This is the year consumer technology holiday sales went flat.

U.S. spending on gadgets was $4.5 billion from Nov. 18 to Dec. 9, according to research firm NPD, half a percent less than in the comparable period last year. Sales figures for the rest of the shopping season were not available.

Digital cameras topped the list of popular consumer electronics products, but sales did not grow over last year. According to NPD, camera unit sales were up less than 1 percent, while in dollar terms sales were down 13 percent because the cameras were less expensive. MP3 player sales were flat.

The sales plateau hit by both gadgets is the result of a saturated market, said Stephen Baker, an NPD analyst. The typical consumer is already on his or her third digital camera and probably owns a digital music player too, he said.

Tim Bajarin, president of Silicon Valley research firm Creative Strategies, said the lackluster tech sales, like holiday sales across the board, were probably the result of consumer anxiety about the economy.

“It’s just indicative of cautiousness of the consumer market overall due to uncertainty,” he said. “Because of the mortgage crisis, I think people were more restrained and didn’t go overboard with their spending.”

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To be honest, it did not matter very much, because the significance of all miracles is not how they happen but what their effect is, and in this case the impact it had made on the despondent person who had felt hopeless and who now felt a new sense of enthusiasm.

Maybe the candle had been imperceptibly burning drowsily all along, but it had reminded him of the value of hope, the power of optimism, and opened his eyes to a more positive outlook on life. The incident had rekindled his spirits even if there was a thoroughly rational explanation to it all.

It is the same with us: often we are so weighed down with a problem that we cannot fathom out who we are or where we are heading; then something ? a candle, a person’s kind word, music from a passing car ? can clear the haze and help us to find a way forward. Often, it is a matter of inner blindness: being blind to the possibilities around us and then suddenly seeing the light.

That is the real miracle, without any thunderbolts overhead or earthquakes below, but when something inside us moves and our eyes are more open than they were before.

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Read it carefully and read it all.

Has the Global South Anglican Primates Steering Committee endorsed this Statement? So far, it has remained silent on the matter. It is important to note that the authority of the Global South Anglican “movement” and of the Steering Committee arise from the South-South Encounter and most recently the Kigali Meeting in 2006. The Global South represents a broad spectrum of Anglican churches that hold onto the historic faith and ecclesiology informed by the historic formularies. It does not answer to the dictates of the radical evangelical wings within the Communion. It is regrettable that Asia, West Indies, and Middle East are glaring omissions among the “conveners” of the proposed Conference. Have they been consulted? Have they rejected the proposal? In their place, we find names of colleagues (with due respect) from a particular strand in the Northern churches. Why was this Statement issued with such haste? And without broader representation?

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About two months ago, Risard said, the bishop summoned him to Fresno. He took along a church official.

“He started building a case as to why he was getting rid of me,” Risard said. “I asked him, ‘What’s this all about?’ He said, ‘We already talked that you’re going to leave at the end of ’08.’ He said, ‘The bottom line is you have to go because we’re not going to have the money to support the mission. If we vote up (to leave the Episcopal Church USA and join Anglicans elsewhere), we’re going to lose the liberals and their money, and if we vote down, we’re going to lose the conservatives and their money.’ ”

The diocese office in Fresno was closed this week. The bishop and other officials could not be reached for comment. But an e-mail from the bishop’s assistant, the Rev. Canon Bill Gandenberger, sent to two St. Nicholas officials on Dec. 25, reads in part:

“The attached document is the letter notifying Fr. Risard that his deployment at St. Nicholas is now over. We wish you to know that the Bishop and the Diocese are fully behind the continuation of your church in Atwater and we will do all that we are able to support you during this transition.”

It also says the “most important directions from the bishop” include changing the exterior locks “immediately,” as well as locks “to the priest’s office and any file cabinets”; retrieving bank statements; forwarding minutes from past committee meetings (“This is especially important if there are commitments made to Mr. Michael Glass, an attorney referenced in the letter of Fr. Risard to the Bishop”); and an assumption that the church’s deacon can “lead worship for a short period of time, especially this next Sunday.”

Despite the loss of his church, Risard isn’t bitter.

