Homeowners who want to refinance existing mortgages may be more likely to take advantage of the lower rates, but many people who bought during the real estate bubble won’t be able to qualify for a new loan because they have little equity or are “upside down” — owing more on their homes than they are worth.

“I anticipate it will increase refinance activity, but there will be nothing dramatic,” said Terrin Griffiths, an economist for the California Credit Union League, which represents credit unions in California and Nevada.
Jeff Lazerson, a Laguna Niguel mortgage broker, said all the customer calls he received Tuesday were from people seeking to refinance, not buy homes. Many are trying to get out of adjustable-rate mortgages scheduled to reset to higher rates next year, he said.

But most who called were rebuffed because they were upside down on their current mortgages or had credit scores too low to qualify.

“Out of all the people calling, about 30% at most can get help,” Lazerson said.

Read it all.

Additionally, early Christians were not, as is commonly assumed, bound to a three-tier vision of the universe, i.e., heaven, hell, and earth.

[W]hen the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time.

So heaven and earth, understood in this way, are two dimensions of the same reality. They “interlock and intersect in a whole variety of ways even while they retain, for the moment at least, their separate identities and roles.” Combine this with the doctrine of the ascension and we do not have a Jesus who floats up into a heaven “up there” but disappears into a reality we cannot yet see. Because heaven and earth are not yet joined Jesus is physically absent from us. At the same time he is present with us through the Holy Spirit and the sacraments, linkages where the two realities meet in the present age.

Read it all.

Man wielding candy cane lawn ornament subdues attacker

A man using a candy cane lawn ornament fended off a knife-wielding neighbor who had been attacking holiday guests at a Sacramento home.

Police spokesman Sgt. Norm Leong says the man used the two-foot-tall plastic ornament to subdue the attacker until officers arrived.

Read it all.

Archbishop Kwashi reports: “The reports from those I have sent out to collect information are that the Muslims are attacking and burning this morning. It looks well co-ordinated. They are well armed with AK 47 and pump machine guns. This morning they have been at Dogonduste. Quite a number of Christian homes have been burnt. We do not know how many have been killed. The local government has underestimated the vehemence of the militants. At the moment this is all restricted to Jos City.

We ask prayer for knowing the right thing to do. I have moved one of our archdeacons and his family to live in our home. St Luke’s Cathedral is in the middle of the area of violence. We hope we can proceed with our normal services tomorrow.”

Read it all.

Reporting from Washington — Senior military leaders took the exceptional step of briefing President Bush this week on a severe and widespread electronic attack on Defense Department computers that may have originated in Russia — an incursion that posed unusual concern among commanders and raised potential implications for national security.

Defense officials would not describe the extent of damage inflicted on military networks. But they said that the attack struck hard at networks within U.S. Central Command, the headquarters that oversees U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and affected computers in combat zones. The attack also penetrated at least one highly protected classified network.

Read it all.

The brewing conflict between Common Cause Partners and Communion Partner Bishops and Rectors is the result of a lack of communication between the two groups. The former group has not heard the Communion Partners’ articulation of their call, which is to remain in TEC as a witness. The assumption has been that they have the mutual goal of reforming the church. Because of this assumption, it has been widely stated that the Communion Partners Plan is a “non-starter,” or that the Communion Partners will have “no alternative” but to join the new province once it is formed. When one substitutes the goal of being a witness for that of reforming the church, it becomes obvious that joining a new province is not an alternative at all. In fact, joining a new province would be an act of disobedience for those who are called by God to remain as a witness.

What is needed above all else is the spirit of charity. Those who are called to remain in TEC need to acknowledge and honor the call of those who are called to leave and form a new entity. Likewise, the reformers need to refrain from making assumptions about those who are called to be a witness and respect their chosen path of obedience. Although our ecclesiological goals may be different, our ultimate goal is the same; to proclaim the Gospel in whatever circumstance we find ourselves. May we be united in our mutual ministry and supportive of one another as we manifest our obedience along the distinct paths to which we are called.

Read it all. Careful readers of this blog will note that I have been harping on this theme of charity (follow the links) for a long time. There needs to be much more of it in the days ahead.

We’ve gotten through roughness before. Of things to be thankful for, I personally include this. I traveled this year, and when I fly I say a prayer that has become a ritual: “Dear God, put your big hands under this plane and lift it up, and carry it forward through the air untouched and unharmed by other objects. And may its inner workings work. And put us down softly in our place of destination, and return us safely to our homes, and to those in whose lives we are enmeshed.”

It occurs to me that is perhaps how many of us are feeling about our country this Thanksgiving: Lord, thank you for our previous safety, and get us through this turbulence.

Read it all.

