of us will be seriously wounded and diminished if our Communion fractures any further.” I wonder if our words and actions have a similar motivation?

Second, there is a strong underscoring of scripture’s authority and importance in our common Anglican life:

The common acknowledgment that we stand under the authority of Scripture as ‘the rule and ultimate standard of faith’, in the words of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral; as the gift shaped by the Holy Spirit which decisively interprets God to the community of believers and the community of believers to itself and opens our hearts to the living and eternal Word that is Christ. Our obedience to the call of Christ the Word Incarnate is drawn out first and foremost by our listening to the Bible and conforming our lives to what God both offers and requires of us through the words and narratives of the Bible. We recognise each other in one fellowship when we see one another ‘standing under’ the word of Scripture.

Third, there is a strong criticism of TEC’s actions. Note carefully that the actions in question were not one but two breaches caused by that fateful gathering, one having to do with the confirmation of an episcopal election, the other having to do with actual liturgical practice. The 2003 actions were not only unilateral, but they plainly imply “a new understanding of Scripture that has not been received and agreed by the wider Church.” Here we have again a reference to Scripture and the need to read and understand Scripture in, with and through the church. Given the importance of this decision, it should have been done with the wider church, but it was not. We should have sought to make a convincing scriptural case for its actions. but we failed to do so.

Let there be no mistake, the heart of the current crisis among Anglicans is a change “in our discipline” and “our interpretation of the Bible.”

More than this it is clear that New Orleans House of Bishops meeting and the JSC Report were insufficient. True, hard work went into them, but there are serious problems here, as to the assurances that were sought. In the case of Episcopal elections the tie in to a possible future General Convention receives special notice, and welcome reference is made to “the distinctive charism of bishops as an order and their responsibility for sustaining doctrinal standards.”

In the case of same sex blessings, what was asked for has simply not been given:

But the declaration on same-sex blessings is in effect a reiteration of the position taken in previous statements from TEC, and has clearly not satisfied many in the Communion any more than these earlier statements. There is obviously a significant and serious gap between what TEC understands and what others assume as to what constitutes a liturgical provision in the name of the Church at large.

(This is a much clearer and more accurate summary than that of the JSC report which had to be corrected by various participants in the New Orleans meeting).

Fourth, there is a welcome description of the Lambeth Conference as “a meeting of the chief pastors and teachers of the Communion, seeking an authoritative common voice.”

Fifth, there is again an underscoring of the need to treat homosexual and lesbian persons with the care of Christ himself. “The Instruments of Communion have consistently and very strongly repeated that it is part of our Christian and Anglican discipleship to condemn homophobic prejudice and violence, to defend the human rights and civil liberties of homosexual people and to offer them the same pastoral care and loving service that we owe to all in Christ’s name.”

That having been said, one is also left with many questions.

How can he recommend consultants given the degree of the breach? I am concerned that the Archbishop of Canterbury underestimates the depth of this problem, alas. “Actions which they deplore or which they simply have not considered” is not strong enough to describe what is, has, and will be happening. The Windsor Report’s language was stronger:

By electing and confirming such a candidate in the face of the concerns expressed by the wider Communion, the Episcopal Church (USA) has caused deep offence to many faithful Anglican Christians both in its own church and in other parts of the Communion.

(Please note carefully, not just offense, but deep offense)

Also, has he not undermined his own argument about Lambeth in the way Lambeth 1998 has been treated? If Lambeth ”is a meeting of the chief pastors and teachers of the Communion, seeking an authoritative common voice,” then why has a province which has unilaterally and blatantly repudiated that voice not suffered real consequences for so doing? What is the point of coming to a meeting to establish a common voice when those who so establish it will not honor it as common in the common life of their own province?

It is very important to underscore here something which many have missed, namely that is is simply insane to come together and discuss whether to do something which has always been considered immoral when one member family of an extended family is already doing it.

I also wish to ask why there is no mention of the fact that there has been no primates meeting since Tanzania? The Primates set in motion the process that produced the Windsor Report, received and deliberated over the meaning of that report for the wider Anglican family, and then set specific guidelines in place for TEC to respond to in order to repair the enormous breach which the TEC leadership caused. Surely they are the logical body to evaluate and deliberate over TEC’s response in New Orleans? The Archbishop of Canterbury risks arrogating to himself too much of a role here in this matter.