“The bishop hasn’t defrocked me. He’s just asked me to go away and leave him alone. He’s the one who priested me and tried to form me in his way, so I still have some affection for him.

“I believe as a priest that Christ calls us to love one another as friends. I sign my letters to the bishop ‘faithfully, your friend in Christ.’ He really is a Christian, maybe operating in a particular way these days, but he truly means well.”

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[BOB] ABERNETHY: One of the things that will certainly be going on in the New Year is more and more of something that we’ve already seen, which is this closer relationship between religious organizations in the United States and those in other countries. Rachel, you’ve been writing a lot about this.

Ms. [RACHEL] ZOLL: The growth or explosion, really, of Christianity overseas is having an impact within the United States. As just one example, the United Methodist Church, which is considered and is and always has been very much of a middle class American church, if the current growth trends continue will become a majority African church within the next couple of decades. They’re already dealing with the fact that there are Methodists from the Philippines and from Korea who are planting churches within the United States as well, and they’re trying to figure out the relationship there. Another impact of it is that a lot of very entrepreneurial, very evangelical-minded or evangelically minded African pastors are coming over here to plant churches in the United States. Now, for people who don’t watch these things closely, they are puzzled. Why does, in a very religious country, does anyone need to plant more churches? But these are very fervent believers, and they think that the American church has lost its spirit and has become co-opted so much by the culture that they’re here to save us.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, some U.S. Episcopalians are separating themselves from the main Episcopal Church and putting themselves under the authority of Nigerians or others in Africa or South America. Bring us up to date on that.

Ms. ZOLL: Sure. The Christians overseas tend to have a very theologically conservative view on the moral issues that we’re grappling with here, and what’s happening is that theological conservatives in the United States are making common cause with like-minded conservatives overseas. The Episcopal Church is not cracking up. It’s a very small comparative number of churches that have actually left the Episcopal Church, about 55 as of this date out of more than 7,000 congregations in the United States. But it’s not just the numbers. It’s the — a lot of those churches are some of the most vibrant churches within the Episcopal Church, and just recently an entire diocese voted to leave.

ABERNETHY: But do you expect more of that separating?

Ms. ZOLL: It’s not clear how many more will happen, but what we know that what will happen next year is a lot of litigation, and that is going to be very difficult for the Episcopal Church and for people who are trying to leave. It’s going to be expensive. It’s going to be ugly, and it’s going to take a long time to play out.

Read it all but do not fall into the trap of thinking that only whole parishes by voting action to depart from TEC measures the degree of the problem.

As I noted earlier:

You can see what is going on, [the TEC leadership is] … playing games with numbers and categories. “Few” leaving actually means “congregations,” and congregations means congregations defined as a whole. This is collapsing all four categories into a very narrow and misleading picture of group number 2.

People know that in reality it is very difficult to get whole parishes or dioceses to take significant decisions about ANYTHING, much less something as important as this. Given the degree of opposition and hostility faced in numerous quarters from diocesan and national leadership, and given how many Anglican reasserters (such as your blog convenor) have been advocating a stay and be opposed but be faithful stance, it is actually surprising that the numbers from the four categories are this large.

The key point is, taken together the four groups illustrate a VERY SERIOUS problem. Good leadership owns the actual situation and then tries to deal with it, it does not try to redefine it narrowly and pretend it is less than it is

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New Year’s Eve tends to be the day of the year with the most binge drinking (based on drunken driving fatalities), followed closely by Super Bowl Sunday. Likewise, colleges have come to expect that the most alcohol-filled day of their students’ lives is their 21st birthday. So, some words of caution for those who continue to binge and even for those who have stopped: just as the news is not so great for former cigarette smokers, there is equally bad news for recovering binge-drinkers who have achieved a sobriety that has lasted years. The more we have binged ”” and the younger we have started to binge ”” the more we experience significant, though often subtle, effects on the brain and cognition.

Much of the evidence for the impact of frequent binge-drinking comes from some simple but elegant studies done on lab rats by Fulton T. Crews and his former student Jennifer Obernier. Dr. Crews, the director of the University of North Carolina Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, and Dr. Obernier have shown that after a longstanding abstinence following heavy binge-drinking, adult rats can learn effectively ”” but they cannot relearn.

