Read it carefully and read it all.

by Ed Beaven

The Bishop of New Hampshire, the Rt Rev V Gene Robinson, is to enter into a Civil Partnership with his long-term partner just weeks before next year’s Lambeth Conference. The openly gay cleric, whose consecration as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 caused outrage among traditionalist wings of the Anglican Communion and has placed the Church on the brink of schism, unveiled his intention during an interview to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 next week, in a programme entitled the Choice. Interviewed by Michael Buerk, Bishop Robinson denied the plan to hold the ceremony next June had been chosen to be deliberately provocative.

He said: “The decision to take advantage of the new law that will come into effect in New Hampshire on January 1 is simply our taking advantage of the kinds of rights which are now being made open to gay and lesbian people in New Hampshire. “I am certainly not doing that to rub salt into anyone’s wounds, but no one should expect me to penalise me and my partner when these rights are being offered. “We were looking for a three-day weekend which would allow people to travel more easily, and that happened to be the fifth anniversary of my election as the Bishop of New Hampshire and thought that would be an appropriate date. “I think the fact is my critics would find any date impermissible.”

He also tells about his love for the Anglican Communion, but said he would never stand down from his role as it would be going against God’s call on his life. He said: “I love the Anglican Church and I value the Communion and I will do everything short of standing down to benefit the Communion.

“But I will not reject God’s call to me. If I were to disappear tomorrow does anyone think these questions are to go away either for the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Communion? I don’t think so.”

When asked about his thoughts on how his consecration as Bishop had placed the Church on the road to schism, Bishop Robinson admitted that the Episcopal Church may have got it wrong. He said: “This was not just my doing this was an entire community’s doing, and that community tried its very best to discern the will of God, and we may be wrong, I am ready to admit to you that I cannot be sure that this is the right thing or the right time or the right way.

“I believe that Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, one of the primary spokespeople against my election, I believe he is following his call from God as best as he can, I just wish he could believe I am following my call from God as best I can.”

The interview is on Radio 4 on Tuesday August 28 at 9am U.K. time

–This article appears on page 1 of the August 24th, 2007, edition of the Church of England Newspaper

President Bush has raised the hackles of the American Left with a major foreign policy speech that is to draw comparisons between a premature pull-out from Iraq and the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.

The speech, to an audience of military veterans, has not actually been delivered but the White House has released extracts in advance ”“ and its arguments have not gone down well with Mr Bush’s political opponents.

“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left,” Mr Bush will tell the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, many of whom fought in Indo-China, later today.

“Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.'”

Read it all.

Vladimir Putin announced ambitious plans to revive Russia’s military power and restore its role as the world’s leading producer of military aircraft yesterday.

Speaking at the opening of the largest airshow in Russia’s post-Soviet history, the president said he was determined to make aircraft manufacture a national priority after decades of lagging behind the west.

The remarks follow his decision last week to resume long-range missions by strategic bomber aircraft capable of hitting the US with nuclear weapons. Patrols over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic began last week for the first time since 1992.

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The Rev. Kenneth Brannon wandered onto the national Episcopalian Web site last year and found something he didn’t know he was looking for.

At the time Brannon, 39 tomorrow, was an associate rector at St. Barnabas in Sleepy Hollow, Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. With two children (Lucy, 10 and Isaac, 6) in school and his wife, Rachel, a psychotherapist studying to be a Jungian analyst, the idea of moving out West wasn’t on his radar. But Brannon saw the Web site for St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Ketchum, which was in the process of a new minister search.

Brannon was immediately intrigued, and continues feeling that way a month after moving to the valley to fill the large shoes left at St. Thomas by the departures of Rev. Brian Baker and more recently Bishop Craig Anderson.

“We weren’t looking to move to Idaho. But the program and the St. Thomas Playhouse were compelling,” he said. Brannon’s second degree (out of three) is from New York University in drama therapy.

Read it all.

Reflections on Kevin Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine

Stephen Noll

Note: I have rushed this essay into print because of the relevance of the discussion between those orthodox “conservatives” who see long-continuing (invincible) heresy on central matters of doctrine as a church-dividing necessity and those who argue that the maintenance of the form of church unity takes precedence over agreement on doctrine. Within the current Anglican context, members of the former group have sometimes been labeled “Federal Conservatives” or “Confessionalists,” while members of the latter have been called “Communion Conservatives.” To some extent, this fault-line mirrors the historic divide in Anglican theology between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. Now I am proposing, following Kevin Vanhoozer, a new binary classification: post-conservatives and post-liberals.