Finally, when Dr. Williams writes

I also intend to convene a small group of primates and others, whose task will be, in close collaboration with the primates, the Joint Standing Committee, the Covenant Design Group and the Lambeth Conference Design Group, to work on the unanswered questions arising from the inconclusive evaluation of the primates to New Orleans and to take certain issues forward to Lambeth. This will feed in to the discussions at Lambeth about Anglican identity and the Covenant process; I suggest that it will also have to consider whether in the present circumstances it is possible for provinces or individual bishops at odds with the expressed mind of the Communion to participate fully in representative Communion agencies, including ecumenical bodies. Its responsibility will be to weigh current developments in the light of the clear recommendations of Windsor and of the subsequent statements from the ACC and the Primates’ Meeting; it will thus also be bound to consider the exact status of bishops ordained by one province for ministry in another

He surely puts the emphasis in the right place but he raises so many more questions than he resolves. Who decides who is in this group or not and why, for example? What criteria do they use? By what deadline do they make their decisions? And: given that meetings and consultations have failed so far to resolve the current chasms in the Communion, how will this lead to any different outcome?

With regard to boundary crossings and the like, has not Dr. Williams allowed allowed this letter to look as if it supports the very equivalency between those actions and what TEC has done which the Tanzania Primates meeting said did not exist? Also, I do not feel that the Archbishop of Canterbury realizes that these actions have been undertaken because the Instruments of Communion have sought to provide a refuge for Communion minded Anglicans in the province of TEC, but they have consistently failed to do so.

The bottom line for me is this: we have here truth, but no consequences.

I sense Archbishop Williams really wants to have a Lambeth Conference as a conference of the whole communion. There is, I believe, a way to do this. It will mean not inviting bishops whose diocesan practice contradicts the mind of the communion; it will involve warning those who have been involved in increasing disorder in our common life, it will involve a clear declaration of the nature of the Lambeth Conference and its focus on the Covenant and that Covenant’s relationship to future Lambeth Conferences, and it will involve a called Primates meeting in the middle of the fall of 2008 to consolidate and elucidate what Lambeth and has said and done and its implications for our common life.

All though this crisis Rowan Williams has decided not to decide, and here he has done it again. Although his description of the problem is most welcome, the solution will take a Herculean effort without which the Lambeth Conference will no longer be a real instrument of the whole communion. In a real communion, there is truth, but there are consequences. I am concerned that with the underestimation of the degree of the problem and the lack of clarity involved in a real solution, Dr. Williams Advent letter will be too little, too late. I pray it may be otherwise–KSH.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has written to Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin Bishop John-David Schofield saying that she assumes his declaration that he is now under the authority of the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone “means you understand yourself to have departed the Episcopal Church and are no longer functioning as a member of the clergy in this Church.”

In a December 14 letter which was emailed to Schofield, Jefferts Schori wrote that she was “deeply saddened” to hear of the San Joaquin convention’s actions.

“I would like to have confirmation from you of this understanding of your status,” she wrote. “Many interrelated matters depend on that status — for example, your membership in the House of Bishops and the acceptability of pension contributions on your behalf.”

Delegates attending the 48th Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin on December 8 voted overwhelmingly to leave the Episcopal Church and to align with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone.

Read it all.

But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted ”” and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?

Usually, Muslim groups like the Organization of the Islamic Conference are quick to defend any affront to the image of Islam. The organization, which represents 57 Muslim states, sent four ambassadors to the leader of my political party in the Netherlands asking him to expel me from Parliament after I gave a newspaper interview in 2003 noting that by Western standards some of the Prophet Muhammad’s behavior would be unconscionable. A few years later, Muslim ambassadors to Denmark protested the cartoons of Muhammad and demanded that their perpetrators be prosecuted.

But while the incidents in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and India have done more to damage the image of Islamic justice than a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the organizations that lined up to protest the hideous Danish offense to Islam are quiet now.

I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so concerned about Islam’s image. We hear that violence is not in the Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up.

Read it all.