When put into a tub of water and forced to continue swimming until they find a platform on which to stand, the sober former binge-drinking rats and the normal control rats (who had never been exposed to alcohol) learned how to find the platform equally well. But when the experimenters abruptly moved the platform, the two groups of rats had remarkably different performances. The rats without previous exposure to alcohol, after some brief circling, were able to find the new location. The former binge-drinking rats, however, were unable to find the new platform; they became confused and kept circling the site of the old platform.

This circling occurs, Dr. Crews says, because the former binge-drinking rats continued to show neurotoxicity in the hippocampus long after (in rat years) becoming sober. On a microscopic level, Dr. Crews has shown that heavy binge-drinking in rats diminishes the genesis of nerve cells, shrinks the development of the branchlike connections between brain cells and contributes to neuronal cell death. The binges activate an inflammatory response in rat brains rather than a pure regrowth of normal neuronal cells. Even after longstanding sobriety this inflammatory response translates into a tendency to stay the course, a diminished capacity for relearning and maladaptive decision-making.

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The Clinton contracts traded up substantially this week, while the price of the Obama contracts fell. The Clinton contracts last traded at 45.0 vs 39.1 on 21-Dec, while the Obama contracts are currently trading at 13.5 vs 16.2 a week ago. The Giuliani contracts last traded at 12.3 vs 11.8 last week. The McCain contracts continue to gain ground, now at 8.9 vs 8.0 a week ago on decent weekly volume. The Romney contracts are trading at 9.2, Huckabee at 4.2, and Paul at 4.3. The rest of the candidate contracts were little changed on the week. In the Republican nomination contracts, the McCain contracts continue their assault in price terms on the Romney and Giuliani contracts. While the Giuliani contracts are unchanged at 29.0 and the Romney contracts slipped to 22.4, the McCain contracts are now trading at 18.1 vs 16.4 last week. The Huckabee contracts last traded at 15.3. In the Democratic nomination contracts, Clinton has increased her lead over Obama, last trading at 67.0 vs 63.3 on 21-Dec, while Obama traded down to 24.2 vs 30.6 a week ago.

Check out the Intrade website for more.

A former prime minister of Pakistan came and laid a wreath Saturday on the grave of his former political rival.

But just before he did it, Nawaz Sharif blamed the military government of Pervez Musharraf for pulling Pakistan into the “grave crisis” that resulted in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. His words were terse, his eyes dry.

“His policies are responsible,” Mr. Sharif said in an interview on a specially chartered propeller plane that took him to Ms. Bhutto’s ancestral village. “Whether he is responsible or not, an independent commission will have to investigate. No commission can be independent if Musharraf is in charge of this government.”

Mr. Sharif’s antipathy to Mr. Musharraf runs deep. The former general ousted Mr. Sharif in a 1999 coup, which Mr. Sharif tried to prevent by blocking the landing of Mr. Musharraf’s plane in Karachi. Mr. Sharif was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for that, though the sentence was later modified to exile in Saudi Arabia, from which he returned last month.

On Saturday, Mr. Sharif flew to an airstrip in Mohenjo-Daro, where South Asian civilization was born some 5,000 years ago, and from there to the ancestral village of Ms. Bhutto, Naudero, where senior leaders of both their parties met briefly to give their sympathies and discuss the way forward. Mr. Sharif has already said his party would boycott the polls, scheduled for Jan. 8.

He said on his way to Naudero that he hoped Ms. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party would join the boycott. “With Musharraf, Pakistan doesn’t have a future,” he said in the interview.

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The Pope has ordered his bishops to set up exorcism squads to tackle the rise of Satanism.

Vatican chiefs are concerned at what they see as an increased interest in the occult.

They have introduced courses for priests to combat what they call the most extreme form of “Godlessness.”

Each bishop is to be told to have in his diocese a number of priests trained to fight demonic possession.

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“If only the good were clever,
And only the clever were good,
This world would be so much better,
Than ever we thought it could.
But the good are seldom clever,
And the clever are hardly good;
The good are so rude to the clever,
And the clever so harsh to the good.”

”“ Anonymous

“The peace of God, it is no peace,
But strife closed in the sod.
Yet, brothers, pray but for one thing ”“
The marvelous peace of God.”

