The US Army sergeants waited on the couch, studying the floor. Family dogs skirted the sofa, growling. From time to time, one of the soldiers extended a conciliatory hand to them.

On the floor, sixth-grader Rebecca Aguayo played a video game; her twin rollerbladed outside. Just one voice fed the tension in the living room: Their mother, Helga, sat in an armchair, bawling. “It was the ugly crying, with the snot and everything,” Mrs. Aguayo recalls, “I wanted them to see how much they were hurting us.”

Her husband, Army Spc. Agustín Aguayo, hurried around their military base apartment in central Germany that afternoon, under orders to assemble his battle gear. Two-and-a-half years earlier, in February 2004, the medic had applied to leave the Army as a conscientious objector (CO), someone whose beliefs forbid him to participate in war. While his claim was being evaluated, Aguayo served a year in Iraq with an unloaded weapon; when the claim was rejected, he sued for another review.

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At one of the first plenary sessions, the organizers announced (to much applause) that no official statements would come from the meeting. Instead, lots of time was scheduled for conversation, including meals, siestas, and “marketplace” encounters. “It was a great opportunity to have time to talk to African bishops who it would take me many months to go to,” said Dr. Johnson. “To have them all at the same consultation, with enough time to sit and have conversations, was an absolute gift.”

Ellie Johnson gave one of the few formal presentations of the week, on the findings of the Inter-Anglican Standing Committee on Mission and Evangelism. She also led a workshop on reconciliation. Hot topics of the week included the millennium development goals, HIV/AIDS, women’s empowerment, and the same-sex issue dividing the Anglican Communion. Bishops could also organize sessions around topics of their choice.

Rev. Dr. Isaac Kawuki-Mukasa, a native of Uganda and a congregational development consultant at the diocese of Toronto, came to assist Bishop Poole in his cross-cultural conversations. “The enthusiasm of African bishops was very uplifting. They are full of hope,” he said, adding later that, “the time is now to begin exploring alternative ways of relating.”

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The news that the Queen’s eldest grandchild may have to renounce his right to the throne to marry his Canadian fiancé has aroused unexpected passions.

Since the story appeared on the front page of the Daily Telegraph last week, there has been a deluge of reaction.

When the engagement between Peter Phillips, the 29-year-old son of the Princess Royal, and Autumn Kelly, 31, his management consultant girlfriend, was announced a fortnight ago, it barely created a ripple.

After all, Mr Phillips is only tenth in line to the throne, and the couple have been too sensible and publicity shy to attract much media interest.

But the royal romance took an unlikely twist when it emerged that Miss Kelly is a baptised Roman Catholic and therefore falls foul of the 1701 Act of Settlement, which bars monarchs and their heirs from becoming or marrying “papists”.

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Cooling off with bottled water could soon cost you more within the Chicago city limits if one alderman has his way.

As CBS 2’s Kristyn Hartman reports, Ald. George Cardenas (12th) wants to slap a tax of up to 25 cents on the cost of every bottle to help close a $217 million budget gap.

“People enjoy jogging or driving with a bottle of water. There’s a cost associated with this behavior. You have to pay for it,” said Cardenas, one of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s staunchest City Council supporters.

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Financial difficulties and drastic changes in the role of the Christian church in society are prompting the leaders of the 11 seminaries connected with the Episcopal Church to reconsider theological education.
The seminaries’ Council of Deans has met three times this year already, twice more than its normal annual meeting, to discuss issues facing the seminaries. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori joined the deans in their March and June meetings.

The Very Rev. Ward Ewing, dean and president of the General Theological Society (GTS) and convener of the Council of Deans, said the deans have realized that because of financial restrictions faced by all the seminaries, “every seminary can’t provide everything for everybody.” Thus, they are exploring how to develop “the kind of coalition so that each seminary becomes a gateway to the resources of all the seminaries.”

The deans’ goal is not simply to improve and strengthen their own seminaries, Ewing said.