In Your Excellency’s remarks you mentioned King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s recognition that the people of Thailand need to offer one another mutual support. His philosophy for economic reform makes that clear, as it seeks to help those at the lowest economic levels by providing access to local resources and technology. I urge your nation to continue to assist those who are most in need so that they may obtain the economic self-sufficiency to which they have a right. One of the most effective ways to ensure this is by safeguarding family life. In fact, family life shapes the social and ethical order of human work and is the true source of genuine economic progress (cf. Encyclical Letter “Laborem Exercens,” 10). In Asia the family has traditionally enjoyed a high level of esteem, regarded not only as the heart of interpersonal relationships but also as a place of economic security for its members. “The Family, therefore, must rightfully be seen as an essential agent of economic life, guided not by the market mentality but by the logic of sharing and solidarity among generations” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 248). It is my hope that your Government will foster an ever greater respect for the importance of the family, convincing young people that material wealth and quick economic gain are no replacement for the loving rapport found in “domestic society.”

Read it all.

An estimated 50 million children in the Arab world woke up this Monday to an early Christmas gift–a new Christian television station with 24-hour program designed just for them.

SAT-7 KIDS is the third channel offered by SAT-7, a Christian satellite network made by and for people living in the Middle East, and the first and only channel dedicated to locally made Christian programming targeted to Arabic children.

The station covers the entire Arab world, 22 countries and five time zones. More than 100 million children under age 15 live in that area, and half have access to satellite TV.

“I had tears in my eyes when the KIDS channel came on the air,” said Rita El Mounayer, director of Arabic programming for SAT-7. “I cried because of God’s blessings. I was so happy to see the SAT-7 KIDS channel finally on the air. It’s amazing to see it, and amazing that God uses imperfect vessels like us to bring about things like this.”

Read it all.

Only 12 per cent of adults and seven per cent of those aged between 18 and 24 really know the story of Jesus’s birth, a survey from the theological think tank Theos suggested this week.

Some parts of the story were better known than others to the 1015 who responded to the poll. Although 73 per cent knew that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, nine per cent thought it was Nazareth, and ten per cent, Jerusalem.

The percentage correctly identifying an angel as the one who told Mary she would give birth to a son was also 73, but six per cent thought the Wise Men told her, and five per cent thought it was the shepherds.

Correctly identifying Jesus’s cousin proved tricky for more than half the respondents. While 48 per cent said it was John the Baptist, 12 per cent suggested Peter, and six per cent, Luke and James. Asked where Joseph, Mary, and Jesus went to escape from King Herod when Jesus was a young child, just 22 per cent of respondents gave the correct answer ”” Egypt.

Read it all.

The debates about sexuality, significant as they may be, are symptoms of our confusion about these basic principles of recognition. It is too easy to make the debate a standoff between those who are ‘for’ and those who are ‘against’ the welcoming of homosexual people in the Church. The Instruments of Communion have consistently and very strongly repeated that it is part of our Christian and Anglican discipleship to condemn homophobic prejudice and violence, to defend the human rights and civil liberties of homosexual people and to offer them the same pastoral care and loving service that we owe to all in Christ’s name. But the deeper question is about what we believe we are free to do, if we seek to be recognisably faithful to Scripture and the moral tradition of the wider Church, with respect to blessing and sanctioning in the name of the Church certain personal decisions about what constitutes an acceptable Christian lifestyle. Insofar as there is currently any consensus in the Communion about this, it is not in favour of change in our discipline or our interpretation of the Bible.

This is why the episcopal ordination of a person in a same-sex union or a claim to the freedom to make liturgical declarations about the character of same-sex unions inevitably raises the question of whether a local church is still fully recognisable within the one family of practice and reflection. Where one part of the family makes a decisive move that plainly implies a new understanding of Scripture that has not been received and agreed by the wider Church, it is not surprising that others find a problem in knowing how far they are still speaking the same language. And because what one local church says is naturally taken as representative of what others might say, we have the painful situation of some communities being associated with views and actions which they deplore or which they simply have not considered.

Where such a situation arises, it becomes important to clarify that the Communion as a whole is not committed to receiving the new interpretation and that there must be ways in which others can appropriately distance themselves from decisions and policies which they have not agreed. This is important in our relations with our own local contexts and equally in our ecumenical (and interfaith) encounters, to avoid confusion and deep misunderstanding.

The desire to establish this distance has led some to conclude that, since the first condition of recognisability (a common reading and understanding of Scripture) is not met, the whole structure of mission and ministry has failed in a local church that commits itself to a new reading of the Bible. Hence the willingness of some to provide supplementary ministerial care through the adoption of parishes in distant provinces or the ordination of ministers for distant provinces.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Four hundred and nine pages.