”“ W. A. Percy (1885-1942)

That most prolific of authors, Anonymous, nailed the human condition as it so often expresses itself amidst the dreaming spires of Oxford in the UK, and Sewanee in the US, where his (or her?) ditty about the good and the clever has been passed down from generation to generation.

In Sewanee’s case, the more profound expression of the perspective of the cross on the same truth is regularly sung in the University Chapel as penned by the late William Alexander Percy (one of Sewanee’s sons) and as found in the hymnal of The Episcopal Church. Both texts could surely be adapted and applied to the “crisis” (as the Archbishop of Canterbury has called it) afflicting the Anglican Communion. It is a crisis in which human polarisation has led to the present stand-off, but the cross provides a way forward.

In the months since the all-but-unanimous re-election of the Very Reverend Mark Lawrence as Bishop-designate of South Carolina, polarization has continued apace. But Dr Williams’s Advent Letter now points us towards resurrection.

The arcane and process-oriented rules of our ecclesiastical game can give the impression that, whatever the ups and downs and however convoluted the circling and turning and posturing, there never seems to emerge anything but a “déjà vu all over again” lack of consensus. Now at last, however, Dr Williams has laid out terms on which Lambeth 2008 might address and even answer the perennial questions about Anglicanism: What is it? Can it be saved? Is it worth it?

Among recently shifting fortunes in the state of play, Mark Lawrence’s home diocese, San Joaquin, has voted overwhelmingly to make its own shift from The Episcopal Church in the US to the Southern Cone of America, a shift welcomed and facilitated by the Southern Cone itself.

While this institutional migration of San Joaquin is certainly an anomaly, it is just as certainly but one among many anomalies in the world of contemporary Anglicanism.

For that matter, anomalousness as such might ironically be called the genius ”“ or daimon? ”“ of the Anglican Way, dating not just from the Elizabethan Settlement but from the immemorial mists of that long-ago encounter between Celtic and Roman Christianity.

Whereas the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the US and her litigious Chancellor seem to have staked their claim ”“ indeed their exercise of hegemony ”“ on a kind of canonical fundamentalism, the Archbishop’s Advent Letter upholds a quite different ecclesiology.

Dr Williams writes: “The Communion is a voluntary association of provinces and dioceses; and so its unity depends not on a canon law that can be enforced but on the ability of each part of the family to recognise that other local churches have received the same faith from the apostles and are faithfully holding to it in loyalty to the One Lord incarnate who speaks in Scripture and bestows his grace in the sacraments. To put it in slightly different terms, local churches acknowledge the same ”˜constitutive elements’ in one another. This means in turn that each local church receives from others and recognises in others the same good news and the same structure of ministry, and seeks to engage in mutual service for the sake of our common mission.”

It is not, I hope, egotism on my part to read in Dr Williams’s words an echo of words of my own in the pages of The Church of England Newspaper last August: “Whether the Diocese of South Carolina is or is not part of The Episcopal Church is a matter of ecclesiological inconsequentiality. Anglicanism is re-aligning itself around relationships of gospel witness, catholic order, and apostolic faithfulness among and between bishops and dioceses whose defining identity is not that of denominations ”“ which, like all human institutions, wax and wane ”“ but, rather, that of the divinely constituted One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ.”

When and where does push come to shove? Can the Archbishop of Canterbury see to it that those who come to Lambeth 2008 really address the question “whether or how far we can recognise the same Gospel and ministry” in one another? For with these words, Dr Williams, perhaps almost against his own inclination, has at last identified the biblical and doctrinal bottom line.

My own hope would be that the Primates and Provinces of the Global South will, on this basis, overcome their understandable scepticism (not least about “professionally facilitated conversations”!) and show up for Lambeth en masse. For it is now clear that even the pathetically uncertain trumpet of the New Orleans Statement by the US House of Bishops is too much for many, if not most, American dioceses to heed. At a truly Communion-wide Lambeth, what the Reverend Dr Paul Zahl has called the “ersatz Christianity” of the leadership of the US Church would surely be exposed for what it is: a false gospel.