“The seminaries exist primarily as servants for the Church,” he said, and are called work together to “provide the resources of the seminaries for the whole Church” so that the seminaries are seen as “adding value to the leadership of the Church.”

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From the online Wall Street Journal:

Shares were already lower, but selling in all three indexes picked up after CNBC reported that Sentinel Management Group, a money market fund manager, had asked to halt investor redemptions, suggesting its investors were in a “panic.”

Sentinel’s action “was a pretty drastic thing,” said Stephen Carl, head trader at Williams Capital. The news stirred up the fears about the spreading impact of trouble in the credit markets and alternative investments that have dogged Wall Street for weeks. “It’s just more of the same,” Mr. Carl said.

As you may have heard, we had a preliminary hearing on Friday, August 10, in court, at which the court heard arguments on our demurrers and pleas in bar. (Our demurrer asserted that even if everything The Episcopal Church claims is true, they still would have no case. The plea in bar argued that vestry members are immune from suit for actions taken in an official capacity as volunteers).

After extensive argument over the plea of statutory immunity, the court was prepared to rule but suggested that the parties work out an agreement. After recess, the Diocese of Virginia and The Episcopal Church agreed to dismiss all of the vestry members and rectors as defendants without prejudice and the individuals agreed to honor any determination of the court regarding the plaintiffs’ property claims, subject to their rights of appeal of any adverse ruling.

“We are appreciative that after all these months, our volunteer vestry members and our pastoral leadership are no longer named defendants in lawsuit filed by the Diocese and The Episcopal Church,” said Tom Wilson, Senior Warden of The Falls Church, and Chairman of the Anglican District of Virginia Board of Directors.

As to the ownership of the property, the court stated that it was making a very narrow ruling. The court found that, at this preliminary stage in the litigation, the complaints filed by the Diocese and The Episcopal Church state a sufficient claim to an interest in the property for those claims to proceed to trial where The Episcopal Church and the Diocese will have to put on actual evidence to support their allegations. The court emphasized that it was not making a determination as to any rights, but simply that the complaints alleged enough to get The Episcopal Church and the Diocese past a preliminary motion to dismiss.

However, before those claims proceed to trial, the court has scheduled a hearing later this year to determine whether or not the claims filed by the Virginia churches under the Virginia Division Statute preempt the property claims of The Episcopal Church and the Diocese. If the court rules in favor of the churches under the Virginia Division Statute, that finding will be dispositive (which means that there would be no reason to proceed with the property claims made by the Diocese and The Episcopal Church).

What does all of this mean? Our legal team will be parsing every sentence of Judge Bellows’ rulings for some time, but we should keep in mind that these are preliminary skirmishes in a long battle. Since football season is about to begin, I can’t help but use a couple of analogies”¦

Our demurrer was, frankly, a long shot. Our legal team has told us that, as a practical matter, it is very rare for a judge to dismiss an entire case at this preliminary stage, particularly one with such national visibility. But it was worth a try. Think of it as a long incomplete pass.

We can think of the plea in bar as a touchdown ”“ very good news, but it is still the first quarter of the game. And we must remember that our trustees are still named as defendants, although no claim of personal liability is asserted.

We still have a long way to go, and we still need prayer! We appreciate your support, encouragement and prayer throughout this process.

Jim Oakes
Vice Chairman
Anglican District of Virginia

A year after her controversial election as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, Katharine Jefferts Schori is still hopeful tensions within the denomination and the worldwide Anglican Communion can be resolved.

“I think as a Christian you have to live in hope of reconciliation always,” Jefferts Schori said during a brief stop in Corvallis at the beginning of a weeklong vacation.

“If we can get people to get out of a face-saving mode and refocus on the mission of the church, I think we can learn to live together and stay one body.”