Eighty-six players.

One fatal injection into the heart of a national pastime’s history.

Baseball will survive the steroid-bloated Mitchell report, which was released today with countless stories of cheating by players, compliance by owners and protection by the union.

Baseball will survive, but Roger Clemens will not.

If Barry Bonds is going to be shunned from Cooperstown and our hearts, then so must Clemens, a Hall of Fame arm who will now forever be remembered for his butt.

“McNamee injected Clemens in the buttocks four to six times with testosterone,” reads the report.

Baseball will survive, but Andy Pettitte will not.

Read the entire piece.

Dan and Ann Stratton are a Wall Street power couple, even if Wall Street doesn’t know it. Dan is a tall, blond, muscular Minnesota boy turned Yale football star who, by the time he was 30, had parlayed his college connections into a small fortune as a commodities trader. Today, at 47, he is the founder and pastor of Faith Exchange Fellowship, a fundamentalist Christian congregation in Manhattan’s financial district. He is also a “five-fold minister” of Yahweh, a self-described evangelist, apostle and prophet, and spiritual warrior king. Ann is a North Jersey Catholic schoolgirl turned born-again miracle worker, a lithe beauty with deeply sympathetic eyes and a sexy wardrobe ”” Carmela Soprano endowed with Protestant superpowers ”” whose prayers once supposedly raised a German au pair from the dead on the street in front of the Blue Moon Mexican Cafe in Englewood, N.J.

Together they are on a mission to banish Satan from the financial temples of Wall Street and transform New York City into “ChristTown.” But first they have to find a decent piece of downtown real estate.

Usually, Faith Exchange Fellowship holds its Sunday services in a ballroom at the Marriott Financial Center Downtown Hotel on West Street, at least for the past five years, since they lost their permanent home on 9/11. The most recent Sunday I was there, a congregation of about 400 had gathered. They stood for half an hour before the service began, clapping and dancing to gospel tunes. The singing was led by Carolyn Miller, who once toured in a national company of “The Wiz,” and a small choir that includes professionals who perform in clubs and shows around New York. The band featured Billy (Spaceman) Patterson, a local guitar legend who has played with Miles Davis and James Brown and whose current night job was musical director of Melvin Van Peebles’s raunchy off-Broadway musical, “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death.”

Faith Exchange Fellowship attracts a lot of downtown artists and performers. It is probably the only fundamentalist church in the country whose active members include a radical feminist poet, a homeless transsexual and a fellow who specializes in choreographing Shakespearian fight scenes.

This suits Dan Stratton, who once took private opera classes at Lincoln Center, just fine. “A lot of my Yale friends regard me as a bigot, close-minded, sophomoric, a redneck,” he says. “But when it comes to sin, my motto is: fight the demand, not the supply. The Bible says homosexuality is an abomination, but I don’t sermonize about that or come down too hard on it. The artists in my church wouldn’t be there if I did. I let the Bible speak for itself on the subject of what is and isn’t a sin.”

read it all.

A short while ago we heard the Word of God that helps us better to understand the solemn moment we are now experiencing. In the Gospel passage, Jesus had just recalled for the third time the fate that awaits him in Jerusalem, but the ambition of the disciples gets the upper hand on the fear that for a moment assailed them. After Peter’s confession at Caesarea and the discussion along the way about who was greatest, ambition drives the sons of Zebedee to claim for themselves the best positions in the messianic kingdom at the end of time. In the race for privileges, the two know well what they want, just as the other 10 do, despite their “righteous” indignation. In truth, however, they do not know what they are asking for. It is Jesus who makes them understand, speaking in very different terms of the “service” that awaits them. He corrects the coarse conception of merit that they have, according to which man can acquire rights before God.

The Evangelist Mark reminds us, dear and venerable brothers, that every true disciple of Christ can aspire for one thing only: to share in his passion without claiming recompense. The Christian is called to assume the condition of “servant,” following in the footsteps of Jesus, spending his life for others in a gratuitous and disinterested way. It is not the quest for power and success but the humble gift of self for the good of the Church that should characterize each gesture and each word of ours. True Christian greatness, in fact, does not consist in dominating but in serving. Today Jesus repeats to each of us that he “did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life for the many” (Mark 10:45). This is the ideal that must orient your service. Dear brothers, in entering the College of Cardinals, the Lord asks of you and gives to you the service of love: love for God, love for his Church, love for our brothers, with a total and unconditional dedication, “usque ad sanguinis effusionem” [even to the shedding of blood], as is said in the formula for the imposition of the biretta and as is shown in the garments that you will put on.

