The Bishop of North Carolina, the Rt Revd Michael Curry, said on Wednesday: “This is a day that I honestly never dreamed I would see. I think about my grandmother, who was the daughter of a sharecropper here in North Carolina. My ancestors were slaves here. My daddy went to jail so folk could vote.

“My great-aunt Callie was a Sunday-school teacher at Sixteenth Street Baptist chapel where the little girls were killed in 1960. Somehow, all the things that people did without knowing how it was going to turn out helped to make this moment possible.

“But they never dreamed this. Americans have said what we want to be: a country for all. That was the American dream from the beginning. God blesses us sometimes, in spite of ourselves, and, every once in a while, something happens that says that dream is real, and don’t give up on it for America, and ultimately for the whole world.”

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Gertrude Baines’ 114-year-old fingers wrapped lightly over the ballpoint pen as she bubbled in No. 18 on her ballot Tuesday. Her mouth curled up in a smile. A laugh escaped. The deed was done.

A daughter of former slaves, Baines had just voted for a black man to be president of the United States. “What’s his name? I can’t say it,” she said shyly afterward. Those who helped her fill out the absentee ballot at a convalescent facility west of USC chimed in: “Barack Obama.”

Baines is the world’s oldest person of African descent, according to the Gerontology Research Group, which validates claims of extreme old age. She is the third-oldest person in the world, and the second-oldest in the United States after Edna Parker of Indiana, who is 115.

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Reporting from Washington — During the campaign, when Barack Obama needed an authoritative voice to defend his tax and spending proposals, he turned to Lawrence H. Summers — the Clinton administration Treasury secretary and former Harvard president who has one of the sharpest minds in modern economics.

Now, as President-elect Obama considers his choice for Treasury secretary, Summers’ name is again front and center. But this time, the decision is not so clear. Obama faces conflicting advice from his close advisors, from Capitol Hill and from important Democratic constituencies.

Some argue that, with the economy gripped by a deepening crisis, he needs the country’s best and brightest to help him deal with it, chief among them Summers.

Others warn that Summers’ sharp elbows and his penchant for controversy could make him a damaging distraction at a time when the nation and the new president can least afford it. And they worry that Summers’ wide-ranging knowledge, expansive personality and combative impulses could clash with the president’s desire to have the White House deeply involved in the biggest problems facing the new administration.

These voices argue that a more reassuring pick might be the venerable former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker, perhaps teamed with New York Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy F. Geithner.

I prefer the Volcker option. Read it all.

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So much for the “new evangelicals.”

For the past two years, hundreds of articles have appeared in newspapers across America making the claim that the old religious right was moving left and that Barack Obama, with his religiously infused rhetoric and various “outreach efforts,” was leading the charge. A year ago, David Kirkpatrick predicted the “evangelical crackup” on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. “Jesus Rode a Donkey: Why Republicans Don’t Have the Corner on Christ,” “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America” and “Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right” are just three of the dozens of books released since 2004 that suggested that evangelicals were rethinking their loyalty to the Republican Party and conservatism in general. The new evangelicals, just in case anyone missed the storyline, were not so backward as to vote on issues like abortion and gay marriage. They were enlightened about the environment and favored government aid to the poor.

Well, whoever these new evangelicals were, they didn’t show up at the polls on Tuesday.

John McCain won 74% of white born-again Protestants’ votes. And while this was four percentage points lower than George Bush’s share in 2004, President Bush’s re-election was “the highpoint” for evangelical support of Republicans at least since 1980, according to John Green, a pollster at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. It’s become something of a cliché that Mr. Bush has a “special relationship” with his fellow evangelicals — but it’s true. And it’s a little unrealistic to expect that Sen. McCain would enjoy the same relationship with them, given that he is not one of their own. But he did just as well as, if not better than, every other GOP candidate in the past 30 years. The large victory that Mr. Obama scored with most of the electorate makes it remarkable that his gains with white evangelicals were so small.

