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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The world needs to understand that the situation that we now confront is not primarily about structure or conferences but about irreconcilable truth claims. It is worth remembering that in the Biblical narratives religious structures have often been the enemy of revealed truth. When these structures become obstacles, YHWH, in his own way and at a time of his own choosing removed them and brought His people back to Himself. Of course there is value to preserving Anglican structures but we must never do so at the expense of the people for whom our Lord Jesus the Christ gave his life.

Until the Communion summons the courage to tackle that issue headlong and resolve it we can do no other than provide for those who cry out to us. It is our earnest prayer that repentance and reconciliation will make this a temporary arrangement. One thing is clear we will not abandon our friends.

When we met in Dar es Salaam, after a great deal of effort, we suggested a way forward that had the support of all those present ”“ including the Presiding Bishop of TEC. The House of Bishops and Executive Committee of The Episcopal Church quickly rejected this proposal on the grounds that it apparently violated their canons. We now have a counter proposal from TEC and yet there is no indication that it will meet the needs of those for whom it is supposedly designed. This endless series of proposals and counter proposals continues with no apparent conclusion in sight. Sadly, it is becoming increasingly clear that the only acceptable end as far as TEC is concerned is the full capitulation of any who would stand in opposition to their biblically incompatible innovations- this we will never do. There is a way forward – we have written and spoken repeatedly about it ”“ the time for action is now.

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The Bishop of Peterborough, Rt Rev Ian Cundy has been diagnosed with cancer.

Mr Cundy, who has been the city’s bishop since 1996, is suffering from mesothelioma ”“ a rare cancer of the lung cavity.

His office has said that the cancer has been caught at an early stage, and medical experts were hopeful the Bishop will be able to continue with his duties after a short course of treatment.

He has been unwell since the summer, forcing him to cancel a number of public engagements.

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In the original article:

During the question-and-answer period, he [referring to Bishop Salmon] denied that he had ordered diocesan clergy to refrain from praying for Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori during the Prayers of the People, despite more than one participant saying their rectors had told them he had.

After Salmon left to go to another appointment, one participant, to murmurs of assent, said that Salmon’s statement was part of a pattern in which “we’re told all sorts of things and then the bishop denies that it’s true.”

That section is now gone, however.

Ralph Webb has some comments on this here.

From here:

”˜Bishop Yamoyam is still seriously ill in the Intensive Care Unit in the United States. The Presiding Bishop returned yesterday and gave us all the news that at the moment Bp Miguel seems to be paralysed down one side of his body. I met with Bp Miguels wife yesterday, and she now has her passport and will be flying out to the US on the next available flight along with their daughter who is a nurse. They are grateful for the prayers of everyone concerned. We are organising special prayer meetings here in the National Office and I know that others are being organised in churches across the Philippines’

You need to guess the top 5 American cities before you look.

She spent years as an outspoken antiabortion activist, and that cause remains dear to her. But these days, Karen Swallow Prior has a new passion: animal welfare.

She wasn’t sure, at first, that advocating for God’s four-legged creatures would go over well on the campus of Liberty University, a fundamentalist Baptist institution founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Among the Liberty faculty — and conservative evangelicals in general — the animal-rights movement is often disdained as a secular, liberal cause.

But activists have been working with increasing intensity to shed that image. They’re lecturing in Quaker meetinghouses and Episcopal churches, setting up websites that post Scripture alongside recipes for vegan soup — and using biblical language to promote political initiatives, such as laws mandating bigger cages for pregnant pigs.

On Wednesday, clergy from 20 faith traditions — including Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic — will sign a statement declaring a moral duty to treat animals with respect. At a ceremony in Washington, they will call on all people of faith to stop wearing fur, reduce meat consumption, and buy only from farms with humane practices. The Best Friends Animal Society, which brought the group together, plans to recruit volunteers to bring that message into at least 2,000 congregations nationwide.

At Liberty University, meanwhile, Prior took a risk: She wrote an editorial for this month’s university journal declaring animal welfare an evangelical concern. She pointed out that the abolitionist William Wilberforce, an evangelical hero of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, pushed for laws to protect animals from human cruelty. And she said there was “ample biblical support” for continuing such activism today.

To Prior’s surprise, she’s gotten plenty of praise on and around Liberty’s campus in Lynchburg, Va. Her pastor has even asked her to lecture on the topic at Bible study.

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Warning: this article’s content may not be suitable for some blog readers.

n his remarkable twenty-year career as a New York Times business journalist, Kurt Eichenwald has seen himself as a kind of crusader””shedding light on the world’s dark places, uncovering wrongdoing, bringing criminals to account. Lately, however, the pursuer feels like the pursued. “I had no idea of what I was taking on. I had no idea of the magnitude of the evil of these people,” he tells me. “This is an organized-crime business, these are people””we’re not talking about people with an affinity for Scotch””they spend their days talking and living and breathing the sexual issues of children.”

Two years ago, Eichenwald wrote a sensational front-page story in the New York Times about Justin Berry, a teenage pornography star who ran an enormously lucrative business from his room while his mother thought he was doing homework. The article resulted in congressional hearings, arrests, book-and-movie interest, and an Oprah episode. Eichenwald followed that first story with disturbing reports about illegal child-modeling Websites and self-help chat rooms where child molesters perfect their strategies. The Berry piece was impressive in its vividness. Law-enforcement agencies seized upon it as the definitive word about a sordid, teeming underworld, and parents inclined to worry about the dangers of the Internet were given reason to worry much more.