Be apostles of God, who is love, and witnesses of evangelical hope: The Christian people expects this of you. Today’s ceremony highlights the great responsibility that weighs on each of you, venerable and dear brothers, and which finds confirmation in the words of the Apostle Peter that we have just heard: “Adore the Lord, Christ, in your hearts, always ready to answer whoever asks you the reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). Such a responsibility does not exempt you from risks, rather, as St. Peter adds, “It is better, if God wills it, to suffer for doing the good than for doing evil” (1 Peter 3:17). Christ asks you to confess his truth before men, to embrace and share his cause; and to accomplish all of this “with sweetness and respect, with a good conscience” (1 Peter 3:1-16), that is, with that interior humility that is a fruit of cooperation with the grace of God.

Pope Benedict XVI.

Roger Clemens, who won the Cy Young award a record seven times, and seven players who won baseball’s most valuable player award were among dozens of players named Thursday in the former Senator George Mitchell’s report on his investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the sport.

“For more than a decade there has been widespread anabolic steroid use,” Mitchell said in a news conference announcing the results of a 20-month investigation he led at the behest of Major League Baseball. He said the use of performance-enhancing substances “poses a serious threat to the integrity of the game.”

Clemens was the most prominent name in the report, along with the Most Valuable Player award-winners Barry Bonds, Ken Caminiti, José Canseco, Jason Giambi, Juan Gonzalez, Mo Vaughn and Miguel Tejada.

The report also includes the names of three of the top 10 home-run leaders of all time: Bonds, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmiero.

Clemens was among several players named in the report from the Yankees championship teams of the late 1990s, which put together one of the most dominant performances in baseball, winning three consecutive World Series from 1998 to 2000. Others from those teams included Andy Pettitte, David Justice and Chuck Knoblauch. Other players named included Gary Sheffield, Kevin Brown, Lenny Dykstra, Denny Neagle, Todd Hundley, Mike Stanton, Paul Lo Duca and Eric Gagné.

“Each of the 30 clubs had a player or players involved in taking illegal substances,” at one time or another, Mitchell said. He called the years on which he focused his investigation “the Steroids Era.”

Read it all.

Iraq remains a violent place, but the trends are encouraging.

U.S. and Iraqi casualties are down sharply. Fewer of the most lethal Iranian-made explosive devices are being used as roadside bombs. In community after community, Sunni groups who were once in league with al-Qaeda have switched sides and are working with the U.S. forces.

On the Shiite side of Iraq’s sectarian chasm, something similar is happening. About 70,000 local, pro-government groups, a bit like neighborhood watch groups, have formed to expose extremist militias, according to Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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The Church of the Epiphany, near Dulles International Airport, in Washington DC is the home of the CANA offices. Some 1,000 people gathered there last Sunday for a three-hour service for the consecration of two Nigerians and two Anglo-Americans as bishops of CANA. The Convocation of Anglicans in North America has 60 congregations in 20 states in the USA, with a total average Sunday attendance of approx 8,600, larger than 70 per cent of TEC dioceses. A senior leader said CANA expected to grow to 200 congregations in the next year. All the glories of Anglican worship were there: a splendid liturgy, the great hymns of the church, enthusiastic African praise songs accompanied by drums and the celebrant on tambourine led by a dominant Nigerian soprano, and robust biblical exposition. It was impossible to tell if this was a Nigerian service in which Anglo-Americans took part, or an Anglo-American service in which Nigerians took part. CANA and other Anglican entities on North America are working hard to express true partnership across cultures. It is hard to see what else other than the crisis we are in could have brought about such a deep desire from Westerners for Global South help.

Archbishop Edmund Akanya of Kaduna insisted in his sermon that the antidote to prevailing heresy is the faithful teaching of the whole Bible. ”˜We will continue to face the growth of heresies. Teach the Word, it is your duty to protect and preserve what God has given to our hands. The divisions in the Anglican Communion are not about sexuality. It is the beginning of a new kind of religion which not only reinterprets traditional doctrines but jettisons many altogether.’ To this task the new bishops, Roger Ames, David Anderson, Amos Fagbamiye and Nathan Kanu were consecrated.