Labels can always distort one’s position, but they are also necessary markers of genuine difference of opinion. I am particularly interested in seeking a response from the Communion Conservatives, many of whom have spent time at Yale with George Lindbeck, to see whether they agree with the typology proposed by Vanhoozer in his recent works. In a recent essay, Craig Uffman contends that Federal Conservatives are unconsciously reflecting the rationalistic “either/or” epistemology of the Enlightenment. I suggest, in response to Uffman, that his view of ultimate, may I say mystical, reconciliation of opposites owes much to Enlightenment Romanticism (a position shared, I think, by Rowan Williams). If Vanhoozer’s typology is correct, then we should begin by admitting that we are all heirs of the Enlightenment (and the postmodernism deriving from Nietzsche) in one sense, but that we are seeking to transcend its rationalistic and romantic distortions of Christianity in order to be true to the “faith once for all delivered to the saints.”

***

When I took sabbatical leave in Cambridge in 1994, I found myself sharing a cubicle with a young academic named Kevin Vanhoozer. Kevin’s piles of xeroxed articles covered most of the working space, and I soon recognized that I was cohabiting with a very bright and competent scholar. I was also gratified to find that he and I shared a common interest in and commitment to the “literal sense” of Scripture, properly defined. As I got to know him, I discovered another side: an accomplished pianist, who had conducted evangelistic missions in France, where he met and married his wife. And a genuinely thoughtful and compassionate Christian individual.

So I have not been surprised to find that this “young scholar” (I’m not sure now long he gets to wear this label, but far be it from me to set an expiration date) has burst upon the academic scene with two major books on hermeneutics – Is There Meaning in This Text? (1997), and First Theology (2002) ”“ which lay the groundwork for his dogmatic work, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005). Vanhoozer has been a leader in an academic movement to recover the “theological interpretation of the Bible,” editing a dictionary of that name (2005). Although his work has garnered respect and praise across the theological spectrum, he has written this as an Evangelical, who moved from University of Edinburgh to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

One mark of his stance is his unashamed defence of sola scriptura ”“ the sufficiency of Scripture alone for salvation and life. Hence he writes in The Drama of Doctrine:

One goal of the present work is to model a post-critical approach to biblical interpretation that respects both the principle ”“ or rather the practice ”“ of sola scriptura and the location of the interpretative community that nevertheless results in performance knowledge and doctrinal truth.

While not disowning his Evangelical pedigree, Vanhoozer claims that his hermeneutical approach to doctrine is catholic and evangelical, and he adopts his central concept of the Gospel as “Theo-Drama” from the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Vanhoozer’s hermeneutics is “post-critical,” that is, accepting the postmodern rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and embracing the “linguistic turn” to subjectivity in interpretation. In particular, he adopts as a dialogue partner George Lindbeck of Yale University, whose book The Nature of Doctrine (1984) has set the “post-liberal” agenda of parsing Scripture using the grammar of the church. Vanhoozer takes for himself the mirror label “post-conservative” and carries on a friendly dialogue with Lindbeck throughout the book. He refers to Lindbeck’s “cultural linguistic” and his own “canonical linguistic” approaches as “cousins” (page 16). Yet while he is carefully appreciative of Lindbeck’s views, by the end of The Drama of Doctrine, it is clear that he considers Lindbeck’s position defective in crucial respects.

In terms of doctrine, Vanhoozer claims to be “postfoundational,” i.e., finding inadequate a certain kind of Evangelical “foundationalist” reading of Scripture as a dogmatic textbook. At the same time, he speaks of “two types of postfoundationalism”:

The first type of postfoundationalism, then, substitutes the life of the church for the set of indubitable beliefs. Though Lindbeck clearly moves beyond the modern emphasis on individual autonomy, one wonders whether his position could not be classified as ecclesial expressivism, and hence of the experiential-expressivist position he associates with modern liberals. (p. 294, emphasis original)

By contrast, Vanhoozer sees his own “canonical-linguistic” type of postfoundationalism as differing from Lindbeck in its insistence on accepting the autonomous truth claims of Scripture and of the Rule of Faith and other summaries of doctrine (a.k.a. confessions). Cultural linguistic and canonical linguistic views share an appreciation of the “illocutionary” character of speech (“illocutionary” referring to the directive use of speech, e.g., persuasive, narrative, celebratory) and the “intertextuality” (“this text interprets that”) in the biblical record. Whereas both views accept the biblical canon as the horizon within which doctrine must operate, Lindbeck tends to see the canon as text-centered (“just this set of writings”) whereas Vanhoozer sees a necessary connection between an authoritative script and an authored script, one where the divine and human author’s meaning is final. For all his appreciation of the grammar and intratextual meanings of Scripture, Lindbeck finds the locus of biblical meaning in the performance by the church rather than the author of the text.