Notwithstanding the element of capriciousness about likely attendance or otherwise, Lambeth 2008 may provide the only opportunity available for the bishops of the Communion to commit to that “mutual recognisability” of faith and ministry which Dr Williams rightly claims as a sine qua non of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

It is on the basis of such mutual recognisability that the Diocese of South Carolina is moving ahead with the consecration of Mark Lawrence ”“ a priest from the migratory Diocese of San Joaquin! ”“ at the hands of Windsor-compliant bishops of The Episcopal Church, the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Global South, and the Common Cause Partnership.

Our hope is that his consecration, along with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s determination, will bear fruit at Lambeth 2008 in a clear and definitive affirmation, on the part of the vast majority of bishops present, that the Anglican Communion is (in the Archbishop’s words) “truly a gift of God to the wholeness of Christ’s Church.”

Only Lambeth can ensure that such an affirmation is based on more than mere consensus about where the “boundaries” of gospel truth and catholic ministry lie and “why they matter for our witness to the world as well as for our own integrity and mutual respect.”

—The Very Rev. William McKeachie is Dean of the Cathedral of Saint Luke and Saint Paul, Charleston, South Carolina

See what you think and don’t miss the picture.

Worshipers come to St. Mary, Mother of God in downtown Washington, D.C., for various reasons, but many say that a big draw is the Tridentine Latin mass that is said here every Sunday. Soon, St. Mary may be less well known for that distinctive liturgical offering than for the number of big-name government and media types that occupy its pews. Now that Pope Benedict XVI has loosened the restrictions on churches that want to observe the pre-Vatican II rite, more parishes are availing themselves of the option. Call it part of a larger conservative shift within the church””one that includes a renewed emphasis on such practices as personal confession and reciting the rosary as well as a resurgent interest in traditional monastic and religious orders.

But this shift extends beyond the Roman Catholic Church. In Richardson, Texas, the congregation of Trinity Fellowship Church participates in something that would have been considered almost heretical in most evangelical Protestant churches five or 10 years ago: a weekly Communion service. An independent, nondenominational church of some 600 members, Trinity Fellowship is not the only evangelical congregation that is offering a weekly Eucharist, saying the Nicene or Apostles’ creeds, reading the early Church Fathers, or doing other things that seem downright Roman Catholic or at least high Episcopalian. Daniel Wallace, a professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, which trains pastors for interdenominational or nondenominational churches, says there is a growing appetite for something more than “worship that is a glorified Bible class in some ways.”

Something curious is happening in the wide world of faith, something that defies easy explanation or quantification. More substantial than a trend but less organized than a movement, it has to do more with how people practice their religion than with what they believe, though people caught up in this change often find that their beliefs are influenced, if not subtly altered, by the changes in their practice.

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More important to note is who the anger is not being directed at. I hope that the legacy of Benazir Bhutto’s untimely and tragic death is a legacy of a society that seizes this moment to reassert its demand for democracy and to recognize that extremist violence is our problem. This is not a mercenary war. This is Pakistan’s own battle. Right now the evidence suggests that society continues to tear at its own self. I fear that it will not change anytime soon. That things are likely to get worse before they become any better. But, I refuse to give up hope. At least, not yet.

Read it all and follow all the links.

The US-based online shopping place came under the attack from Hindu activists at Puri, one of the most hallowed destinations in India, following the misuse of Hindu gods and goddesses. The website sold undergarments embossed with the images of famous Hindu deities like Jagannath, Krishna, Rama, Siva, Mahalaxmi among others. A number of priests alongside some Hindu brigades poured into streets of Puri expressing their displeasure at the online shop.

Even though that website has put the images and slogans of other religions on undergarments, there was not any reaction from people of other communities here at Puri as the place is largely inhabited by Hindus.

But the Puri police slapped a case against the website based on a First Information Report (FIR) of Priyadarshan Pattnaik, the president of Jagannath Sena, a Puri-based religious outfit. Police also admitted that the website was found with selling undergarments emblazoned with the pictures of Hindu Gods and Goddesses through its online marketplace. “We registered a case under sections 295 (A) and 153 (A) of Indian Penal Code for maliciously hurting and damaging the religious sentiments and promoting enmity between classes, respectively. Though the crime has taken place somewhere else, we were bound to register a case looking at its sensitivity and link with the presiding god (Jagannath) at Jagannath temple. Investigation is on,” said Asheet Kumar Panigarhi, the superintendent of police (Puri). “This is a difficult case. We are facing such a case for the first time. We will see what we can do,” Panigarhi said.

