Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, told Congress today that the economy is going to get worse before it gets better, a message that got a chilly reception from both Wall Street and politicians.

On a day when stock prices swung wildly, the dollar hit another new low against the euro and further signs emerged that consumers are growing more cautious about spending, Mr. Bernanke warned that the economy is about to “slow noticeably” as the housing market continues to spiral downward and financial institutions tighten up on lending.

But in a disappointment to investors, Mr. Bernanke offered no signal that the central bank might soften the blow by lowering interest rates for a third time this year at its next policy meeting on Dec. 11.

Stock prices, which had plunged Wednesday, went on a roller-coaster ride after Mr. Bernanke testified. The Dow Jones industrial average first fell 205 points by mid-afternoon, but then clawed back most of the way and ended the day at 13,266.29, down just 33 points.

Testifying before the Joint Economic Committee, the Fed chairman said that the two rate cuts in September and October “should” be enough to keep the economy from slipping into a recession. Without being specific, he reinforced statements by other Fed policymakers that the economy would have to show signs of stalling out entirely before they would reduce rates again.

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A prominent Atlanta preacher is challenging requests from a powerful senator for detailed financial information on his ministry.

The Rev. Creflo Dollar of World Changers Church International in College Park said his team of legal experts is reviewing a request for financial records from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), head of the Senate Finance Committee.

Dollar wants to know if Grassley or the committee has authority to request the records and if the request infringes on religious liberty.

“Are we saying the First Amendment [which protects churches from government intrusion] is null and void by allowing this to happen?” Dollar asked.

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Traditionalist Anglican leaders have stepped up pressure on their deeply split Communion by urging it to postpone its consultative conference and pledging more support for rebels against liberal local churches.

Nine leaders from the “Global South”, known as primates, want to delay the Lambeth Conference, a 10-yearly assembly due in 2008, and hold an emergency summit of primates to resolve a crisis sparked by a gay bishop being named in the United States.

Also this week, two leading traditionalist archbishops — Peter Akinola in Nigeria and Gregory Venables in Argentina — vowed to continue to defend parishes and dioceses seeking to leave the Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of Anglicanism.

Four Episcopal dioceses are considering switching allegiance to foreign primates in protest against their church’s support for gay bishop Gene Robinson, despite threats of disciplinary action from Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.

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Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has released a letter to Bishop Jack Leo Iker in which she writes that a step to withdraw the Diocese of Fort Worth from the The Episcopal Church would force her to take action to bring the diocese and its leadership into line with the mandates of the national Church. The letter is similar to one sent to Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh on October 31. Episcopal News Service reports that letters to other bishops will follow.

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The former prime minister will be received into his new church in a mass at the private chapel of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales.

He has been guided by Fr John Walsh, a former RAF chaplain who celebrated mass at Chequers, and Fr Mark O’Toole, the cardinal’s secretary.

His path to Rome will come as no surprise because his wife Cherie and four children are Catholics and the family have worshipped together for years.

Mr Blair, in one of his final acts as prime minister, met Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican when he told him of wish to leave the Church of England.

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Why are students focusing on investments to change the world?

Mr. Pearson: Students are beginning to realize that 51 of the top 100 biggest economies in the world are corporations. And so when they look at … who has the biggest influence over world affairs, over child labor, over environmental issues, they’re beginning to see it’s corporations. And they make the connection to endowments.

What concerns students most?

Ms. Pritchard: Divestment from Sudan has been a big topic of interest … and also climate change, I think, is on the minds of students these days.

How do university officials react when you urge them to divest from Sudan?

Mr. Zainabadi: They didn’t say anything. They ignored us for about nine months out of the 12 months that it took for us to get a response from them.

No response at all?

Zainabadi: Their administrative assistants would say: “Thank you for your e-mail; we’ll take it into consideration.” No responses of substance. And this was [after] we drafted petitions that garnered 500 signatures from faculty, alumni, and students. We had resolutions pass at both the graduate student council level and undergraduate student government [level]. We had a letter-writing campaign. We had letters to the editor. And finally, a “die-in,” which was a protest to represent the 80,000 people who had died in the eight months that MIT was taking to reach a decision.

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In 2004, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops found themselves in the middle of a rancorous public debate about the church’s political priorities and Communion, its most holy sacrament.

As another presidential campaign gathers steam, the bishops are preparing to publish moral guidelines for political life, as they have every four years since the 1970s, this time with lessons learned from 2004.

The 2008 version of “Faithful Citizenship” will be debated by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore next week (Nov. 12-15).