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New Jersey will become the first state in four decades to abolish the death penalty under a measure lawmakers approved Thursday and the governor intends to sign within days.

Assembly members voted 44-36 to replace the death sentence with life in prison without parole. The state Senate approved the bill Monday, and Gov. Jon S. Corzine, a Democrat, has said he will sign the bill within a week.

A special state commission found in January that the death penalty was a more expensive sentence than life in prison, hasn’t deterred murder and risks killing an innocent person.

“We would be better served as a society by having a clear and certain outcome for individuals that carry out heinous crimes,” Corzine said. “That’s what I think we’re doing, making certain that individuals would be imprisoned without any possibility of parole.”

The measure would spare eight men on the state’s death row, including Jesse Timmendequas, a sex offender convicted of murdering 7-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994. That case sparked a Megan’s Law, which requires law enforcement agencies to notify the public about convicted sex offenders living in their communities.

Marilyn Flax, whose husband Irving was kidnapped and murdered in 1989 by death row inmate John Martini Sr., said she seethes at the thought Martini will remain alive “while my innocent, loving, adoring husband lies in a grave.”

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The Bishop will call a meeting of those members desiring to remain in The Episcopal Church as indicated in the declarations. The Bishop, or his designee, will preside at that meeting. The purpose of the meeting shall be one of mutual discernment regarding two key questions: Is there a viable continuing congregation? And if so, can the continuing congregation maintain its life and ministry within the existing physical plant?

Should the mutual discernment be that a viable continuing congregation does not remain the members shall be asked to dissolve the parish and corporate entity, with all assets reverting to the Diocese of Central Florida. Note that: “whenever the number of persons so associated shall fall below 25, the Ecclesiastical Authority may dissolve the mission.” (Canon XIV.5) While this Canon applies to missions, and not to parishes, the Canon provides guidance as to the minimum number of members the Diocese believes is needed to maintain a viable congregation.

Should the mutual discernment be that a viable continuing congregation does remain, and that the continuing congregation can maintain its life and ministry within the existing physical plant, the members shall at that meeting fill any vacancies on the Vestry. Or, the Bishop may appoint at least five of the members of the continuing congregation as an acting Vestry and will appoint an interim senior warden. The Vestry shall take charge of the continuing congregation and establish a plan for its future operation.

Should the mutual discernment be that the continuing congregation cannot maintain its viability in the existing physical plant the continuing congregation shall be asked to empower the Vestry and Bishop to negotiate the sale or lease of the real and/or personal property.

The Bishop shall report the results of the meeting to all parties within one week of the meeting itself.

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It is almost certainly true that no person, regardless of religious commitment, has ever taken to the freeways with a bumper sticker that reads, “Who took Christ out of the Christmas special?”

Episodic television has always celebrated Christmas the way secular humanists and the neglectfully faithful have: with overcooked turkey, undercooked turkey, too much bourbon, not enough bourbon, mind games, debt, farcical airport delays, injurious gift giving, fractured compromise, teary problem solving, newly found bastard children and the lewd mistletoe enticements to sexual distraction that result in those children.

Since the first breeding of reindeer, in other words, any special Christmas episode of a series might be described more or less as Thursday’s hour of “The Office” is summarized on NBC.com: “A Benihana Christmas: The office sees two competing Christmas parties, and Michael is dumped for the holidays.”

This year, however, the annual adventures in December hedonism come at the end of a fall television season that has taken a vivid interest in Christian faith, portraying it with a variety and complexity, reverence and irreverence, for which it is hard to find previous parallels. It is one thing for a practitioner of Christian Science to wind up as a patient on NBC’s “ER,” screaming against penicillin, but it is another for a plastic surgeon with a bleak soul to rediscover his faith, go to church and thank God for delivering him to an overdosing woman in time to save her life. This happened on the FX series “Nip/Tuck” a few weeks ago ”” as unlikely a place to go looking for sympathetic images of religious fealty as a swingers’ club or any volume of Cattulus.

Throughout the reign of “Touched by an Angel” and network efforts after the 2004 election to reach newly discovered demographics in places like Alabama, Christianity was just a synonym for mysticism and mundane visitation. On the short-lived 2006 series “The Book of Daniel” Jesus showed up in a station wagon bearing wisdom and a willingness (presumably) to pump the gas.