Go here and then click on the link labelled “Suffering Soldiers” to view Bob Woodruff’s important and disturbing story.

Unemployed workers filled the third floor of the Employment Security Commission [in the Charleston, South Carolina area] on Wednesday morning. The mood was somber and businesslike.

One-hundred claims were processed Tuesday, more than double the number of claims handled the same time last year, said Chuck Rein, a commission staffer who advises veterans at the Lockwood Boulevard office.

Hal Wynn, a radiology technician with 35 years of experience, said he was recently laid off indefinitely from the Medical University of South Carolina. He would like to visit family in Missouri during the holidays but said he can’t afford it.

“This is the first time I’ve ever been laid off. It’s kind of a shock,” he said. Wynn, 58, said his gift-buying would be “kind of slim” because of his financial situation. His 14-year-old son lives with him.

Read it all from yesterday’s local paper here.

About 50 conservative Anglican leaders, including eight young theological students, gathered in Toronto for a one-day consultation on Nov. 25 and emerged with a determination to remain within the Anglican Church of Canada. They came from 16 dioceses across the country.

Rev. Brett Cane of St. Aidan’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg is chair of Anglican Essentials Federation who was quick to point out that the organization is going through a name change. He said that the “Essentials” label has negative connotations in some parts of the country. He said that the federation is loosening its connection to the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC). “We will still maintain links of fellowship with the network but we will not be organizationally tied together.”

Read it all.

A Wal-Mart worker died after being trampled when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island store Friday morning, police and witnesses said.

The 34-year-old employee, a temporary maintenance worker, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

Ugh. Read it all.

So far, this has been one of the most severely destructive bear markets in history. Almost no asset class has been spared. Stocks, commodities, housing, bonds have been battered. All the famous investors have been slaughtered — Buffett, Pickens, Icahn, Adelson. Of the 500 stocks in the S&P 500, only 13 are up for the year. The Legg Mason Value Fund, which boasts the longest streak of beating the S&P 500, is down over 65% this year, the third year that the fund has under performed the S&P. According to Investor’s Business Daily’sMutual Fund Index, the average growth fund is now down for the year around 44%. My own guesstimate is that the average US investor has lost over 50% of his or her assets so far this year.

—Richard Russell, author of the Dow Theory Letter”

A remembrance service took place on 27 November 2008 at Southwark Cathedral for Damilola Taylor and all young people lost to violent crime. The date marks eight years since the murder of Damilola. The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, who chaired the inquiry into the 11-year-old’s murder investigation, delivered the sermon during the service.

This is holy ground ”“ we should take off our shoes. We are here for Damilola Taylor, and for the families still grieving for their young ones murdered on our streets for the past eight years. We are treading on the holy ground of human grief, of love wounded by violence.

And yet on this holy ground, where we must tread so gently, there are voices we must hear, and things we must learn. For we stand also at the foot of the cross, where I believe God took upon himself our sorrows and our love turned in on itself, so that we may return from our self-imposed exile to our true home of love.

Read it all.

Fourteen bishops of the Anglican Church in the Province of the West Indies, meeting in the House of Bishops and Provincial Standing Committee in Nassau, Bahamas, November 11-14, under the chairmanship of the Archbishop of the West Indies, the Most Rev Drexel Gomez, have registered their opposition to the death penalty, while calling for intervention by government and cooperation of the Church as part of civil society, to deal with the situation which facilitates the upsurge of crime and violence in the Caribbean region.

In a communiqué dated November 14, the West Indian Bishops state that they are “of one mind in calling our people to stand with us in our opposition to the death penalty”.

Read it all.

Faith leaders “should shout from the rooftops that AIDS is not a punishment from God but a medical condition which is preventable,” Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, former primate of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, has told the World Aids Campaign.

Ndungane was speaking in an interview for the Amsterdam- and Cape Town-based World Aids Campaign, founded by UNAIDS, ahead of the 20th anniversary of the marking of December 1 as World AIDS Day. The campaign says World AIDS Day is a time of “global solidarity for a pandemic that has led to over 25 million deaths, with an estimated 33 million people currently living with HIV worldwide.”

Ndungane, who now heads African Monitor, a continental development agency, said that AIDS was “manageable and treatable although not curable,” as well as not being a punishment from God.

Read it all.

While it is technically possible for a vote on a third province to come before the primates’ meeting Jan. 31 thru Feb. 5 in Alexandria, Egypt, and then be forwarded to ACC-14 in May for action this year, it is unlikely as the necessary constitutional work in forming a CCP-based North American province is not likely to be completed.