“We did not want to appear, as we enter a major political cycle, as if we’re trying to tell people how to vote,” said Archbishop John J.Myers of Newark, N.J. “We’re not taking a political role but the role of teachers.”

“Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” delineates in three sections how Catholics should behave in the public square. Rather than just present a checklist of the proper Catholic stance on issues, the document takes pains to explain the church’s role in politics.

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Bishop Venables told The Living Church the offer of a provincial home for traditionalist American dioceses merely recognized the existing splits within the church. He said the Southern Cone was not precipitating a crisis or invading The Episcopal Church, but was offering a safe haven within the Anglican Communion for those wishing to flee.

By a supermajority, delegates to the Valparaíso synod voted to permit traditionalist North American dioceses to affiliate with the province. The vote goes a step beyond Bishop Venables’ intervention in Brazil, and marks a major shift in the ecclesial structures of the Anglican Communion.

In 2005, Bishop Venables extended his personal primatial oversight to Bishop Robinson Cavalcanti and 40 priests of the Diocese of Recife after they had been deposed by the Brazilian church for contumacy.

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Take a look.

California sued the federal government on Thursday to force a decision about whether the state can impose the nation’s first greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and light trucks.
More than a dozen other states are poised to follow California’s lead if it is granted the waiver from federal law, presenting a challenge to automakers who would have to adapt to a patchwork of regulations.

The state’s lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., was expected after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed last spring to take legal action.

“Our future depends on us taking action on global warming right now,” Schwarzenegger said during a news conference. “There’s no legal basis for Washington to stand in our way.”

At issue is California’s nearly two-year-old request for a waiver under the federal Clean Air Act allowing it to implement a 2002 state anti-pollution law regulating greenhouse gases.

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ABC news is reporting this. Yuck.

Where are the affected churches and members?

Gloria Dei Church in Cocoa; Church of the Good Shepherd in Maitland; St. Edward’s Church in Mount Dora; Grace Church in Ocala; Trinity Church in Vero Beach and Holy Cross Church in Winter Haven, according to officials at the Diocese of Central Florida. The church affiliates are from St. Philip’s in Lake Nona and St. Nicholas in Poinciana.

Why are the churches leaving now?

“We’re not dialoguing anymore,” said the Rev. Paul Young, rector at Gloria Dei Church in Cocoa. The consecration of a gay bishop “is done, and it’s held up as a standard in a church. … Within our diocese, our bishop is highly respected. But he also has said he is going to stand behind the Episcopal Church. It makes it more difficult for us in that we do love our bishop.” Bishop John Howe, who leads the diocese, declined to comment on the impending departures.

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Fifteen years have passed since the stonemasons put down their chisels and mallets for the last time. Now, they can finally see what their carving wrought: the uppermost 55 feet 2 inches of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

In recent weeks, the cathedral’s southwest tower has emerged from the rusty scaffolding that had enclosed it since the last round of construction ended in 1992. The tower is still far from complete, but it has grown noticeably closer to the sky.

What is now revealed, in a limestone several shades blonder than the rest of the cathedral, are crisp buttresses, gables, colonettes, gargoyles, pinnacles, crockets and ornaments known as trefoils (three cusps), quatrefoils (four cusps) and cinquefoils (five cusps).

The tower has a newly imposing presence.

“It has been set free from its bondage of scaffolding,” said the Very Rev. Dr. James A. Kowalski, dean of the cathedral. Perhaps the greatest personal gratification, he said, was felt by those who labored so hard on the tower before the money ran out. “It was the first time they saw the magnitude of what was accomplished.”

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OOPS! The Episcopal congregations voted and then – following the Diocese of Virginia’s Protocol for Departing Churches – filed that vote in their local court house. WE DID NOT, repeat, did not seek the court’s declaration. We thought we were following the Diocese of Virginia’s Protocol and that we were entering into property negotiations by joining Bishop Lee’s official Diocese of Virginia Property Committee (the Diocese fails to mention that part – or the Standstill Agreement that the Diocese entered into with the Virginia Churches as we prepared for the next phase in the Protocol). The property negotiations had all ready been modeled for us by the property negotiations between the Diocese of Virginia and All Saints, Dale City. This all came to a sudden halt in January 2007 following a meeting of the Diocese of Virginia’s Standing Committee, Executive Board, and Bishop Lee with the Presiding Bishop’s Chancellor, David Booth Beers. Within days of that meeting, the standstill agreement was abruptly cancelled, lawsuits against the 200 lay volunteers and their clergy were filed by the Diocese and then another set by 815, the clergy were inhibited (even the ones who were remaining Episcopalian), and health benefits for clergy and staff were cut off, including COBRA benefits that cost the Diocese nothing but their honor. One thinks that David Booth Beers could not have the Diocese of Virginia declaring the facts that division had indeed occurred (as the Protocol stipulated) or their whole House of Cards would tumble.