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Presidential candidates of both parties have talked more openly about their religious beliefs this year than in elections past, lifting a window on some of the values that could shape their decisions in the Oval Office. But the political benefits of such candor are not always clear in a country where most Republicans and Democrats believe in separation of church and state.

A holiday campaign ad featuring Republican Mike Huckabee, in a red sweater by a Christmas tree as “Silent Night” tinkles in the background, may be the latest example. Though Mr. Huckabee’s courtship of conservative Christians has siphoned support from Mitt Romney and helped vault him to the top of the polls in Iowa in advance of the Jan. 3 caucuses, his overtly Christian ad has drawn fire from across the political spectrum. [Both men are profiled, along with other major presidential contenders, in the Monitor series “The Candidates: Faith & Values,” at right.]

In the 30-second commercial, Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, wished viewers “Merry Christmas” instead of an ecumenical “happy holidays” and said “it’s nice to pull aside” from politics and “just remember that what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ and being with our family and friends.”

To some, the spot was no more offensive or profound than a Hallmark card. But the former Arkansas governor found himself defending it against criticism that its mix of faith and politics went too far.

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For some time now, people have been asking me why I haven’t written anything on the current””or, depending on your point of view, everlasting””crisis in the Anglican world. After all, I have been an Anglican for nearly twenty-five years, virtually all of my adult life; indeed, my experiences in other denominations, before I discovered Anglicanism, were so brief and tentative that I don’t even know how to be a Christian except as an Anglican. Nor do I wish to be a Christian in any other way. Surely I have some opinions on the mess the Anglican Communion is now in, on how it got this way, and how it might get out again?

Well, yes, I do have such opinions. But they are worthless. All such opinions amount to little more than the assignation of blame for past events and predictions of the future””the latter usually involving punishments to come for those blamed for the past””and neither of those activities interests me. There was a time when they did, but I have long since learned how futile such pursuits are, and (more important) how powerfully they distract from the core practices of the Christian life. This is the primary reason why, after too long a season scanning the Anglican blogs daily, I now check just one of them, and once a week, at most. This abstinence has calmed my spirit and removed, I think permanently, my taste for such things.

Moreover, I remind myself that the churches of the Anglican world are governed by bishops, and I am not a bishop. One of the chief reasons I have held firm to Anglicanism over the years is that I believe that the threefold order of ministry””bishop, priest, and deacon””is the model taught by the apostles, the governance particularly approved by God. In this model I, as a layman””even though I am also a member of the priesthood of all believers””have a highly circumscribed role. If my pastor asks me to teach, I teach; otherwise I shut up. In the unlikely (and unwelcome) event of a bishop of the Church asking for my thoughts I would share them; otherwise I keep them to myself, at least in public. The decisions that will shape the future of the Anglican Communion will be made by bishops, not by laypeople, nor even by priests; if I care about that Communion””and I do””I had best be praying for those bishops, and not repeating the error of Job in darkening counsel by words without knowledge.

Read it all.

Read it all from the latest Scientific American.

For a perfectly healthy woman, Dianne Kerley has had quite a few medical tests in recent years: M.R.I. and PET scans of her brain, two spinal taps and hours of memory and thinking tests.

Ms. Kerley, 52, has spent much of her life in the shadow of an illness that gradually destroys memory, personality and the ability to think, speak and live independently. Her mother, grandmother and a maternal great-aunt all developed Alzheimer’s disease. Her mother, 78, is in a nursing home in the advanced stages of dementia, helpless and barely responsive.

“She’s in her own private purgatory,” Ms. Kerley said.

Ms. Kerley is part of an ambitious new scientific effort to find ways to detect Alzheimer’s disease at the earliest possible moment. Although the disease may seem like a calamity that strikes suddenly in old age, scientists now think it begins long before the mind fails.