Vanhoozer argues that Lindbeck’s approach leads to three mistaken tendencies: “With regard to theology, it tends toward fideism,” because it accepts an internal world of the text, which must either be accepted or rejected without any further criterion”¦.” “With regard to the church, it tends toward idealism,” because the church and only the church can establish the truth of Scripture. “With regard to God, it tends toward nonrealism,” because it has no way of handling the truth claims of what God has done in Jesus Christ.” (p. 174, emphasis original)

Vanhoozer notes on several occasions that Lindbeck’s theology slips into a kind of cultural anthropology or ethnography, that is, it is descriptive but not prescriptive. One of the symptoms of this deficiency is the inability to identify false ecclesial interpretations of Scripture. Vanhoozer asks: “If church practices serve as both source and norm for theology, how can we ever distinguish well-formed practices from those that are deformed?” (page 7). In a telling footnote, he comments:

“I do not want to minimize the difficulty in discerning “correct” from “incorrect” [readings from Scripture]. At the same time, I believe the ability to reform the church depends on just such discerning judgments that arise not from humanly devised exegetical method, but from a prayerful combination of attention to the Word and attention to the Spirit. (p. 12 n. 38)

In a comment reminiscent of the Anglican Article XXI, he states: “Neither tradition nor practice can be the supreme norm for Christian theology because each is susceptible to error. Practices become deformed; traditions become corrupt” (page 22, emphasis original).

This important distinction between Lindbeck and Vanhoozer allows the latter to speak unqualifiedly of confession and its converse heresy. He deals with heresy ecclesiologically in his final section on “Doctrine and the Church.” He begins by stating that true doctrine necessarily identifies false teaching in order to heal the wounds of the Church. So heresy-hunting is not a matter of ecclesiastical power-plays, but of discerning the truth of the Gospel. This task is not to be taken on lightly but must be done to preserve the integrity of the church’s witness to Christ. Vanhoozer points out that the canonical texts themselves contain warnings against false teaching. Not every occasional theological error constitutes heresy, but true heresy threatens the corporate threat because it attacks like a disease the very lifeblood of the Gospel:

Heresy is dangerous because it proposes an alternative economy of salvation, not that there is one. A heresy is thus a fateful error that compromises the integrity of the theo-drama, either by misidentifying the divine dramatis personae, misunderstanding the action, or giving directions that lead away from one’s fitting participation in the continuing dramatic action. (p. 424, emphasis original)

Careful and prayerful discernment of heresy leads necessarily to excommunication:

To repeat: those who perform some other drama take themselves out of the redemptive action. Excommunication is thus an outward and formal recognition of an inward reality, namely, the fact that the heretic is no longer oriented to the way, the truth, and the life. (p. 426)

The basis for distinguishing heresy, Vanhoozer argues, is nothing less than the conviction that the false teaching contradicts the biblical testimony. This judgement involves a statement of truth, called a creed or confession. Vanhoozer contends that the patristic councils like Nicaea claimed not to be judging heresy according to their own interpretative script but on the clear sense of the biblical script. Hence a true evaluation of Nicaea must be a matter of determining whether the Council correctly read the theo-dramatic witness to the Person of Christ, or whether it was merely following its own philosophical language du jour.

Among the variety of ecclesiastical truth statements, Vanhoozer (pp. 449-457) distinguishes between Creeds (“Masterpiece Theater”), Confessions (“Regional Theater”) and Congregational Theology (“Local Theater”), and the role of the pastor is to harmonize all these performances. But at the heart of them all is the conviction that the biblical story, as recorded in Scripture, provides a single text from which all précis and stage-directions proceed.

Kevin Vanhoozer’s most recent book on doctrine models a respectful yet critical dialogue between two interpretative schools – call them “post-liberals” and “post-conservatives” (dare I compare them with the Alexandrians and Antiochenes) ”“ who share a common commitment to the biblical canon and the Church’s Rule of Faith but who diverge on the locus of divine authority. I have suggested that the issue of acceptance of church confessions as grounds for identifying heresy and enacting discipline through excommunication or separation may distinguish the two schools.

