Roxanne Helmey does not mind spending time with Mormons. She welcomes an opportunity to talk to them about her Christian faith and on occasion, she prays for them. But one thing she will not do, she said, is vote for a Mormon as president of the United States.

“I feel like they’re lost,” said Helmey, 37, an insurance agent from Guyton, a small town about 30 miles northwest of Savannah. “I love them, but my heart breaks for them.”

For Helmey and many other evangelical Christians, particularly in the Bible Belt South, religion and politics go hand in hand. So no matter what Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has to say about key conservative issues such as abortion, immigration and same-sex marriage, his Mormon faith stands in the way of getting their vote.

“For me, his faith matters. A lot of Christians believe Mormons are a cult,” said Mario Bertoluzzi, a 39-year-old elementary school teacher from Savannah and a member of an evangelical church. “Romney puts a clean face on it, but it has a dubious beginning and a history of bigamy. Lots of Christians have questions about that.”

Read it all.

Bishop Gene Robinson, the Nation’s openly practicing homosexual Episcopal Bishop, spoke to a crowd of over 200 people on November 27, 2007 at Nova Southeastern University’s Shephard Law Center. He told them of his upcoming planned ”˜marriage’ to his paramour saying with pride, “I always wanted to be a June bride.”

The activist Bishop continued:

“It may take many years for religious institutions to add their blessing for same-sex marriages and no church, mosque or synagogue should be forced to do so. But that should not slow down progress for the full civil right to marry,” Robinson said. “Because New Hampshire will have legal unions beginning in January, my partner of 20 years and I will enter into such a legal union next June.”

Dressed in his clerical collar and wearing his pectoral cross, the symbol of his ecclesial office in the Episcopal church, he castigated the “religious right”, a term by which he refers to all orthodox Christians who support the unbroken teaching of Christianity on the sanctity of authentic marriage:

“The greatest single hindrance to achievement of full rights for gays and lesbians can be laid at the doorstep of the three Abrahamic faiths– Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It’s going to take people of faith to end discrimination,” said Robinson, who was invested as the ninth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire in 2004.

Read it all but note that he gets the Gene Robinson chronology wrong. Saying he was ” a married Episcopal priest, who had broken both his marriage and priestly vows when he divorced his wife and abandoned his children to engage in an active homosexual relationship” is not true (and we have made this point over and over again). The divorce preceded his even meeting his current partner.

A west Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus “baby levy” at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.

Writing in today’s Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child’s lifetime.

Professor Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and “greenhouse-friendly” services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits.

Read it all.

The price of oil nearly reached $100 a barrel recently, but a new University of Delaware prototype vehicle demonstrates how the cost of the black stuff could become a concern of the past.

A team of UD faculty has created a system that enables vehicles to not only run on electricity alone, but also to generate revenue by storing and providing electricity for utilities. The technology–known as V2G, for vehicle-to-grid–lets electricity flow from the car’s battery to power lines and back.

“When I get home, I’ll charge up and then switch into V2G mode,” said Willett Kempton, UD associate professor of marine policy and a V2G pioneer who began developing the technology more than a decade ago and who is now testing the new prototype vehicle. The UD V2G team includes Kempton as well as Ajay Prasad, professor of mechanical engineering; Suresh Advani, George W. Laird Professor of Mechanical Engineering; and Meryl Gardner, associate professor of business administration, along with several students.

Read it all.

Dear friends in Christ,

I write to you with sadness at the decision of our brothers and sisters to leave The Episcopal Church. I trust you will join me in forgiving their transgressions, putting all recriminations and bitterness aside, and wishing them well as they continue their spiritual journeys in another community of faith.

I write to you as the Chair of the House of Bishops Task Force on Property Disputes in the hope of reassuring you of the justice and rightness of your position. Your faithfulness and steadfastness to your community and your vows inspire all of us. More than inspiring us, your efforts deserve our active support because, in truth, you are acting on behalf of all of us.
It is the job of the Task Force to do all that it can to see that you receive the care and the support that you need and deserve. Indeed, we will be meeting next week to consider a number of matters in our Church and the protection across the Church of our polity, which is intended to protect all of us from abuses of power such as that you are now experiencing. I can assure you that your situation in the Diocese of San Joaquin will be part of our consideration.