The time line for final approval could take up to two years as the diocesan conventions of the four breakaway Episcopal dioceses: San Joaquin, Pittsburgh, Quincy and Fort Worth will have to endorse the constitution over two meetings of their convention, while the Reformed Episcopal Church, the Anglican Mission in the Americas, the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, and the Kenyan and Uganda overseen churches in North America and other CCP members must ratify the constitution and amend their own governing documents so as to bring its terms into force.

International approval of the CCP document will likely be quicker, as the Gafcon (Global Anglican Future Conference) primates’ council comprising the primates of Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, West Africa and the Archbishop of Sydney are scheduled to meet after the Dec. 3 gathering in Wheaton to vote to receive the constitution. Meetings have been tentatively scheduled between the Gafcon primates and Archbishop Williams before the primates meeting in Alexandria, to seek his counsel and input into the process. However, Archbishop Williams’ approval is not a prerequisite for creating a new province for the Anglican Communion.

Read it all.

Back to Church Sunday is celebrating another rise in the numbers drawn back to church by the event this year as organisers gather in London for a special event at Lambeth Palace. Figures based on returns from dioceses suggest that more than 37,000 people took up the invitation to try church again on Sunday 28th September 2008 ”“ with more than 31,000 of them ”˜coming back’ to an Anglican church.

This achievement is being marked with a ”˜thank you’ party for people across the country responsible for promoting Back to Church Sunday to local parish churches and encouraging them to extend the warmest welcome to visitors. The day will involve multimedia presentations, buzzgroups, and giveaway treats from the sponsors Traidcraft.

Thirty-eight Church of England dioceses from Cornwall to Newcastle took part this year….

Read it all.

Pub-owner Sean Hughes, who’s his 20s, has seen a big change in people’s spending habits even in his young life.

SEAN HUGHES, Pub Owner: When I was very young, I mean, it was different then, because credit wasn’t a real kind of thing in people’s lives. It was obviously — you know, if you had the money to buy something, then you could buy it.

Whereas now, people just seem to look at something like a television, and be like, “I want that,” and they can get it, because they can get on no percent interest or they can get it on whatever.

SELLER: We got things for 5 pounds, 10 pounds, 20 pounds.

MARGARET WARNER: That attitude led many British consumers, especially younger ones, to run up huge levels of personal debt, more than even in the United States. Total household indebtedness here, credit card and mortgage debt combined, stands at 160 percent of GDP, the highest in the developed world….

MARGARET WARNER: But now British banks are squeezing these consumers through their credit cards. Credit counselor Jahanara Hussain works for a nonprofit in London’s East End.

Read or watch the whole thing.

Watch it all–makes the heart sad.

(ACNS) The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has…[yesterday] written to the High Commissioner of India, Mr Shiv Shankar Mukherjee, expressing his shock and outrage at the appalling atrocities in Mumbai and offering on behalf of the whole Anglican Communion prayers for those who have lost loved ones, for the injured and for all those caring for them or dealing with the ongoing siege. “People everywhere”, he said, “stand in solidarity with the innocent and in condemnation of those who would destroy innocent lives out of evil and misguided motives”.

An Anglican Parish Church has joined with speech technology company SpinVox so that as the Rev John Kronenberg, vicar of Hinchley Wood in Surrey, delivers his sermon to the congregation his words will be automatically sent to the inboxes of 100 church members.

Mr Kronenberg said: “There are many reasons why people may not be able to make it to Church on a Sunday. They may have to work, or visit families far away, some may have trouble leaving the house if they are elderly or ill and some families can only get to church a couple of times a month because of other commitments, but they still want to keep in touch.”

Read it all.

THE Common Cause Partnership (CCP), a coalition of conservative Anglican groups in the United States and Canada, which have broken away from their national Churches, is to announce plans next week for a separate province.

The group will meet in the Evangelical Free Church in Wheaton, Illinois, next Wednesday to “release to the public” its draft constitution. Its moderator, the Rt Revd Bob Duncan, the deposed Bishop of Pitts­burgh, described it as “an im­portant concrete step towards the goal of a biblical, missionary and united Anglican Church in North America”.

The CCP represents about 100,000 Anglicans, 3000 of them in Canada. It comprises diverse groups that have left the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada: four US dioceses (San Joaquin, Pittsburgh, Quincy, and Fort Worth); associations such as the Nigerian-led Convocation of An­glicans in North America (CANA); and seceded congrega­tions and de­nom­ina­tions, such as the Reformed Episcopal Church.

A spokesman for one of the con­stituent bodies, the American An­glican Council, said the new Anglican Church in North America “will have all the necessary features to be recognised as a province”.

Read it all.

Everyone accused of a crime is entitled to a lawyer, whether they can afford one or not. But in civil cases, such as home foreclosures, there is no right to an attorney.