The current crisis of discipline within the Anglican Communion has drawn these schools into the forum of dispute. Sometimes they resort to rhetorical barbs (“appeasers” and “angry militants”), and at the end of the day they may find themselves on different sides of an ecclesial divide. But at least we should know where we are coming from and hope and pray that in the end by “turning, turning” in this debate, we may come round right and together.

I am flying up to Ohio to meet Elizabeth and Abigail for the final drop off at College tomorrow.

Joe Alamo didn’t set out to become a do-gooder. But late last year, when the Geneva, N.Y., Web designer was surfing on MySpace, he chanced onto the profile of Kiva.org, a nonprofit that allows people to make zero-interest “microfinance” loans over the Internet to needy entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Soon after, Mr. Alamo not only became a lender through Kiva, but he also started a new Web site, Kivafriends.org, devoted to Kiva enthusiasts. He also now volunteers to run Kiva’s MySpace page. “This is the first time I’ve ever gotten so involved with a charity,” says Mr. Alamo, now 30 years old.

Young donors and volunteers, snubbing traditional appeals such as direct mail and phone calls, are satisfying their philanthropic urges on the Internet. They’re increasingly turning to blogs and social-networking Web sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, to spread the word about — and raise funds for — their favorite nonprofits and causes. They’re sending Web-based fund-raising pitches to their friends and families, encouraging them, in turn, to forward the appeals to their own contacts.

At the same time, a growing number of charities — ranging from start-ups to established names such as the Salvation Army — are launching profiles on popular social-networking sites, hoping that young people will link up to the pages. Some are also encouraging bloggers to mention the causes on their sites, raising thousands of dollars in small donations from readers.

Many of the nonprofits that have embraced social networking are themselves run by people in their 20s and 30s, who already spend a good portion of their lives online. Some of them also appeal to donors by offering them tangible results of their gifts by directly linking contributors with recipients.

Read it all.

Heather from Oregon sounds like a born-again woman, financially speaking. “I finally got everything paid off this spring. . . . No more credit cards, no more student loan! I feel so good, so adult, and so proud of myself.” She thanks her deliverer, radio personality and anticredit crusader Dave Ramsey, for freeing her from bondage to consumer debt, and he published her note at daveramsey.com as the testimony of another satisfied customer.

Ramsey is a tough-talking, quick-witted evangelical radio personality out of Nashville whose ability to offer paternalistic financial advice and to turn a phrase has earned him millions of listeners, both religious and secular. The Financial Peace University, a spinoff of his radio program, offers curricula for church groups. His 13-week seminar promises to help the average family reduce debt by $5,300 and save $2,700, according to the marketing materials on his Web site.

Those savings presumably make for more money in the church’s offering plate. A spokesperson for Crown Financial Ministries, headquartered in Gainesville, Georgia, told the Dallas Morning News that graduates of Crown’s small-group study increase their giving to the church by more than 60 percent. What church wouldn’t pay the $289 study fee and ask for $89 from each participant in return for the sort of joy that gushes from Heather from Oregon, or from her pastor?

Ramsey’s financial advice is tied to an evangelical Christian message….

Read it all.

Here is one:

Re “Credit Time Bomb Ticked, but Few Heard” (front page, Aug. 19):

We in the United States, at the middle-class level, are conditioned to live beyond our means.

“We have a great economy” ”” the slogan of any administration of any stripe ”” is based on our entrenched credit living.

Just wait a few years, and we’ll see how the debt we’ve incurred for the war in Iraq ”” which has filled the pockets of the few ”” will blow up in the face of our self-proclaimed prosperous economy and devastate the backbone of this nation.

Brahama D. Sharma
Pismo Beach, Calif., Aug. 19, 2007

Read them all.

Update:: More from the London Times here, including:

Yes, the bank that for years let me pay even less than the minimum amount of interest due on my mortgage (a phenomenon known darkly as “negative amortisation”) had reached what even amateur economists might have considered the bloody inevitable: it had ran out of money. Or, to use the correct euphemism, it had been forced to “supplement its funding liquidity position” with a $11.5 billion (£5.75 billion) mortgage of its very own.

I mention all this not only because it’s incredible for how long this Ponzi scheme was allowed to continue, but also because it advances the theory that the LA housing boom of the past five years has been primarily responsible for the global financial apocalypse.

Take Countrywide. There is really only one thing anyone has ever needed to know about Countrywide: that it is based in LA suburb of Calabasas, a mountain paradise so absurdly rich, so helplessly adrift in an ocean of other people’s cash, that its population of 23,000 is able to sustain its very own Ferrari dealership.