For now, know of our awareness of your situation, our deep concern, and our pledge to do all that we can to support your efforts to carry on the mission of our Church in California. The task you have before you, no doubt, will not be easy. You will not walk it alone.

With the assurance of my prayers and the conviction of the coming of the Lord in this holy season, I am

Faithfully yours,

(The Rt. Rev.) Stacy F. Sauls
Bishop of Lexington

More letters may be found here (scroll down a bit).

St. Vincent of Lerins, in 434 A.D., devised a method for evaluating truth claims in the Christian church.

He believed truth begins and ends with holy Scripture. Even in the fifth century, everyone didn’t agree on what holy writ said or meant.

He wrote about what is taught everywhere, what has always been taught and what everyone teaches.

Read it all.

Bishop Duncan gave me an interview during his visit. He said: “It is hard to imagine how the Communion can be kept together. The American church remains committed to its progressive direction.” He compared it to US foreign policy. “The American Episcopal Church, rather like American foreign policy, is determined the world will go precisely the way it wishes. It seems a split is almost unavoidable at this point.”

A great many people observing the situation, he said, are speaking in terms of the “Anglican experiment” being over. “That is a great sadness. The question for the rest of us is whether we can again be both Reformed and Catholic. The jury is out. Will it simply disintegrate or will it break into two parts? It is a long-term historical question. The 21st century will give an answer to it but we are only at the beginning of that century.”

From my personal perspective, I have to say, things look a little different….

Read the whole blog entry.

Kimberly Moch reaches into the bottom of a cardboard box of donated toys Thursday as she and others sort through what will be gifts for 5,600 area children.

Volunteers carefully checked the product number against the list of recalled toys and discovered their dolls were fine. But the experience illustrates the concern of parents and organizations such as Toys for Tots and the Salvation Army, which give toys to children in need.

Volunteers who sort toys according to the child’s sex and age are also paying close attention to product recalls. Millions of toys made in China have been recalled this year for lead-based paint and other potential dangers, including parts that can cause choking or sharp edges that can cause cuts.

More than $22 billion worth of toys are sold in the United States each year, with toys made in China making up 70 percent to 80 percent, according to the Toy Industry Association.

It appears vendors and donors are paying attention to recalls because the local Salvation Army and Toys for Tots have not had to pull a large number of suspect toys.

“We haven’t removed any toys yet and hopefully it remains that way,” said 2007 Toys for Tots coordinator Gunnery Sgt. Michael Kirby.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

Check it out.

Read it all.

As millions of travelers prepare to fly home for the holidays this year, a few thousand can expect to try out a new generation of onboard e-mail and text-messaging services using their own cellphones and portable devices.

Starting this week and over the next few months, several airlines in the United States and Europe are due to begin testing these new services on some of their planes, with plans to roll out the technology across most of their fleets over the next 12 to 18 months.

Eventually, a few plan to enable voice calls, too.

On Tuesday, the U.S. carrier JetBlue Airways will begin offering a free e-mail and instant messaging service on one aircraft, while American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines plan to offer a broader Web experience in the coming months, probably at a cost of around $10 a flight.

Read the whole article.

If body odor is a key to romantic attraction, a Florida company claims to have the first scientific way of finding true love.

A new dating service that says it’s the first to use DNA matching to find that “perfect someone” is scheduled to launch in Boston Tuesday.

ScientificMatch.com promises its technology will use DNA to find a date with “a natural odor you’ll love, with whom you’d have healthier children and a more satisfying sex life.”

How does it work?

Read it all.

Jeanne Assam appeared before the news media for the first time Monday and said she “did not think for a minute to run away” when a gunman entered the New Life Church in Colorado Springs and started shooting.

There was applause as Assam spoke to reporters and TV cameras saying, “God guided me and protected me.”

New Life’s Senior Pastor Brady Boyd called Assam “a real hero” because Murray “had enough ammunition on him to cause a lot of damage.”

When asked by a reporter if she felt like a hero, Assam said, “I wasn’t just going to wait for him to do further damage.”

“I give credit to God,” she said.

Assam described how the gunman, Matthew Murray, entered the east entrance of the church firing his rifle.

“There was chaos,” Assam said, as parishioners ran away, “I will never forget the gunshots. They were so loud.”