None of that anthropomorphism, which also distinguished the vague spirituality of “Joan of Arcadia” and charges on in TNT’s “Saving Grace,” materializes on “Friday Night Lights.” That series (Fridays on NBC) has given us as close an approximation of religious conversion as any on television, without pandering or patronizing, imagining born-again Christianity in all its challenges and consolations.

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Roger Clemens turned out be Exhibit A in the long-awaited Mitchell report, an All-Star roster of players linked to steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs that put a question mark — if not an asterisk — next to some of baseball’s biggest moments.

Barry Bonds, already under indictment on charges of lying to a federal grand jury about steroids, Miguel Tejada and Andy Pettitte also showed up Thursday in the game’s most infamous lineup since the Black Sox scandal.

The report culminated a 20-month investigation by former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, hired by commissioner Bud Selig to examine the steroids era.

“The illegal use of performance-enhancing substances poses a serious threat to the integrity of the game,” the report said. “Widespread use by players of such substances unfairly disadvantages the honest athletes who refuse to use them and raises questions about the validity of baseball records.”

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A top campaign adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton resigned Thursday, a day after suggesting Democrats should be wary of nominating Barack Obama because his teenage drug use could make it hard for him to win the presidency.
Clinton herself apologized to Obama as they waited to fly to Iowa for a debate.

Bill Shaheen, a national co-chairman for Clinton and a prominent New Hampshire political figure, had raised the issue during a Wednesday interview, published on washingtonpost.com.

“I made a mistake and in light of what happened, I have made the personal decision that I will step down as the co-chair of the Hillary for President campaign,” Shaheen said in a statement released by the campaign Thursday. “This election is too important, and we must all get back to electing the best qualified candidate who has the record of making change happen in this country. That candidate is Hillary Clinton.”

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Dr Michael Nazir-Ali is the Bishop of Rochester, and thus a leading figure in the Church of England, one of the Lords Spiritual; but, as his name suggests, he is from a largely Muslim family background. Dr Nazir-Ali was received into the Anglican Church of Pakistan at the age of 20 and became the Bishop of Raiwind in West Punjab at the age of 35, making him the youngest bishop in the Anglican Communion.

As Dr Nazir-Ali told me on an earlier occasion: “This was a time ”“ the late 1980s ”“ when there was a great movement towards political Islamicisation in Pakistan. As Christians we had to say that there were certain penal laws, partly concerning the role of women in society, which we could not support.”

The threats to Dr Nazir-Ali that resulted from this ideological conflict eventually became so unpleasant ”“ especially as they were also directed at his children ”“ that the young bishop left Pakistan, and settled in Britain.

What astounded Dr Nazir-Ali, when he regained his bearings, was that the dominant form of Islam in the UK that he recalled from his time here in the 1970s (when he was tutorial supervisor in theology at Cambridge University) ”“ pietistic, Sufi-orientated ”“ had, in little more than a decade, been completely supplanted by something much more militant and political: in fact, exactly the same form of the religion that had forced him out of Pakistan.

Dr Nazir-Ali claims that this had happened “because the British mosques had recruited people from fundamentalist backgrounds” ”“ people like Hannah’s father, as it happens.

Like Hannah, Dr Nazir-Ali cannot be described as anti-Islamic. As he pointed out to me, he has “a large number of Muslim friends and relatives with whom I get on very well and for which I am deeply thankful”. His complaint is against what he terms “the chauvinist manifestations of Islam, a kind of ideology which affirms the will to power”. He adds that he had been to Bosnia during the period in which Muslims were slaughtered in their thousands: “So I have seen such chauvinism in its Christian form.”

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Of those things reported in the Scriptures that strain credulity, from the perspective of 21st-century America, it is not so much the miracles that pose a problem, but, I would suggest, the popularity of John the Baptist and his message of repentance. Can you imagine such a thing? We have officially entered the silly season of American politics with 2008 presidential campaigns ”“ we’re getting a good taste of it this weekend here in South Carolina ”“ but can you imagine any of the candidates taking a John the Baptist approach to winning the electorate’s affections, taking up John’s style of slash-and-burn oratory?