And we’re not talking about any old Ferrari dealership. We’re talking a massive glass-walled emporium, visible from the freeway, visible probably from near-Earth orbit, stacked wall to wall with the $1,000,000 playthings of Countrywide mortgage salesmen. It was once said that if you went into Calabasas at night, and sat very still for a while, you could actually hear the laughter of the negative-amortisation specialists bouncing off the gated marble driveways.

My graduate studies in public discourse last spring brought the point home once again: Speaking about religious faith in contemporary North America is an activity fraught with challenge, misunderstanding, and polarization. Listening to others speak about faith in a meaningful way is no less difficult.

The 30 of us spent four hours together each Thursday evening for ten weeks reading texts on major public-discourse issues, including war, the working poor, gender, inequality in public education, and the environment, among others. By no means was there unanimity on any of these subjects, but we took them up without strain, in vigorous but respectful and effective dialogue. Then came religion.

In our class discussion on religious faith, responding to Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being and Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, polarization and anxiety kicked in like a full-force gale. I found myself wishing that American Public Media host and author Krista Tippett were in the room with us, moderating the conversation, asking probing yet measured questions, drawing out the stories behind our own belief systems, and reflecting back her own insights from a theologically trained perspective. Alas, that didn’t happen, but we have the next best thing: Tippet’s book Speaking of Faith.

Writing at a website devoted to the weekly radio program that carries the same name (www.speakingoffaith.org), Tippett says, “The first-person approach behind ‘Speaking of Faith’ sidesteps the predictable minefields and opens the subject wide, making it inviting, both in ambiance and substance. It insists that people speak straight from the experience behind their own personal beliefs. How did they come to hold the truths they hold? How are religious insights given depth and nuance by the complexities of life?”

Read it all.

Couples must first take an HIV test before they will be allowed to marry, the Anglican Church in Nigeria has reaffirmed.

The church noted that the move was to help parishioners make “informed choices” when choosing marriage partners.

The BBC News website learnt that many Christian churches in Nigeria impose similar tests on their members as a condition for marriage.

The policy is being implemented in all Anglican dioceses across Nigeria, the church’s spokesman said.

“The aim is to help intending couples to make informed decisions because we don’t want anyone to be kept in the dark about their partner,” spokesman for the church Rev Akintunde Popoola told the BBC News website.

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“While 43 states experienced year-over-year increases in foreclosure activity, just five states — California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Georgia — accounted for more than half of the nation’s total foreclosure filings,” said RealtyTrac Chief Executive James J. Saccacio.

Nevada posted the highest foreclosure rate: one filing for every 199 households, or more than three times the national average. It reported 5,116 filings during the month, an increase of 8 percent from June.

Georgia’s foreclosure rate was more than twice the national average, with one filing for every 299 households. The state reported 12,602 foreclosure filings, up 75 percent from June.

Michigan reported 13,979 filings in July, a 39 percent spike from June.

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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney disclosed a low-sacrifice ethic in Iowa that should raise more doubts about his qualification to be a president than his religion does.

Given that his low-sacrifice ethic matches the ethic of so many American Christians, will his low-sacrifice ethic be a problem for him.

Ethics reveal more than doctrine. Too often religious doctrine is a matter of mental assent to faith statements adopted over extended periods of time and codified as orthodoxy. Ethics, on the other hand, has more real-time value, integrity and practicality.

While many Americans and even more evangelical Christians feel most unconformable with Romney’s Mormon faith, they should pay much more attention to his ethics. No, not his practiced pro-family moral values as a Mormon, but his expressed political values as a Republican.

Read it all.

A Good profile from NPR.

Check it out as well as all the links.

My own approach to the development of Mary’s person has gone in a somewhat different direction from that of the Lutheran-Roman Catholic commission that produced the very influential and stimulating volume, Mary in the New Testament.[45] In this volume the interests were necessarily quite different than mine. A vigorous scholarly attempt was made to read each New Testament author on his own and not to allow later Church doctrines anachronistically to be read back into the original voices of the text. The results of this study were clear, sober, and unassailable. But, the end result of the volume was unsatisfying for me because the implication was that the growth of Marian doctrine was conceived to be a slow and careful outgrowth of what the New Testament had only hinted at. One would not have gathered from this volume that the elaboration of Mary in the Church was just as much an attempt to understand her in light of the Church’s two-part Bible.