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The typical 1970s family is headed by a working father and a stay-at-home mother with two children. The father’s income is $38,700, out of which came $5,310 in mortgage payments, $5,140 a year on car expenses, $1,030 on health insurance, and income taxes “which claim 24% of [the father’s] income,” leaving $17,834, or about $1,500 per month in “discretionary income” for all other expenses, such as food, clothing, utilities and savings.

The typical 2000s family has two working parents and a higher income of $67,800, an increase of 75% over the 1970s family. But their expenses have also risen: The mortgage payment increases to $9,000, the additional car raises the family obligation to $8,000, and more expensive health insurance premiums cost $1,650. A new expense of full-time daycare so the mother can work is estimated at $9,670. Mother’s income bumps the family into a higher tax bracket, so that “the government takes 33% of the family’s money.” In the end, despite the dramatic increase in family income, the family is left with $17,045 in “discretionary income,” less than the earlier generation.

The authors present no explanation for why they present only the tax data in their two examples as percentages instead of dollars. Nor do they ever present the actual dollar value for taxes anywhere in the book. So to conduct an “apples to apples” comparison of all expenses, I converted the tax obligations in the example from percentages to actual dollars.

In fact, for the typical 1970s family, paying 24% of its income in taxes works out to be $9,288. And for the 2000s family, paying 33% of its income is $22,374.

Although income only rose 75%, and expenditures for the mortgage, car and health insurance rose by even less than that, the tax bill increased by $13,086 — a whopping 140% increase. The percentage of family income dedicated to health insurance, mortgage and automobiles actually declined between the two periods.

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Be on the lookout for the church from the Lowcountry of South Carolina where I live and the Episcopal Church which are mentioned.

Crisis of Doubt is an impressively researched, clearly written, and forcefully, even polemically, argued work of scholarship. Moreover, Larsen is careful not to overplay his hand. Despite supplying an appendix of some thirty additional names of erstwhile secularists who found some sort of religion, he acknowledges that reconversion from secularism was not exactly rampant in Victorian Britain. He is also careful to show that his seven converts did not necessarily return to an impeccably conservative form of evangelical Protestantism. In fact most embraced fairly conservative positions on important Christian doctrines, but many held a more flexible view of biblical inspiration, and most remained radical in their social and political orientations. Reconversion did not mean capitulation to the religious or political status quo, and old radicals lived on in new Christian clothes.

By suggesting that the “crisis of doubt” within Victorian secularism was a more common and powerful reality than was the “crisis of faith” among the Victorian intelligentsia, Larsen is hoping not only to correct an exaggerated emphasis on the Victorian crisis of faith but also to show the intellectual robustness of Christianity in the 19th century. Challenging the notion that there was an inevitable and inexorable slide towards Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Crisis of Doubt argues that the tide of faith could come in as well as go out. In that sense the book also acts as an important counterpoint to intellectually sloppy versions of secularization theory.

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Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi will consecrate two American priests fleeing the liberal US church over a gay clergy crisis.

Nzimbi will consecrate Bill Atwood and Bill Murdoch on August 30, as assistant bishops in the province of Kenya.

This latest move will create more conservative African outposts amid the liberal American mainstream, which sparked off the divisions by its consecration of gay bishops.

“We are not undermining anybody’s authority. We are saving a situation of people who so much need us,” Nzimbi told Reuters in response to criticism that African bishops were violating church rules.

Ugandan Archbishop, Mr Henry Orombi, also supported the decision.

“In Uganda, we have provided a home for refugees from Congo, Rwanda and Sudan,” said Orombi, who is consecrating John Guernsey of Virginia on September 2. “Now, we are also providing a home for ecclesiastical refugees from America,” he added.

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“He’s young,” says Bishop John, “he’s enthusiastic, and he’s a highly respected parish priest. Not only does he have my full confidence, he has the trust and confidence of his colleagues. I am very pleased.”

Ross Bay was born and raised in Papatoetoe, and went to Papatoetoe High School before starting his working life at the Bank of New Zealand. After his theological training, he served a stint as an assistant priest at the Cathedral from 1990 to 1992, under Dean John Rymer.