“I saw him coming through the doors” and took cover, Assam said. “I came out of cover and identified myself and engaged him and took him down.”

“God was with me,” Assam said. “I didn’t think for a minute to run away.”

Read it all.

New Jersey’s legislature may soon be the first in the country to repeal a death penalty law. While courts in other states have struck death penalty statutes, this would be the first time a legislative body eliminated executions since the Supreme Court reinstated them 31 years ago.

New Jersey has the death penalty, but the state hasn’t actually executed anyone since 1963.

Listen to it all from NPR.

In China it is known as the “sacred doctrine” and it has become one of the country’s bestselling books. Yet it has nothing to do with the thoughts of Chairman Mao and its teachings have been in conflict with the forces of Communism for generations.

Demand for the Bible is soaring in China, at a time when meteoric economic growth is testing the country’s allegiance to Communist doctrine. Today the 50 millionth Bible will roll off the presses of China’s only authorised publisher, Amity Printing, amid public fanfare and celebration.

In the past, foreign visitors were discouraged from bringing Bibles into the country in case they received some heavy-handed treatment from zealous Customs officials.

Such is the demand in China for Bibles that Amity Printing can scarcely keep pace. Early next year it will move into a new, much larger factory on the edge of the eastern city of Nanjing to become the world’s single-biggest producer of Bibles.

Read it all.

You can watch the Youtube here.

Twenty-four years after the U.S. Supreme Court gave its blessing to America’s long tradition of opening government meetings with prayer, questions linger about just what kind of prayer is OK.

Those questions now hover over the Pennsylvania Senate, which has opened every session with prayer for years.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State complained last month that prayers in the Senate often use language only a Christian would use. They end, for example, “in Jesus’ name.”

The Washington-based group asked to stop the prayers “in order to make all feel equally welcome at sessions of the Senate.” If prayers continue, they must use no language specific to one religion.

Senate officials countered that their “interfaith opening prayer” has been offered not only by Christian clergy, but by rabbis, a Unitarian pastor and, recently, a Buddhist teacher.

The Senate doesn’t prescribe what belongs in the prayers and what doesn’t, said Drew Crompton, counsel to Senate President Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati.

“The question becomes a broader interpretation of interfaith,” Crompton said. “You balance one prayer against the others.”

Read the whole thing.

Thus my first point about the role of plural religious communities in society is that they both underpin the notion that there are values which are not negotiable, and that at the same time they prohibit any conclusion that such values can ultimately be defended by violence. They challenge the drift from Enlightenment optimism to the postmodern enthronement of power and interest as the sole elements in political life; that is, they allow societies as well as person to fail with grace and to find space beyond anxiety. That is not at all the same as saying that they require passivity, resignation to the unprincipled power of others. But they allow human beings the dignity of accepting defeat in certain circumstances where the alternative is to abandon the moral essence of a society in order to win: they suggest the subversive but all-important insight that failure might be preferable to victory at the cost of tolerating, say, torture or random military reprisal as normal elements in political life. By being absolute and thus in a sense irreconcilable, they remind society that a unity imposed by force will always undermine the moral substance of social and political life. There is no way of finding a position outside or beyond diverse faith traditions from which to broker a union between them in which their convictions can be reconciled; and this is not bad news but good ”“ good because it does two things at once. It affirms transcendent values; and by insisting that no other values are absolute, it denies to any other system of values any justification for uncontrolled violence. Transcendent values can be defended through violence only by those who do not fully understand their transcendent character; and if no other value is absolute, no other value can claim the right to unconditional defence by any means and at all costs. Thus the rationally irreconcilable systems of religious belief rule out any assumption that coercive power is the last resort or the ultimate authority in our world.

And if that is the case, we can see how religious plurality may serve the cause of social unity, paradoxically but genuinely. If we are prohibited from claiming that social harmony can be established by uncontrolled coercive power ”“ that is, if we are obliged to make a case for the legitimacy of any social order ”“ but are also prohibited from solving the problem by a simple appeal to universal reason, we are left with a model of politics which is always to do with negotiation and the struggle for mutual understanding. Politics is clearly identified as something pragmatic and ”˜secular’, in the sense that it is not about absolutes. As the world now is, diverse religious traditions very frequently inhabit one territory, one nation, one social unit (and that may be a relatively small unit like a school, or a housing co-operative or even a business). And in such a setting, we cannot avoid the pragmatic and secular question of ”˜common security’: what is needed for our convictions to flourish is bound up with what is needed for the convictions of other groups to flourish. We learn that we can best defend ourselves by defending others. In a plural society, Christians secure their religious liberty by advocacy for the liberty of Muslims or Jews to have the same right to be heard in the continuing conversation about the direction and ethos of a society that is characteristic of liberal polity in the broadest sense of the word.