But I should concede that the two-testament witness of the Christian Bible is not the whole story. In addition, one must reckon with the influence of the vicissitudes of history. Had Theodore of Mopsuestia not brought to light the fact that the deity seems free to enter and leave the temple as witnessed in Ezekiel 8-11 the wholesale transfer of the temple form to Mary might not have happened. Though texts like the Protevangelium of James were already moving far in that direction, most Patristic writers up to Chalcedon seemed to be most comfortable using the image of the temple as a metaphor for the indwelling of the Godhead within the person of Jesus. In addition, the rising importance of the Marian feasts within the liturgical life of the Church in the wake of Chalcedon should not be underemphasized. These feasts quickened the need for and the development of icons and innumerable homilies. And both the icons and the homilies provided the fertile soil from which the growth of Mary’s temple-like being could flourish. Given the paucity of material about Mary in the New Testament, it can hardly be surprising that the homilies on the Dormition that Brian Daley has collected devote such an extraordinary amount of space to the metaphor of Mary as temple.

In sum, one can see that the doctrine of the incarnation was not understood in Patristic tradition as solely an affair of the New Testament. In some very important ways, the New Testament was thought to defer to the Old. The task of the Catholic reader of the Old Testament is perhaps best illustrated by Michelangelo. In keeping with the historical sense it is absolutely crucial that we allow this Old Testament prophet his own voice. Otherwise, whence will come his surprise? The Old Testament, with complete theological integrity, imagines that all world history points towards God’s rebuilding of Zion. We cannot compromise this perspective. In the New Testament, on the other hand, that hope takes a radical and unexpected turn, but not one that renders null and void the subject matter of Ezekiel’s hopes. As Michelangelo indicates, God has indwelt a virgin and the task of the Christian reader is to explore how Ezekiel’s words and imagery take new shape in light of the mystery of Christ. The Angelus is one such means the tradition has offered for adoring the moment of incarnation. For when Mary responds “fiat mihi,” her body becomes a fit vessel (gratia plena) to contain the uncontainable. Like the Israelites of old who fell on their faces in adoration when they witnessed the descent of God to earth to inhabit his Tabernacle, so for the church (ave maria ”¦ dominus tecum). In this fashion a high doctrine of Mary both ensures and safeguards the doctrine of the incarnation.

Read it all.

In the end Leland’s book begins to feel as if it’s missing the road for the gravel and tar. What matters about “On the Road” is the book’s raw energy yoked to its sense of promise in “all that raw land,” the shove it offers to get out of one’s own chair and see what lies over the horizon. As Dean says on reaching San Francisco: “Wow! Made it! Just enough gas! Give me water! No more land! We can’t go any further ’cause there ain’t no more land!” And on heading back east: “Let’s go, let’s not stop ”” go now! Yes!” The book is a hymn to purposelessness, an antidote to what John Fowles once decried as our modern “addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield” in everything we do.

Above all, “On the Road” matters for its music: its plaintive, restless hum. In it, Kerouac perfected a melancholy optimism and a yearning for solace a thousand times richer and subtler than the mournful sap that drips down from so many contemporary American films and novels. It’s the lovely ache in the writing of Sherwood Anderson and Arthur Miller, in the cracked voices of Jeff Tweedy and Paul Westerberg. This is the great, lasting appeal of “On the Road,” the reason it will continue to matter to readers for another half-century and more. It’s the reason I’m glad I’ve got another copy, its pages already creased and its spine broken ”” and it’s the reason I won’t be giving this one away.

Is purposeless what people really want? Does that way lead to REAL freedom? Just asking. Read it all–KSH..

An example: In May of last year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran sent an open letter to President George W. Bush that was translated and published in newspapers around the world. Its theme was contemporary politics and its language that of divine revelation. After rehearsing a litany of grievances against American foreign policies, real and imagined, Ahmadinejad wrote, “If Prophet Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Joseph or Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) were with us today, how would they have judged such behavior?” This was not a rhetorical question. “I have been told that Your Excellency follows the teachings of Jesus (peace be upon him) and believes in the divine promise of the rule of the righteous on Earth,” Ahmadinejad continued, reminding his fellow believer that “according to divine verses, we have all been called upon to worship one God and follow the teachings of divine Prophets.” There follows a kind of altar call, in which the American president is invited to bring his actions into line with these verses. And then comes a threatening prophecy: “Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. . . . Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.”

This is the language of political theology, and for millennia it was the only tongue human beings had for expressing their thoughts about political life. It is primordial, but also contemporary: countless millions still pursue the age-old quest to bring the whole of human life under God’s authority, and they have their reasons. To understand them we need only interpret the language of political theology ”” yet that is what we find hardest to do. Reading a letter like Ahmadinejad’s, we fall mute, like explorers coming upon an ancient inscription written in hieroglyphics.