Not only is it difficult to imagine a politician taking such a tack, the call to a penitent life is rarely to be heard in the church these days. Indeed, America’s most popular preacher, with perfect hair and a smile that brings well-deserved glory to the modern practice of cosmetic dentistry, channels not so much John the Baptist as Norman Vincent Peale and a “gospel” of self-affirmation and positive thinking ”“ which is no gospel at all. And we eat it up. Flatter me, coddle me, affirm me – but don’t tell me I am wrong down to my very roots, that to be fit for the Kingdom of Heaven my life will have to be completely re-thought from the inside all the way out.

But that is just what John came preaching. And of course, it’s a sermon not unique to that wild man John. If we were to read ahead to the next chapter of St. Matthew’s gospel, we would see that “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” is exactly the message Jesus proclaimed in his own preaching ministry. [ii] And were we to read ahead to chapter 10, we would see Jesus send his disciples out on their first mission trip and actually provide their sermon text: “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” [iii] And if we wanted to skip even further ahead, out of St. Matthew’s gospel altogether and into the Acts of the Apostles, to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, what is the climactic exhortation of St. Peter’s sermon that day? “Repent and be baptized every one of you.” [iv]

But that is a difficult message to preach and to hear in our own day.

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Instruments of Mischief: Over the last decade and a half, sex-and-gender liberals in TEC/CoE have shown themselves vulnerable to this sort of reasoning. They have conceded sex-and-gender conservatives’ construals of what liberal tolerance and inclusiveness entails, and they have responded by handing sex-and-gender conservatives two (what I shall call) instruments of mischief. The CoE led the way with the Act of Synod which complicated the polity of the CoE to allow for flying bishops: a plan which allowed sex-and-gender conservative parishes to refuse to welcome geographical diocesans who had ordained women, and to request the episcopal offices of another bishop with clean hands. Candidates for ordination are also allowed to request a ”˜clean hands’ flying bishop to ordain them. This model has been twice adapted and applied in TEC, with the institution of Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight (DEPO) and now the presiding bishop’s scheme for Episcopal Visitors. Once the concept of individual congregations or dioceses not being bound to their duly elected geographical diocesan or PB is introduced and legitimized, it is an easy leap to appealing to bishops and primates of other Anglican provinces as well. The trajectory of +Duncan shows how slippery the slide from parallel ecclesial units within TEC (his diagnosis at the end of General Convention 2006) to schism (the move to form a separate North American Anglican church entirely, and/or to affiliate with some other ”˜orthodox’ Anglican province).

The second instrument of mischief is the The Windsor Report-proposed and Archbishop Drexel Gomez-interpreted Anglican covenant, which constructs a wider Anglican body politic in which a conservative majority would be guaranteed for the foreseeable future. Like the PB-sponsored House of Bishops’ ”˜pause’ (its resolve to withhold consents to non-celibate LGBT candidates for the episcopacy, and to refrain from authorising rites for the blessing of homosexual partnerships), consent to a Gomez-style Anglican covenant would represent a liberal concession not to implement their conscientious sex-and-gender beliefs at an institutional level. Talk about pastoral care defines the maximum scope within which conscientious liberal sex-and-gender convictions would be allowed to hold sway: to the private sphere, to what goes on individual to individuals, perhaps counter-culturally and covertly. And some Anglican communion primates are insisting on their right to invade privacy and put an end to the blessing of same-sex couples under the rubric of pastoral care.

Liberal concessions and sponsorship of these instruments of mischief represent not only a major political victory, but also a rhetorical triumph for conservatives. If tolerance and inclusiveness always trump, then liberals will never be in a position to press their conscientious content-beliefs about Kingdom-coming in the face of clever ([IPP]-invoking) conservative opposition. No wonder liberals are regularly caricatured as making idols of tolerance and inclusiveness, while betraying the Gospel!

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The Bishop of Bolton, the Rt Rev David Gillett, who has called for Christians to celebrate Christmas more simply and criticised the ”˜over consumption’ of the festival, commented on the situation.

He said: “I am quite surprised to see the usual Christmas greetings replaced by the slogan ”˜Recycle for Warrington’. “The various faith communities in Warrington all share the common belief that we should care for our environment and celebrate festivals in an appropriate way. “For the majority of Warrington’s population the celebration of Christmas is an important time. I hope that next year the town council will reinstate Christmas.” The Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Rev James Jones, whose diocese includes Warrington, said: “Peace on Earth is the message of Christmas. Recycling is one way of preserving the earth. But it’s only part of the message.”

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