Read it all.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the fastest-growing faiths in South Florida, its expansion fueled mainly by Hispanic converts who find the religion’s emphasis on family and values appealingly familiar. Local growth is mirrored in the development of the church in Latin America and elsewhere, where worldwide membership topped 13 million earlier this year.

The reach of the Mormon faith was at the fore of the political arena Thursday after Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a 20-minute speech to discuss his Mormon roots and whether his faith would affect decisions he might make in the Oval Office.

South Florida has about 13,000 Mormons in 40 to 50 congregations. These congregations, or units, belong to five stakes, similar to dioceses, three in Miami-Dade and two in Broward and south Palm Beach. One stake in Miami is comprised solely of Spanish-speaking units and the other four have at least one or two Spanish-language units, says Scott Richards, first counselor of the Fort Lauderdale stake.

”Our strongest growth is from converts and from people who know somebody already in the church,” Richards said. “Possibly half are Hispanic. We probably mirror the population.”

Read it all.

By 1995 he was retired from the service and a widower again. His second Mary Alice died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. A year and a half later, Mrs. Conway’s husband died of heart attack. The general swiftly wrote her a condolence letter.

General O’Connor had kept photos of her in a drawer at home, but rarely looked at them. He didn’t need to. He vividly remembered her. “Love never fails,” he said. “I really believe that.”

Months later she and her sister, Helen Maher, invited General O’Connor to a family party in Florida. “It was like we never left off,” Mrs. Conway said. Her sister commented: “They have both weathered many storms and always had fidelity and faith and focus.”

He began flying east to see her.

“We had done what we had to do with our lives,” she said. “Now, we had the chance to concentrate on each other again,” she said. She describes their relationship as much freer now, “a magic slate” upon which they can “write anything they want.

They became inseparable. “If I’m not with Jeanne, I feel like I’m just waiting to be back together with her,” he said. “It’s that kind of relationship.”

On Nov. 24, in chilly-yet-sunny weather, the couple were married at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side. It was a ceremony much like one they might have had in the 1950s. Guests in flip hairdos and wingtip shoes sang “Amazing Grace.” The bridegroom wore his uniform out of nostalgia because that’s what he always wore when they first dated. When the church doors opened after the ceremony, it was strange to see 2007 Hummers and taxis roaring by.

“My philosophy is, this was always meant to be,” the bridegroom said a few days before. “This was the girl of my dreams, the girl I had on a pedestal when I was a young man.” He added, “It’s as if the greatest dream you ever had finally came true.”

Read it all. So wonderful.

Mitt Romney’s “Faith In America” speech might have surpassed even his own expectations.

By changing the debate from doctrinal differences of his Mormon belief to a principled discussion of religious liberty, he not only raised the bar for political discourse, but he also effectively made a case for uniting all faiths in defense of Western civilization.

No modest proposal that.

Read it all.

In a statement issued after the December 3-5 meeting of the President of the House of Deputies Council of Advice, President Bonnie Anderson said she and Council members “spent a considerable amount of time discussing how the wider church can support those Episcopalians who want to remain in the church when and if their bishops attempt to lead their dioceses out of the Episcopal Church.”

Anderson said the Council also discussed how the Episcopal Church “can best create the safest space possible for the largest number of Episcopalians” to remain in the church.

“I have learned during my travels throughout our church that there are Episcopalians in every one of those disaffected dioceses who need our prayers and our support,” Anderson said in her statement. “I was very moved by the conversations I have had this year with such Episcopalians in the dioceses of Fort Worth, Pittsburgh and San Joaquin.”

The Council, composed of 15 persons, is appointed each triennium by the president of the House of Deputies under the authority of Title I, Canon 1.1(b) and gives the president, upon her request, consultation and advice.

Read the whole thing.