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The worldwide Anglican Church suffered a dramatic new split last night when a leading conservative archbishop approved plans to adopt breakaway American dioceses, the Daily Telegraph has learned.

Archbishop Gregory Venables is to allow conservative dioceses that are defecting from the pro-gay American branch of Anglicanism to affiliate with his South American province thousands of miles away.

The unprecedented realignment will rock the 70 million-strong worldwide Church and escalate the bitter civil war over gay clergy that is tearing it apart.

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When Paul Chan visited New Orleans for the first time in 2006, the gutted houses, abandoned streets and bare trees reminded him of Samuel Beckett’s legendary play Waiting for Godot.

“The sense of waiting is legion here,” Chan said. “People are waiting to come home. Waiting for the levee board to OK them to rebuild. Waiting for Road Home money. Waiting for honest construction crews that won’t rip them off. Waiting for phone and electric companies.”

The artist and activist says the desolation in New Orleans inspired him to “create art in places where we ought not have any.” This weekend, Chan’s vision comes to fruition in the Lower Ninth Ward, where the New York public arts group Creative Time and the Classical Theater of Harlem are staging free, outdoor performances of Waiting for Godot. They will continue next weekend in the city’s Gentilly neighborhood, in front of a flooded home.

Listen to it all from NPR.

“The financials are the bodyguards of the market and when the bodyguards are taking shots then the market can’t do well…A lot of the bad stuff is known; what the markets are worrying about is the unknown.”

—David Darst, chief investment strategist for Morgan Stanley’s global wealth management group speaking of recent market action

When a Boston television reporter gave then-candidate George W. Bush a pop quiz on foreign leaders in 1999, one of the names he missed was that of Pakistan’s president.

Now, few people are more important to the Bush administration than Pervez Musharraf. His efforts to quell violent protests against his government this week have put a spotlight not only on the chaos within the nuclear-armed Islamic nation, but also on how fragile Pakistan’s role has become in Bush’s war on terrorism.

There are increasing questions about whether Musharraf is effectively keeping his vow to crack down on Islamic militants, which are using Pakistan as a base to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Add this week’s political crisis, and Pakistan may have surpassed Iraq and Afghanistan as the most vulnerable front in Bush’s anti-terrorism efforts.

“There’s no way to win a war on terrorism without Pakistan’s cooperation,” says Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a Washington-based group that tracks Muslim terrorist organizations.

Pakistan’s uncertain future symbolizes how, six years after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration is facing tough decisions on how to protect the USA from another assault by Muslim extremists. In recent days, much of the news from the three major fronts of the war on terrorism has not been good:

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The House of Bishops is proceeding with disciplinary action against three of the six bishops who have resigned from The Episcopal Church during the past year. The bishops were briefed on active cases during an executive session of the fall meeting held Sept. 20-25 in New Orleans.

An ecclesiastical trial against the Rt. Rev. William Cox is still pending, despite the fact that he transferred to the Anglican Church of Southern Cone last March. Bishop Cox told The Living Church he was not aware that he was still a target of interest to the ecclesiastical court.

Bishop Cox served as Bishop Suffragan of Maryland from 1972-1980 and assisting Bishop of Oklahoma from 1980-1988. He previously admitted ordaining two priests and a deacon at Christ Church in Overland Park, Kan., in 2005 after he was asked to do so by the Primate of Uganda. A month later, he returned to Christ Church and led a service of confirmation.

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The video link is at the bottom of the page. I happened to catch this last night on the NBC news while running on the elliptical and it moved me to tears.

This is heartwarming.

For those of you with HBO, Five Days is really worth the time.

The Editor The CEN

Dear Sir,

We write to inform you that we are sending the following letter of support to Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh and his fellow Bishops in the Common Cause Council of Bishops following the letter last week to the Bishop of Pittsburgh,

Dear Bishop Duncan and Bishops in Common Cause

Warm greetings from the UK.

We have read the letter from Presiding Bishop Schori to the Bishop of Pittsburgh. We want to assure you, your dioceses and parishes of our prayers and fellowship as you take your stand on our shared Anglican heritage, accepting the Holy Scriptures as the rule and ultimate standard of faith, contrary to those innovators both in the British Isles and in the Americas who wish to give primacy to the demands of contemporary culture.