“Alzheimer’s disease may be a chronic condition in which changes begin in midlife or even earlier,” said Dr. John C. Morris, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis, where Ms. Kerley volunteers for studies.

Read it all.

You probably didn’t notice it, but that old rogue Elmer Gantry turned 80 this year. A surprising thought, perhaps, given what a fixture Sinclair Lewis’s 1927 fictional portrait of a bogus and amoral itinerant Midwestern preacher has become in both our speech and our imaginations. Was there really a time when we didn’t have Elmer to kick around–or to kick others with? It is hard to imagine. No less than the camp meetings on the frontier or the Scopes Trial or the stadium revivals of Billy Graham, the character Elmer Gantry has shaped the world’s impressions of American religion.

A crude, profane, hard-drinking and oversexed football player from Paris, Kan., Gantry, using his histrionic gifts and his “arousing barytone,” latched onto the ministry because of the power it gave him over others. The book related Gantry’s picaresque wanderings from one ministry to another, always looking out for the main chance, always complicating his life with amorous dalliances, always ready to beat a hasty retreat, always emerging from his scrapes with ambitions undimmed.

His creator was a gloomy alcoholic Midwesterner with a personal life just as rootless and messy as Gantry’s. But Lewis (1885-1951) gave us a cultural icon whose name is invoked every time there is a scandal involving sex, money and a preacher.

Not many writers can claim similar success in adding to our storehouse of powerful archetypes–or our cupboard of easy clichés. But this is the chief consolation for a literary career that has otherwise faded into obscurity. Lewis’s reputation peaked in 1930, when he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature. With this award and the invention of two cultural icons–Gantry and the crass businessman George F. Babbitt–Lewis has a secure place in the history books. But that does not mean that, except as cultural artifacts, his books are much worth reading today.

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THREE hundred and fifty years ago today, religious freedom was born on this continent. Yes, 350 years. Religious tolerance did not begin with the Bill of Rights or with Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1786. With due respect to Roger Williams and his early experiment with “liberty of conscience” in Rhode Island, this republic really owes its enduring strength to a fragile, scorched and little-known document that was signed by some 30 ordinary citizens on Dec. 27, 1657.

It is fitting that the Flushing Remonstrance should be associated with Dutch settlements, because they were the most tolerant in the New World. The Netherlands had enshrined freedom of conscience in 1579, when it clearly established that “no one shall be persecuted or investigated because of his religion.” And when the Dutch West India Company set up a trading post at the southern tip of Manhattan in 1625, the purpose was to make money, not to save souls. Because the founding idea was trade, the directors of the firm took pains to ensure that all were welcome.

For example, while the Massachusetts Bay Colony was enforcing Puritan orthodoxy, there were no religious tests in the Dutch colony. So open was New Amsterdam that at least 16 languages were being spoken there by the 1640s; by 1654, the first Jews in what is now the United States had been able to settle there peaceably.

Read the whole piece.

Christmas has had a good run at the Antenucci house, where the glistening tree and framed family photos with Santa went on display even before Thanksgiving.

It’s mere coincidence that the red-and-green charts in the bedroom perfectly complemented the home’s festive theme, but an appropriate one, considering that the White Plains couple credits the fertility-tracking diagrams for their greatest gifts: 2-year-old Matteo and 5-month-old Olivia.

“Now, we have our two angels for Christmas,” said Michelle Antenucci, 33, smiling as her baby daughter grabbed at the folded spreadsheets.

The colorful charts illustrate their use of the Creighton Model – one of the Natural Family Planning techniques that are the Catholic Church’s only permitted form of birth control – because it allows a couple to remain open to the possibility of creating new life. In recent years, the Archdiocese of New York and local instructors say these traditionally faith-based methods have started appealing to couples motivated by scientific results, despite skepticism from their doctors.

Read the whole article.

Never let it be forgotten that the Roman Church is headquartered in a tiny state, called the Vatican.

Its Pope is a head of state, who aspires to influence world affairs and he has interfered in the domestic affairs of many countries. In my own land, the Roman Catholic Church flies the Vatican flag, alongside our own national flag, outside its places of worship, on special occasions, starkly illustrating divided loyalties.