That experience gave him a glimpse of the role the Cathedral can play as the mother church to Anglicans in this city, and to Anglicans in the wider Auckland diocese.

Fifteen years later, Ross sees that task as more important than ever.

“There’s an increasing trend,” he says, “towards ”˜congregationalism’ in the Anglican Church ”“ that is, for individual parishes to do their own thing without a sense of being part of something much bigger. The Cathedral can really draw the Church together, and be the heart of the diocese.”

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There may be little progress on political goals crafted in America, to meet American concerns, by politicians who have a cushion of 200 years of democracy. Washington might as well be on the moon. Iraqis don’t respond well to rules imposed from outside their acknowledged authorities, though I have many times seen Iraqi Police and Army of all ranks responding very well to American Marines and soldiers who they have come to respect, and in many cases actually admire and try to emulate. Our military has increasing moral authority in Iraq, but the same cannot be said for our government at home. In fact, it’s in moral deficit because many Iraqis are increasingly frightened we will abandon them to genocide. The Iraqis I speak with couldn’t care less what is said from Washington but large numbers of them pay close attention to what some Marine Gunny says, or what American battalion commanders all over Iraq say. Some of our commanders could probably run for local offices in Iraq, and win. To say there has been no political progress in Iraq in 2007 is patently absurd, completely wrong and dangerously dismissive of the significant changes and improvements happening all across Iraq. Whether or not Americans are seeing it on the nightly news or reading it in their local papers, Iraqis are actively writing their children’s history.

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will almost certainly hit the grim total of 400 executions this month, far ahead of any other state, testament to the influence of the state’s conservative evangelical Christians and its cultural mix of Old South and Wild West.

“In Texas you have all the elements lined up. Public support, a governor that supports it and supportive courts,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

“If any of those things are hesitant then the process slows down,” said Dieter. “With all cylinders working as in Texas it produces a lot of executions.”

Texas has executed 398 convicts since it resumed the practice in 1982, six years after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a ban on capital punishment, far exceeding second-place Virginia with 98 executions since the ban was lifted. It has five executions scheduled for August.

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“Twenty years after the 1987 film ”˜Wall Street’ popularized the catch-phrase ”˜Greed is good,’ this new wave of insider trading cases suggests that the ends-justify-the-means ethos that gripped Wall Street in the 1980s has returned.”

—Bob Drummond in Saturday’s New York Times

Consider yourself an astute judge of modern culture if ethical and moral faux pas seem more pronounced these days. Unethical decisions, some with legal consequences, have been prominent in business, sports, political and entertainment news. Dan Rather. Britney Spears. Tom DeLay. Martha Stewart.

A study of 21,500 undergraduates that was released last fall by the Center for Academic Integrity found that 74 percent of business majors admitted cheating. Right behind were engineering students at 73 percent, followed by science majors with 71 percent.

Sneaking a tuna sandwich into a theater may seem insignificant compared to out-and-out lying and cheating at the academic level. Of course, the tuna sandwich caper happened before Johnson, once a researcher at UC Davis, became a pastor.

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Why would Hollywood release a controversial feature film about alleged Mormon terrorists of 150 years ago while all but ignoring the dangerous Muslim terrorists of today?

The movie industry has pointedly avoided harsh treatment of modern Islamic radicals, but September Dawn (to be released nationally Aug. 24) portrays the 19th century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a deeply corrupt cult led by an all-powerful, blood-thirsty mass murderer.