The problem is ours, not his. A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form ”” as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.

Understanding this difference is the most urgent intellectual and political task of the present time….

Read it all.

[Donald] Helmandollar said the parish plans to rebut the lawsuit’s assertions. The lawsuit was no surprise, he said, but the idea that church leaders would use a lawsuit to resolve the issue still struck an emotional chord.

“It just feels kind of strange to be sued personally, for myself and my vestry members, by your church, or what used to be your church,” he said. “It just doesn’t sit well.”

The lawsuit follows months of skirmishes between the parish and the diocese, part of a wider dispute unfolding within the Episcopal Church nationwide related to the 2003 election of an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire and the church’s blessing of same-sex unions.

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An illegal immigrant who took refuge in a Chicago church for a year to avoid being separated from her U.S.-born son has been deported to Mexico, the church’s pastor said.

Elvira Arellano became an activist and a national symbol for illegal immigrant parents as she defied her deportation order and spoke out from her religious sanctuary. She held a news conference last week to announce that she would finally leave the church to try to lobby U.S. lawmakers for change.

She had just spoken at a Los Angeles rally when she was arrested Sunday outside Our Lady Queen of Angels church and deported, said the Rev. Walter Coleman, pastor of Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago, where Arellano had been living.

“She is free and in Tijuana,” said Coleman, who said he spoke to her on the phone. “She is in good spirits. She is ready to continue the struggle against the separation of families from the other side of the border.”

Her 8-year-old son, Saul, is now living with Coleman’s family. During a news conference in Los Angeles after Arellano’s arrest, the boy hid behind the pastor’s wife and wiped away tears.

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Among the questions that have arisen are: What does the approved motion stating that “the blessing of same-sex unions is not in conflict with the doctrine of the Anglican Church of Canada” mean? Can clergy and dioceses now conduct same-sex blessings? Some bishops have issued pastoral letters asking clergy not to conduct same-sex blessings — can priests be disciplined if they ignore this directive? How can clergy be disciplined if General Synod already declared that same-sex blessings are “not in conflict” with the core doctrine of the church? What does the defeat of the motion affirming the authority of dioceses to offer same-sex blessings mean?

And, for the Diocese of New Westminster, which approved such blessings in 2002: Do the decisions mean an end to the moratorium on blessings? (In response to the House of Bishops’ agreement in 2005 not to encourage nor initiate same-sex blessings “until General Synod has made a decision on the matter” New Westminster had voted to impose a moratorium on allowing any new parishes to permit same-sex blessings; those parishes which already received the bishop’s approval were permitted to continue.)

At least seven of the church’s 30 diocesan bishops have issued pastoral letters stating that General Synod has decided that same-sex blessings are still not permitted. Thirteen have not yet issued pastoral letters; the rest offered reflections or reiterated the pastoral response issued by the House of Bishops in April. (The pastoral response stated in part that civilly-married lesbian or gay couples may, with the bishop’s permission, celebrate a eucharist that includes intercessory prayers, but not an exchange of vows and a nuptial blessing.)

Ronald Stevenson, General Synod chancellor (legal advisor), declined to comment on the questions when reached by the Anglican Journal.

The Rev. Alan Perry, an expert on canon law from the Diocese of Montreal, said the motion that blessings are not in conflict with the church’s core doctrine is a “declarative” but not an “enabling” motion, “which would contain some mechanism or permission to act in a certain way.” It does, however, “clear the decks for future action on blessing of same-sex unions by some body or other, ” he said.

It all feels like they are living in a world where it comes down to what the meaning of “is” is. I find the muddledness and confusion baffling. If one is going to do something, then do it clearly and unambiguously, and if not, then make it clear you are not forthrightly. This miasma of a cacophony of different interpretive voices drowns out, in my view, any real common life for the church as a whole in question, in this case the Anglican Church of Canada. At a time when the whole Anglican Communion is struggling, this is most unfortunate. Read it all–KSH.

A Picture is worth 1000 words.

Update: There is more there.

Michael Vick, the star quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons, has accepted a plea offer from federal prosecutors in a criminal case stemming from a dog-fighting ring that was run from a property Mr. Vick owned.

Mr. Vick will probably face a sentence of at least a year in prison under the deal. His future in the National Football League appears bleak.

Mr. Vick is expected to formally enter his plea on Aug. 27. The United States District Judge overseeing the case, Henry E. Hudson, announced the agreement at a status hearing in the case this afternoon.