We are outraged by the threat and implementation of court actions against faithful Anglicans in the United States by the current leadership of The Episcopal Church who appear to be unitarian and universalist in theology, and coercively utopian in social practice.

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Mike Day, singer and guitarist, gathered his rock band around him.

Dressed in a faded black T-shirt, jeans and skateboard sneakers, he bent his shaved head. “God,” he said, “I hope these songs we sing will be much more than the music. I know it’s so difficult at times when we’re thinking about chords and lyrics and when to hit the right effect patch, but would you just help that to become second nature, so that we can truly worship you from our hearts?”

A few minutes later the band broke into three songs of slightly funky, distorted rock with heaving choruses, and the room sang along: 1,500 or so congregants of High Desert Church here, where Mr. Day, 33, is a worship director. This was Sunday night worship for the young-adult subset of the church’s congregation, but it was also very much a rock show, one that has helped create a vibrant social world in this otherwise quiet desert town.

There has been enormous growth in the evangelical Protestant movement in America over the last 25 years, and bands in large, modern, nondenominational churches ”” some would say megachurches ”” like this one, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, now provide one of the major ways that Americans hear live music.

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We seem to be having an increasingly frequent problem with folks pasting in URLs that are too long for the width of the comment box, which then blows out the margins and makes text overflow into the sidebar.

Thus, we’d like to request please don’t paste long-links in the comments. If your link is long, use anchor codes to make a link. If you don’t know how to do that, go to tinyurl.com and your long link will be transformed into a very short one you can copy and paste into your comment. Thanks!

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The Diocese of Dallas recently approved the second reading of a constitutional amendment that makes accession to the constitution and canons of The Episcopal Church conditional on it remaining “a full, constituent member of the Anglican Communion.”

The amendment was one of several items on a busy agenda, which also included affirmation of Bishop James Stanton’s call for the election of a suffragan bishop. Convention met at Southfork Ranch Oct. 18-20.

The resolution approving the second reading of the constitutional change passed overwhelmingly on a voice vote by orders. Convention also approved resolutions affirming evangelism, the way that Bishop Stanton has pastorally dealt with those congregations wishing to leave The Episcopal Church and another affirming the primates’ Feb. 19 communiqué from Dar es Salaam which states that “we as a diocese do not believe that The Episcopal Church has complied with those requests.”

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About 15 people marched alongside the Muslim float in this city’s notoriously fleshy Gay Pride Parade earlier this year, with various men carrying the flags of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey and even Iran’s old imperial banner.

While other floats featured men dancing in leather Speedos or women with scant duct tape over their nipples, many Muslims were disguised behind big sunglasses, fezzes or kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads.

Even as they reveled in newfound freedom compared with the Muslim world, they remained closeted, worried about being ostracized at the mosque or at their local falafel stand.

“They’re afraid of the rest of the community here,” said Ayman, a stocky 31-year-old from Jordan, who won asylum in the United States last year on the basis of his sexuality. “It’s such a big wrong in the Koran that it is impossible to be accepted.”

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6. It is clear to us that the House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church (TEC) has not given an unequivocal response to the requests of the Primates at Dar es Salaam. Therefore we affirm the conclusion that the Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa (CAPA) has reached in the communiqué of their meeting in Mauritius in October 2007 that “a change in direction from our current trajectory is urgently needed” because “we want unity but not unity at any expense”.

7. In view of our desire to move forward:

7.1 We call for an urgent meeting of the Primates to receive and conclude the draft Anglican Covenant and to determine how the Communion should move forward;

7.2 We urge that the proposed Lambeth Conference 2008 be postponed to a later date when bishops of all the provinces in the Communion can participate in a spirit of true collegiality and unity in the faith;

7.3 We request the Steering Committee to start preparations for the 4th Encounter of the Global South in 2008;

7.4 We receive with thanks the report of the Economic Empowerment Consultation in Accra, Ghana, in September 2007, and encourage the Task Force to continue to develop programmes to help our churches to be increasingly self-supporting;

7.5 We commend the work of the Theological Education and Formation Task Force, especially the drafting of the Anglican Catechism in Outline (ACIO), and urge our dioceses to make it available to all strata of leadership in preparation for its formal adoption in the first quarter of 2008;

7.6 We call upon bishops of the Global South and the Anglican Communion to write to their churches to explain the current situation and ask them to pray for the Communion at this crucial time which would lead to reformation and transformation.

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