In what Sen. Barack Obama described as the best-attended rally of the political season for any candidate, more than 29,000 attendees jammed Williams-Brice Stadium Sunday.

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey rallied the crowd of supporters ”” a primarily female and African-American audience ”” to get behind her friend, Obama, a new kind of leader who possesses “a tongue dipped in the unvarnished truth,” Winfrey said.

Winfrey, who has never before endorsed a presidential candidate, said she’s “stepping out of my pew” because she’s been disappointed with politicians and has become inspired by Obama’s message of change and unity.

“Dr. King dreamed the dream, but we don’t have to dream the dream anymore,” Oprah told the crowd. “We get to vote that dream into office.”

Read it all.

BY age 2 it was clear that the boy had a sensibility all his own, affectionate and distant at the same time, often more focused on patterns and objects than the people around him.

He was neither naturally social like his mother, nor an early and gifted reader like his father. Quirky, curious, exuberant, he would leap up and dance across the floor after solving a problem or winning a game, duck walking like an N.F.L. receiver posing for a highlight film.

Yet after Phil and Susan Schwarz received a diagnosis for their son, Jeremy, of high functioning autism, they began to think carefully about their own behaviors and histories.

Mr. Schwarz, a software developer in Framingham, Mass., found in his son’s diagnosis a new language to understand his own life. His sensitivities when growing up to loud noises and bright light, his own diffidence through school, his parents’ and grandparents’ special intellectual skills ”” all echoed through his and Jeremy’s behavior, like some ancient rhythm.

His son’s diagnosis, Mr. Schwarz said, “provided a frame in which a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated aspects of my own life growing up fit together for the first time.”

Read it all.

“Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them ”¦” These familiar words belong to the Collect which Archbishop Thomas Cranmer composed for The Second Sunday in Advent. Taken from the Scriptures, in this case Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the prayer captures an entire pattern of theological understanding that is at once formative and foundational for Anglican doctrine and devotion. Diarmaid MacCulloch, commenting on Gerlach Flicke’s 1545 portrait of Cranmer, which depicts him holding The Epistles of Paul but also with Augustine’s book De Fide et Operibus (“Of Faith and Works”), suggests that this signals Cranmer’s theological enterprise, namely, the recovery of the Scriptures understood through the best of the Fathers, principally Augustine.

The creedal or doctrinal understanding of the Scriptures is a distinctive feature of the Anglican Common Prayer tradition. The rich interplay of Scripture and Creed(s), for example, shapes the worship and liturgy of the Church. The Articles of Religion and the ordination vows of the clergy testify to the centrality of the Scriptures for the teaching and praying life of the Church and express a remarkably sophisticated approach to the reading of the Scriptures in the life of the Church. We place ourselves under the authority of God’s Word Written. But that means that we have to think the Scriptures. “What do the Scriptures say?” (Romans 10.8). Or, as Christ asks, “how do you read?” (Lk.10.26). There is a necessary engagement between God and our humanity through the witness of the Scriptures. Revelation is mediation and requires the fullest engagement of our minds with what the Scriptures proclaim.

The reformed principle of sola scriptura, “scripture alone”, admits of a range of applications but its most basic sense for Anglicans is the primacy of Scripture in determining doctrine, devotion and discipline. “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proven thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith,” as Article VI puts it. The same idea is required of the teaching of the clergy. What are the things necessary to salvation? Those things which belong to the articles of the Faith; in short, the Creeds, which are the distillation of the Scriptures, and which speak to the nature of our spiritual identity with God in his self-relation as Trinity and in his relation to us as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier. Creedal and doctrinal principles exercise more than a merely formal role; they exercise a formative role in the life of the Church. They should have a definitive voice in the debates and issues of the day.

How? Do creedal and doctrinal principles as derived from Scripture have anything to say on matters of morality and polity? And, if so, in what way and to what extent? To begin to consider those questions will necessarily mean becoming more aware of the essentials of the Faith and the ways in which those principles are brought to bear upon our lives and the life of the Church. At issue in the present controversies is whether the principles of the Faith have an integrity which should direct our thinking or whether they can be changed and altered; in short, whether they are subject to our thinking.