Billy Martin, one of Mr. Vick’s defense lawyers, said in a written statement: “After consulting with his family over the weekend, Michael Vick asked that I announce today that he has reached an agreement with federal prosecutors regarding the charges pending against him. Mr. Vick has agreed to enter a plea of guilty to those charges and to accept full responsibility for his actions and the mistakes he has made. Michael wishes to apologize again to everyone who has been hurt by this matter.”

Mr. Vick has been barred by the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, from appearing at the Falcons’ training camp since the league began its own investigation of the matter on July 24, a week after Mr. Vick was indicted in the case.

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So you’re between the ages of 13 and 24. What makes you happy? A worried, weary parent might imagine the answer to sound something like this: Sex, drugs, a little rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe some cash, or at least the car keys.

Turns out the real answer is quite different. Spending time with family was the top answer to that open-ended question, according to an extensive survey ”” more than 100 questions asked of 1,280 people ages 13-24 ”” conducted by The Associated Press and MTV on the nature of happiness among America’s young people.

Next was spending time with friends, followed by time with a significant other. And even better for parents: Nearly three-quarters of young people say their relationship with their parents makes them happy.

“They’re my foundation,” says Kristiana St. John, 17, a high-school student from Queens in New York. “My mom tells me that even if I do something stupid, she’s still going to love me no matter what. Just knowing that makes me feel very happy and blessed.”

Other results are more disconcerting. While most young people are happy overall with the way their lives are going, there are racial differences: the poll shows whites to be happier, across economic categories, than blacks and Hispanics. A lot of young people feel stress, particularly those from the middle class, and females more than males.

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See what you make of the list.

This essay is about our Anglican identity. In particular, what does it mean to “stand firm in faith; be persons of courage; be strong. Do everything in love” (1 Cor 16:14)? There is much talk these days about the hard facts that require conservatives to abandon hope for a future that includes communion with TEC and even Canterbury. Indeed, in some circles, it is an accepted commonplace to speak of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the harshest terms, declaring him a weakling, a quisling, untrustworthy, and faithless. Schism, in the judgment of some, is more godly than maintaining communion with those they judge to be heretical or apostate.

While I acknowledge the hard facts of our reality at this moment, and I, like many, suffer much distress about my own ecclesial future as we navigate this difficult time together, I disagree profoundly with those who counsel despair and rationalize abandonment of Canterbury and global schism. I agree that the issue at hand is our Christian identity, but I suggest that a militant politics of “liberation from TEC” ensnares us in behaviors that contradict our identity in Christ and therefore lead us astray. Part 1 reviews lessons from the mission field of Islam to introduce the practical significance of an identity founded on relational receptivity. Part II develops this concept by examining closely J. Kameron Carter’s study of Frederick Douglass to show that the militant identity advocated by some may well actually repeat the self-destructive performance of Christian identity of those from whom it is claimed we must seek liberation. Following Carter, I propose that the cause of our Anglican identity crisis in the West is a “modern” theology, the core of which is shared by both liberals and “orthodox,” that is insufficiently paschal, charismatic, pentecostal, and spiritual. Drawing heavily upon the work of Carter and Kenneth Bailey, in Part III, I conclude by offering a rough outline of how our Anglican identity might be alternatively understood and performed.

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The symptoms of a broken society are all around us. Over a million British youngsters are neither in education nor a job. The incidence of knife-crime has doubled in two years. New victims fall prey to the feral young on an almost daily basis. Even if they do not necessarily host homicides, many public spaces are steadily growing scruffier and dirtier. They look as if there should be a sign: “Decent people keep out.”

Yet we are a rich country. Private affluence is rivalled by record levels of public spending. There is no excuse for deficient public provision. But it often seems as if the right motto for Modern Britain would be: “Nothing works.”

Other societies seem vastly better than we are at avoiding social disintegration….

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The peace of Christ is not “the absence of conflict” but the “struggle against evil,” Benedict XVI says.

The Pope said this today to those gathered at the pontifical residence at Castel Gandolfo to pray the Angelus. He added that being instruments of Christ’s peace means “defeating evil with good.”

Speaking about the words of Jesus from today’s Gospel — “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” — the Holy Father clarified that this saying “means the peace that he came to bring is not synonymous with the simple absence of conflict.”

“On the contrary, the peace of Jesus is the fruit of a constant struggle against evil. The battle that Jesus has decided to fight is not against men or human powers but against the enemy of God and man, Satan,” the Pontiff emphasized.

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