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One of Marie’s troubles, the psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell might have said, is that she seemed hooked on safety. Marriage typically meets our sharply felt needs for security and predictability, he argues, but in those relationships that last well, people take the leap of believing that they actually don’t know exactly who the other person is or what he or she is capable of ”” the absolute knowingness is a fantasy, anyway ”” and that there is new terrain to be discovered. So, out of deference to Marie’s fascination with the Civil War, Clem was planning a summer trip to visit some battle sites with her. And maybe, if Marie would dare risk it, Clem could get caught up in the history of the era, too. And maybe, after watching her husband traverse the grassy fields of Antietam, she’d even want to sleep with him, if she could bear him being anything other than dependable old Clem. (Not incidentally, Clem was as enamored of stability as his wife. When I spoke to him outside of the group, he told me one moment of his yearning for Marie to “roll over and kiss” him in bed. The next, he said that she met perhaps his top requirement for a wife: She’d never “stray or look at other men or have an affair. Marie’s true to me, and that’s one of the things I wanted, and that’s what I got.”)

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Enlightenment does not mean merely shining a light into the darker recesses of the world but must also mean a liberation of people out of darkness into the light. What progressive religious thought has to contribute to that process of liberation in an age of tumultuous social change is the preservation of human dignity against both reactionary religious obscurantism and value-free scientistic rationalism. To label all forms of religion as part of a general delusion, therefore, does a disservice to both progress and reason. Where we are offers us no home. That is why we constantly feel it is time to move on. As long as that is the case there will be the need for religion. The point, however, is to make it a religion which will be happily complicit in its own earthly fulfilment. And I say that as a good atheist.

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When the Geinzer boys were growing up in Ingram in the 1940s and 1950s, their grandpa built them a miniature altar, nicely painted and equipped with its own imitation tabernacle. It wasn’t the most popular toy in the Roman Catholic household of five boys and one girl, but it got a lot of use.

There was a little taste of childhood inside the sanctuary of St. Barbara Church in Collier yesterday when three of the boys, now in their 60s, came together on a full-sized altar as real priests concelebrating a Mass.

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At the conclusion of the Friday service, the Central Mosque of Charleston congregation stands to prayer on Friday.

The message Imam Mohamed Melhem delivered during the Friday afternoon prayer service at the Central Mosque of Charleston emphasized the unity of Islam and its universal message of peace.

But in the wake of the recent arrests of two Egyptian students driving through Goose Creek, he also expressed the collective frustration of local Muslims, many of whom think the public reaction to the arrests has been exaggerated and unfair.

“The media went crazy,” Melhem said. “Most Muslims are good citizens and good contributors to society.”

And nothing much is yet known about the two students, he said, so why the rush to judgment?

“We believe in the system and the court of law and believe it will be fair,” he said.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

A few interesting details ”“ in the midst of Friday morning’s panic, banks would have liked to have done more. At the 8:25 AM operation, $31 billion of securities were submitted by the banks for repo, and $19 billion were accepted by the Fed. At 10:55 AM, $41 billion were submitted, and just $16 billion were accepted. But by 1:50 PM, the scramble for funds had eased somewhat – $11 billion were submitted, and $3 billion were accepted.

Given that about $1.4 trillion of interest-only adjustable-rate mortgages were issued in 2005 and 2006, and hundreds of billions in sub-prime mortgages are already delinquent, a $38 billion repurchase operation by the Fed, where the securities posted as collateral have to be bought back by the banks unless the banks default, is hardly a “rescue operation.”

The Fed has an interest in stabilizing the banking system and the real economy. It has no interest in taking the private sector’s loss for the irresponsible lending practices of recent years, nor in saving overly aggressive hedge funds from the losses on their leveraged bets. Again, the Fed did exactly what it was supposed to do on Friday. There will inevitably be enormous losses taken as a result of mortgage defaults ”“ but don’t assume it will be the Fed that takes them.

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Only a couple of hundred of the 880 Anglican bishops invited to next year’s Lambeth Conference, one of the most critical gatherings in the Church’s history, have replied by the deadline set by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Dr Rowan Williams hopes that the conference, which is held every 10 years at Canterbury, can be the starting point for rebuilding the Church, which has been torn apart over the issue of homosexuality.

The failure of so many to respond is fresh evidence of the disintegration of the 70 million-strong worldwide Communion, and will come as a further blow to the authority of Dr Williams.