The Roman Church makes the outrageous claim that it is the one true Church. Christian people in other denominations must never cease to refute that claim.

I travelled to Rome and received the blessing of John Paul II. I can accept that there is much that is good and true in the Roman Church, in spite of its errors. I have no problem in attending Mass and worshipping with fellow Christians of that tradition. At the same time, as a conscientious Protestant, I cannot and will not stand idly by and allow the errors of Rome to go unchallenged.

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In a flurry of rather out-of-date statistics, the Sunday Telegraph led off its front page with the daring cry that ‘Britain is a Catholic country’. The explanation appeared to lie in Sunday Mass attendances exceeding Anglicans’ average Sunday attendances. Anglicans were nettled, but clearly recognised it would be unseemly openly to go to war.

“It isn’t a competition,” declared the Rev Graham Cray, supremo of those who report on Anglican evangelism. “I’m delighted,” said he with a diplomatic and vaguely ecumenical clearing of the throat, “to see all Christian denominations flourishing.” But is this the whole story? Regrettably, in the real world, churches find themselves very much in competition, however they seek to deny it; and, history being what it is, that competition – in England at least – reaches its apotheosis between Canterbury and Rome.

This is awkward, for the churches are at their least attractive when they allow the wine of triumphalism to go to the head. Seeking to throw one’s weight about, asserting that ‘we are the top dogs’, seems somehow out of kilter with the stainless sage who sought out simple fishermen on the shores of Galilee.

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Many conservative bishops will boycott Lambeth due to the fallout over The Episcopal Church’s actions supportive of GLBT clergy and couples, TEC’s rejection of global accountability, and its re-interpretation of core scriptural teachings.

TEC’s ambiguous response to the Windsor Report and its refusals to follow the guidance of Anglican primates meeting in Tanzania in early 2007 to end gay ordinations, same-sex blessings, and property litigation against conservative parishes have undermined Anglican unity worldwide.

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So yes, I can still campaign. Not as freely as in the past, but I don’t intend to be intimidated by those who threaten to kill me. And I see that in every event where there is a threat to one’s core interests, national interests, people send their young men and women to give their lives. America sends their young men and women to Afghanistan where they risk death. No one says don’t send our boys because somebody may kill you. So where there is a cause that is larger than oneself, one has to take the risks.

–Benazir Bhutto in an interview on the Lehrer Newshour, November 2007, a section of which was reaired last evening

The Roman Catholic Church has a new member, but he’s far beyond the age of any would-be altar boy.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair’s conversion to Catholicism in a private ceremony in London last Friday wasn’t a surprise to most Britons. He had been edging away from his Anglican roots for years, attending mass on Sundays with his four children and wife, Cherie, who are all baptized Catholics.

But the 54-year-old joins many others who have made the decision to convert later in life. Middle age, some experts say, is a time when many people begin to question their faith ”” or lack of it.

“A lot of it has to do with confronting death,” said Rev. Daniel Donovan, a priest and professor of theology at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto.

While young people may reflect on their spirituality, those thoughts are often shoved aside by immediate pressures such as childcare, career and paying the rent, he said.

“When you’re older, and some of the pressure is relieved, you can kind of think, where do I want to end up?” Father Donovan said.

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Angry supporters rioted in her home city, the southern port of Karachi, The Associated Press reported, shooting at police officers, setting tires and cars on fire and burning a gas station.

In a brief televised address, President Pervez Musharraf called for support from the Pakistani people and declared three days of mourning. “This is a great tragedy which I cannot describe in words,” he said, according to a report on state-run media.

He blamed terrorists for the attack, saying “Pakistan and the nation faces the greatest threat from these terrorists.”

Condemnation of the assassination flowed in from around the world. President Bush called it a “cowardly attack by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan’s democracy.” The White House said Mr. Bush called Mr. Musharraf early Thursday afternoon.

In a statement on the United Nations Web site, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, called the killing “an assault on stability.”

Ms. Bhutto’s death is the latest upset in Pakistan’s treacherous political situation, and leaves her party leaderless in the short term and likely to be unable to effectively compete in hotly contested parliamentary elections that are two weeks away, according to Hasan Askari Rizvi, a leading Pakistani political and military analyst.

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