Some see everything – God, humanity, the Church – as endlessly negotiable and celebrate the secular culture as providing the context that determines the content of the Faith. In this view, the principle is our human experience which determines all else and seeks the re-imaging of God, humanity and Church in our own image. But who is it that claims to speak on behalf of our human experience and what happens when such claims collide with principles of doctrine? For Anglicans, synodical consensus does not extend to matters of doctrine and worship; in fact, such things are intentionally precluded by the self-limiting nature of The Solemn Declaration of 1893 which commits the Anglican Church of Canada to being “an integral portion” of the “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, hold[ing] the One Faith revealed in Holy Writ, and defined in the Creeds” by being “in full communion with the Church of England throughout the world.” Some things, the Archbishop of Canterbury, remarks, with respect to the scene in North America, cannot be negotiated. We are not simply our own independent agents. We are part of the body of Christ.

To walk apart from the Anglican Communion would be to forsake the catholicity and apostolicity of the Church and to become merely another sect in the sea of sectarian confusions belonging to the landscape of North American religion.

The appeal to the Scripture is not to an arbitrary authority but to the principles which the Scriptures present, the principles which govern and measure human lives and human activity. At issue, in the present controversy, is the place of the sexual in the understanding of our humanity and moral behaviour. What is homosexuality? Neither a category of creation nor of biology, it is, properly speaking and on its own terms, a social and psychological construct. There are many, many different social constructs ranging from biker gangs to the red hat ladies, from hobby groups to sex clubs. It doesn’t mean that special liturgies should be created for each and every social construct or that each and every social construct is something that should be celebrated as morally consistent with Christian doctrine. What is the relation of the sociological to the theological?

From the standpoint of Christian morality, the theological determinants of social and moral order are the revealed doctrines of creation, redemption and sanctification seen in engagement with the order of nature rationally understood. Scripture does not speak of sexual orientation as something ontologically given or created. Christian Marriage, too, is not understood simply as a social construct ”“ something invented by us ”“ but rather as divinely “instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency,” recalling the order of creation, “an honourable estate, signifying unto us the mystical union betwixt Christ and his Church,” recalling the order of redemption, “an holy estate ”¦ adorned and beautified” by Christ “with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought,” recalling the order of sanctification. We are not our own and marriage is one way in which we live to and for Christ in the life of his body, the Church.

One way. Not the only way. Friendship in all of its varied and many forms is a significant part of our life in Faith. We belong to a fellowship of faithful believers who, whether married or single, are committed to one another in the body, in the Church. Friendship is not the same thing as marriage, however, and excludes the sexual. This is the sticking-point for our contemporary technologically fixated culture. In condoms we trust, too much, I fear, and are the victims of our own technological idolatry which wreaks such havoc upon all our lives.

We began with a reference to an Advent prayer. We end with a prayer of the Epiphany. Both are seasons of teaching, each of which engages contemporary culture in different ways. Advent looks to the light of God in Christ coming into our world and day, a light that is judgment from above. Epiphany celebrates the light of God in Christ in our midst, engaging the cultures of the world from within the world. A light from above and a light from within “that we may both perceive and know what things we ought to do, also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same.” The doctrine of revelation offers healing and health, salvation and grace, to a world that is weary and worn. The question is whether we will “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” what the Scriptures are saying to us in the integrity of their doctrinal and creedal understanding.

–The Rev. David Curry serves at Christ Church, Windsor, Nova Scotia

A gunman shot four staff members at a missionary training center near Denver early Sunday, killing two, after being told he couldn’t spend the night. About 12 hours later and 65 miles away in Colorado Springs, a gunman fatally shot a parishioner at a megachurch and wounded four other people before a guard killed him, police said.

One of the hospitalized victims from the second attack died Sunday at about 10:10 p.m., said Amy Sufak, a spokeswoman for Penrose Community Hospital in Colorado Springs.

The police chief in Arvada, a suburb about 15 miles west of Denver where the mission workers were shot, said the shootings may be related to those in Colorado Springs but declined to elaborate. No one had been captured in the Arvada shootings, authorities said.

Early Monday, authorities were searching a home in suburban Englewood, about 15 miles south of Denver, that they said could be related to the Colorado Springs shooting case. Results of that search were not immediately known.

Read it all.

Thank you, graduates. Please be seated. It’s an honor to address the college athletes who are going on to the pros this year. If I may, I’d like to offer just a few pieces of advice.