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John Sentamu: I think, for myself, that the 1998 resolution was very clear on where the church stood, and it actually invited everybody to engage in the listening process to gay and lesbian people. I still think it was not a good thing for the Episcopal church, while we are still in conversation, to proceed the consecration of Jim Robinson. I happen to think they actually pre-empted the conversation and the discussion. Now what I don’t think should happen now [is] that the whole question of gay and lesbian people — when we said we should listen to their experiences — should now become the kind of dominant theological factor for the whole of the communion. Because really the communion, at the heart of it, has got to do a number of things. While on one hand upholding Christian teaching, [it] must also be very loving and kind towards gay and lesbian people because that’s part of the resolution. And it must also continue to listen. And I’m not so sure, when some people speak as if the debate has been concluded, or we cannot engage with this, you’re being very faithful to the resolution.

Secondly, the Windsor Report has made it very clear that the four instruments of unity — that is, Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Primates Meeting — should be the kind of instrument that actually allows all of us to talk. So those who now say, for example, that they don’t want to come to the Lambeth Conference in 2008 because there may be people from ECUSA , well all I want to say is that church history has always taught us that churches have always disagreed. I mean, over the nature of Christ, the salvation of Christ, there were bitter, bitter, bitter disagreements in the early church, but everybody turned up at those ecumenical councils to resolve their differences. So my view would be, if you’re finding this quite difficult, please do not stop the dialogue and the conversation.

Stephen Crittenden: Well indeed, you’ve warned — just in the last few days –warned the conservative bishops of the global south that if they don’t come to Lambeth, they’d effectively be severing themselves from the rest of the communion. That’s a bit tough, isn’t it?

John Sentamu: Well, the Lambeth Conference is an invitation from the Archbishop of Canterbury to all bishops of the Anglican communion to come to Lambeth and talk of matters of common concern. Now if there is already a fracture within the communion, I would have thought everybody would want to turn up in order to work out how we as a communion are going to go forward. Secondly, the Primates Meeting in Tanzania set out a fairly clear way ahead in its communiqué, as well as the whole question of the covenant. Now if we’re going to continue to talk about the covenant at Lambeth Conference, and some people absent themselves from this, what is it that actually they think they’re going to be achieving? You see, again I want to challenge them in terms of the debate about the nature of Christ and the salvation of Christ — no church in the seven Ecumenical Councils absented themselves from it, because they were trying to represent the faith as they saw it. And only by people meeting around the table and having a conversation are you likely to find some kind of thing. I think the thing I was reacting to was a question that some people were planning an alternative Lambeth Conference, and my view was there can be no alternative Lambeth Conference, because the Lambeth Conference is always at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury in line with the four instruments of unity. And I cannot see an alternative, actually, for another Lambeth Conference. I mean that’s the logic for it.

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But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may accomplish my course and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.

–Acts 20:24

A gunman opened fire in the sanctuary of a southwest Missouri church Sunday, killing three people and wounding several others, authorities said.
About 25 to 50 people were briefly held hostage at the First Congregational Church until the gunman surrendered, Neosho spokeswoman Desiree Bridges said.

About four or five people were wounded, Police Chief Dave McCracken said, and several others who were injured fled the scene.

Officials removed two covered bodies from the brick-and-white trim church into a waiting funeral parlor van Sunday evening.

“This is a terrible tragedy which was made worse by the fact that it happened in a peaceful place of faith and worship,” Gov. Matt Blunt said in a statement.

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Sorting out ways to live Jewishly in a big city – and sharing their experience with other young adults – has just brought Rebecca Karp, 25, and Becky Coren, 23, together with Vassar in a Center City townhouse they will share for at least a year.

Coren, a second-year law student at Rutgers/Camden, calls theirs a “holistic, grassroots pursuit of religion.”

Their experiment is so relaxed and so new (three weeks) that the three haven’t yet affixed a mezuzah to the doorway, although that might happen Sunday at their open house “kickoff” barbecue.

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