Legal aid attorneys say some people being kicked out of their homes might have been able to stay if they’d had legal help ”” help that isn’t there for everyone.

Sarah Bolling is an attorney with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. Her 71-year-old client, Jenny McCaslin, bought a house more than 30 years ago. McCaslin raised her children there. Now it’s falling apart.

Read or listen to it all.

Is lying about one’s identity on the Internet now a crime?

The verdict Wednesday in the MySpace cyberbullying case raised a variety of questions about the terms that users agree to when they log on to Web sites.

The defendant in the case, a Missouri woman, was convicted by a federal jury in Los Angeles on three misdemeanor counts of computer fraud for having misrepresented herself on the popular social network MySpace. The woman, Lori Drew, posed as a teenage boy in using the account to send first friendly and then menacing messages to Megan Meier, 13, who killed herself shortly after receiving a message in October 2006 that said in part, “The world would be a better place without you.”

MySpace’s terms of service require users to submit “truthful and accurate” registration information. Ms. Drew’s creation of a phony profile amounted to “unauthorized access” to the site, prosecutors said, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which until now has been used almost exclusively to prosecute hacker crimes.

Read it all.

IT’S THANKSGIVING; who’ll remember the forgotten children?

That’s the name advocates have given the thousands upon thousands of children in foster care in the United States who won’t feel the warm embrace of Mom or Dad or know the blessed feeling of being with birth relatives this day so well known for love-laden family gatherings.

Even as you hug your own child tight today, even as you carve the turkey to share with family, even as you enjoy the warmth and hospitality of friends gathered around a table of plenty, remember the many abused and neglected children who’ve had to be taken from their families and left to the care of courts and overwhelmed, inefficient governmental agencies.

Pray for them, yes; prayer changes things. But also consider becoming a volunteer guardian ad litem who watches over these most vulnerable citizens.

Read it all.

I took my good fortune for granted for a long time, and I’m finally starting to realize what is important. We all have SO much, much more than we realize. This year Thanksgiving will not be about the turkey, the centerpiece, the china or the silver.

I will sit at the table today, bow my head and say a heartfelt prayer of thanks for the food I receive. When I tuck my children into bed tonight, I will thank God for these miracles and for the roof over their heads. I will tell my husband I am so grateful for this marriage.

I will call my parents and my brother and tell them that they are without a doubt the best parents and brother a girl could ever have. I will hug my friends and family and let them know that there is no way I could ever make it without them.

Read it all.

It has become our custom on Thanksgiving Day to spend a few moments reflecting on the past year and our many reasons to be grateful. Here-with, a few of the people and developments for which we give thanks….

California firefighters. Every time the hot Santa Anas blow, we’re grateful they’re on the job. Sadly, as this month’s ring of fire from Santa Barbara to Orange County painfully reminds us, we’ve had too many opportunities to appreciate them this year.

Read it all.

We asked our readers to share their thoughts about Thanksgiving in these difficult times. Here is…[some of what they said]:

Read them all.

The line for a Thanksgiving meal was long when the Chicago Christian Industrial League shelter opened Thursday morning, and volunteers served more than 200 people in the first 40 minutes _ record demand for the shelter.

Among the hungry were familiar faces, people who had eaten their last Thanksgiving meal at the shelter and others who had helped provide those meals, said executive director Mary Shaver.

“These are the people who are always giving money _ and now they’re asking for help,” Shaver said. “These were the people donating money to us.”

Read it all.

IN AN AGE in which students can get suspended for wearing religious T-shirts to school and pre-game prayers have been dropped lest they offend someone, it is a wonder the Supreme Court has not ruled Thanksgiving unconstitutional. It is, after all, an official recognition of religion.

To deny Thanksgiving’s religious basis is to ignore the spark that ignited the Pilgrims’ productive labors. They worked hard, and the bounty this work created was the product of human exertion. But their efforts were not entirely motivated by a desire for prosperity.

In his 1995 book, “Creating the Commonwealth,” historian Stephen Innes argues that the secret to Massachusetts Bay’s economic success ”” for which the colonists gave thanks ”” was its religious underpinning. “Massachusetts Bay was a commonwealth that flourished in large part because its notion of redemptive community endowed economic development with moral, spiritual, and religious imperatives,” he wrote. “The settlers’ providentialism ”” the belief that they were participating in the working out of God’s purposes ”” made all labor and enterprise ”˜godly business,’ to be pursued aggressively and judged by the most exacting of standards.”

The Pilgrims did not work only to feed, clothe, and house themselves. They worked to glorify God, and work so motivated produced abundant profits”¦.”

–The New Hampshire Union Leader in 2004