Every now and again turn off Nintendo, shut off Spectravision and open a book. We already have enough jocks who think the Brothers Karamazov are the WWF tag-team champs.

If you ever hear yourself saying, “They offered me $81 million? That’s an insult!” find a tire iron, go into a quiet room and hit yourself very hard on the shin.

Marry someone who has never heard of you.

Now that you’ve made it, practice twice as long as you did in college. The hardest worker in the NBA is Michael Jordan. What does that tell you?

If you write a book, read it before it comes out.

Be careful with your money. Write your own checks. None of this power-of-attorney crap. Get an agent and a lawyer, and tell each the other’s a crook.

Shock the world: Apologize when you screw up.

Read it all; this was also used in yesterday’s sermon by yours truly.

The garden is a place of God’s abundant providence and blessing. Everything is gift and cause for wonder and celebration. Everything is permitted and a source of ongoing delight and pleasure. But there are always boundaries, and the garden is bounded by one prohibition. he story does not explain the prohibition for the prohibition in and of itself is unimportant. What is important is the authority of the one who speaks and the expectation of an absolute obedience that is born of trust. This is God’s world and we live in it on God’s terms.

The conversation that comes later between the woman and the serpent is fascinating. The prohibition is interrogated and challenged, and what is a given is reduced to an option. In the process, what was boundary becomes threat, promise is obscured, and what was trust becomes defiance.In his commentary on Genesis, Walter Brueggemann rather scathingly says, ‘Theological-ethical talk here is not to serve God, but to avoid the claims of God. ”¦ The serpent is the first in the Bible to seem knowing and critical about God and to practice theology in the place of obedience’.

I wonder how often we ‘practice theology in the place of obedience,’ how often we use it to avoid the claims of God on our life? In the garden when the prohibition is violated, the promises are perverted and vocation is undermined. The energy once spent in ’tilling and tending’ God’s creation is now focussed entirely on the self and its new-found freedom that is not freedom but bondage.

Vocation, promise, prohibition are three strands of human life lived in God’s world on God’s terms, interdependent facets of divine purpose. Prayerfully they must woven into a threefold cord that is not easily broken and that can sustain us in our ministry. All life is vocation.

May the three-fold chord of your life be renewed this Advent and Christmas

Read it all. (Hat tip jdk)

“The old order in the Episcopal Church is falling apart,” said CANA Bishop Martyn Minns, the former rector of Truro Church in Fairfax. “We’re all finding a new way to live into our Anglican heritage.”

Churches belonging to CANA are under the umbrella of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, and Bishop Minns was made a member of the Nigerian House of Bishops in August 2006. He was snubbed last spring by being one of a handful of prelates not invited by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to the decennial Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops.

Archbishop Akinola has since said that none of his bishops will attend Lambeth in July if the CANA bishops are not invited. He objected to the presence of several dozen American bishops who helped consecrate openly homosexual New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson in 2003.

“It’s not so much about me and my invitation,” Bishop Minns told reporters Thursday, “it’s about how the Anglican Communion functions together.”

Read it all and there is much more information on the CANA website.

One day after the Diocese of San Joaquin became the first in the country to break ties with the Episcopal Church, the Rev. Keith Axberg sought to reassure and cheer up his congregation, the only one in this city that is expected to remain with the national church.

“There are things that are going to take time and much we don’t know,” said Axberg, rector of Holy Family Episcopal Church in northeast Fresno. “But our purpose is to gather here to worship God . . . and I’m thankful you are here.”

Delegates to San Joaquin’s annual convention finalized Saturday an earlier decision to remove all references to the Episcopal Church from the diocese’s constitution, the latest twist in a bitter, years-long dispute about theology and the role of gays in the church. The conflict between liberals and conservatives escalated sharply in 2003 when the church consecrated an openly gay priest as bishop of New Hampshire.

In another unprecedented step, the convention delegates, made up of clergy and lay leaders from area churches, also formally accepted an invitation from Anglican Archbishop Gregory James Venables of Argentina to place their Fresno-based diocese under his authority.

The dual actions thrust all involved — church leaders and parishioners, theological liberals and conservatives alike — into uncharted waters, many said, with the immediate future far from clear.

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