As much as the stories provided a window into a seldom-seen world, they also raised troubling questions about how they were reported””and ultimately about the man who reported them. To start with, Eichenwald made himself a character in the story about Berry””highly unusual for the New York Times. The reporter appeared as a savior, working to win Berry’s trust and finally rescuing him from the business he’d fallen into and delivering him back to his religious faith. But once Eichenwald became part of the story, others began to ask questions: Why would a Times reporter believe he should go into the rescuing business? And how had he accomplished what he’d accomplished? (Reporting on child pornography is inherently difficult, because looking at the images themselves is illegal, even for a journalist.) And behind those questions is a more fundamental one: What drives the people who fill these roles, criminal and pursuer, obsessive fan and obsessive foe?

With the country’s vexed relationship to youthful sexuality as the backdrop, Eichenwald’s stories, hectoring as they were about the evils they were uncovering, had a kind of prurient power that is undeniably related to the power of pornography. The cure and the disease are impossible to separate.

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Russell Crowe, who is 43, says he’s planning to be baptized. “I’d like to do it this year,” the Oscar-winning actor tells Men’s Journal. “My mom and dad decided to let my brother and me make our own decisions about God when we got to the right age. I started thinking recently, `If I believe it is important to baptize my kids, why not me?”’

Crowe says the baptism will take place in the Byzantine chapel he built at his country ranch in Australia for his wedding to Danielle Spencer in 2003. The couple have two sons, 3-year-old Charlie and 1-year-old Tennyson.

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“We are creating stages for people to perform on in some way, but it’s a very scripted and considered display,” he said. “Cooking could be a display, for example, with your partner watching you from the bedroom.”

He talked about tuning the privacy of each room, using shades or scrims to have larger or smaller openings, as you would change the aperture of a camera. “So if you don’t want your partner to see you shaving your legs in the shower,” he said, “you can pull the shade.”

Like the clothes Marc Jacobs designed for his own label and for Vuitton this fall ”” skirts bunched into the waistbands of pantyhose at the back, see-through dresses with bras and panties sewn onto them ”” Graft’s peekaboo interiors are a sly commentary on a culture that continues to find new ways to display ever more intimate, and mundane, details of domestic life. In a YouTube world, one’s home is no longer one’s private retreat: it’s just a container for the webcam.

In New York City, where the streetscape is being systematically remade by glassy towers like the W, which have been spreading like kudzu in the seven years since the first two terrarium-like Richard Meier buildings went up on the West Side Highway, the lives of the inhabitants are increasingly on exhibit, like the performance art wherein the artists “live” in a gallery for 24 hours and you get to watch them napping or brushing their teeth.

It’s not always a pretty picture.

In September, Curbed, the feisty New York City real estate blog, posted a photograph of a newly completed, glass-walled condo building on East 13th Street. You could see right into the apartments, which looked most like messy dorm rooms. It was a grubby retort to the marketing hoo-ha that surrounds these now ubiquitous buildings and trumpets a sleekly attractive lifestyle accessorized by midcentury modern furniture and designer clothing. There were unmade beds jammed right up against the glass, mangled paper Venetian shades, a towel over a chair.

Accompanying the photo was a report of a sighting of a guy in boxer shorts doing push-ups. “Doesn’t the first condo association meeting need to include a window coverings workshop?” the post wondered plaintively.

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Evangelical conflict on the topic was obvious in reader response to the Instone Brewer essay. Initially the mail was heavily negative. The most stinging broadside was a column by John Piper, a respected theological conservative, that called the essay not just weak but “tragic.” The magazine’s editor in chief, David Neff, felt the need to explain online that “Instone-Brewer’s article did not… give people carte blanche on divorce.” The mail eventually leveled off at 60% negative to 40% positive.

Still, the controversy suggests that even the country’s most rule-bound Christians will search for a fresh understanding of scripture when it seems unjust to them. The implications? Flexibility on divorce may mean that evangelicals could also rethink their position on such things as gay marriage, as a generation of Christians far more accepting of homosexuality begins to move into power. (The ever-active Barna folks have found that 57% of “born-again” Christians age 16-29 criticize their own church for being “anti-homosexual.”) It could also give heart to a certain twice-divorced former New York mayor who is running for President and seeking the conservative vote. But that may be pushing things a bit.

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Later, [Charles] Bennison did not prevent his brother’s ordination, his later request to be reinstated after renouncing his orders in 1977, or his transfer between two California dioceses, according to the Episcopal committee.

John Bennison was forced to leave the priesthood in 2006 when news of his abuse was made public, according to Episcopal News Service.

A trial date for Bishop Bennison has not yet been set. He will be paid in the meantime, ENS reported.

Meanwhile, the Diocese of Pittsburgh disregarded a warning from Schori and took a big step out the door of the Episcopal Church, declaring itself at odds with the denomination’s more liberal view of Scripture and homosexuality and paving the way to join a more conservative Anglican branch.

By a tally of 227 to 82, lay and ordained delegates to Pittsburgh’s annual convention on Friday (Nov. 2) voted to change their diocese’s constitution, removing language that requires “accession” to the national church.

“As a diocese we have come to a fork in the road,” Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan told delegates on Friday. “Indeed, it has become clear that our understandings are not only different, but mutually exclusive, even destructive to one another.”

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Download it and read it all. The election is scheduled for November 10th..

Prayer said, Scripture read, birthday song happily sung, the Rev. Roger Marsh has a message for his team. Stay on track.

“Be kind, courteous and respectful toward each other,” he says. “Keep in mind that we’re out here with a task, and that is to share the Lord.”

The pastor leads a parting prayer. Then it’s off to work, off to the multitudes swarming at Texas Motor Speedway.

Speedway officials estimate this weekend’s racing triple-header, peaking with Sunday’s Dickies 500 race, will draw 400,000 fans to the Tarrant County oval.

And as always, Dr. Marsh and his fellow volunteers of Texas Alliance Raceway Ministries are there to lend a hand, offer support and spread the word.

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