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A new report from American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate concludes that voter turnout in Tuesday’s election was the same in percentage terms as it was four years ago ”” or at most has risen by less than 1 percent.

The report released Thursday estimates that between 126.5 and 128.5 million Americans cast ballots in the presidential election earlier this week. Those figures represent 60.7 percent or, at most, 61.7 percent of those eligible to vote in the country.

“A downturn in the number and percentage of Republican voters going to the polls seemed to be the primary explanation for the lower than predicted turnout,” the report said. Compared to 2004, Republican turnout declined by 1.3 percentage points to 28.7 percent, while Democratic turnout increased by 2.6 points from 28.7 percent in 2004 to 31.3 percent in 2008.

Read it all and follow the link to the full report.

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The next meeting of the primates of the Anglican Communion will be Jan. 31 through Feb. 6, in Egypt, The Living Church has learned.

Among the topics expected to be discussed are the proposed Anglican Covenant and the three-fold moratoria proposed during the Lambeth Conference by the Windsor Continuation Group.

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Christian emergency response organizations have expressed alarm at a deteriorating situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province and about brutalities innocent civilians are facing in a potential humanitarian catastrophe.

The Geneva-based ACT International (Action by Churches Together) said in a statement on October 30 that it had accounts from aid workers of looted shops and dead bodies on the pavements in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province.

“It has been a night of horror, but Goma is quiet now,” ACT International quoted one of its aid workers as saying. Emergency work became paralysed after aid workers themselves were withdrawn from the field for security reasons, while thousands of people have sought refuge as rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda has moved towards the city.

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For the first time in human history, a largely white nation has elected a black man to be its paramount leader. And the cultural meaning of this unprecedented convergence of dark skin and ultimate power will likely become — at least for a time — a national obsession. In fact, the Obama presidency will always be read as an allegory. Already we are as curious about the cultural significance of his victory as we are about its political significance.

Does his victory mean that America is now officially beyond racism? Does it finally complete the work of the civil rights movement so that racism is at last dismissible as an explanation of black difficulty? Can the good Revs. Jackson and Sharpton now safely retire to the seashore? Will the Obama victory dispel the twin stigmas that have tormented black and white Americans for so long — that blacks are inherently inferior and whites inherently racist? Doesn’t a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism? Doesn’t it imply a “post-racial” America? And shouldn’t those of us — white and black — who did not vote for Mr. Obama take pride in what his victory says about our culture even as we mourn our political loss?

Answering no to such questions is like saying no to any idealism; it seems callow. How could a decent person not hope for all these possibilities, or not give America credit for electing its first black president? And yet an element of Barack Obama’s success was always his use of the idealism implied in these questions as political muscle. His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America — and then to have that vision define political decency. Thus, a failure to support Obama politically implied a failure of decency.

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Reporting from London — If history records a sudden surge in carbon emissions on Wednesday, it may be due to the collective exhalation of relief and joy by the hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of people around the globe who watched, waited and prayed for Barack Obama to be elected president of the United States.

In country after country, elation over Obama’s victory was palpable, the hunger for a change of American leadership as strong outside the U.S. as in it. And there was wonderment that, in the world’s most powerful democracy, a man with African roots and the middle name Hussein, an upstart fighter who took on political heavyweights, could capture the highest office in the land.

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A poll commissioned by the Club for Growth in 12 swing congressional districts over the past weekend shows that the voters who made the difference in this election still prefer less government — lower taxes, less spending and less regulation — to Sen. Obama’s economic liberalism. Turns out, Americans didn’t vote for Mr. Obama and Democratic congressional candidates because they support their redistributionist agenda, but because they are fed up with the Republican politicians in office….

Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district will always support universal health care, and Jeff Flake’s Arizona district will always support less government. But the 12 districts we surveyed represent the political middle of the country, and in this cycle their partisan allegiances changed. The question is, have their opinions on the issues changed as well? The answer is emphatically no.

Consider the most salient aspects of Mr. Obama’s economic agenda: the redistribution of wealth through higher taxes on America’s top earners; the revival of the death tax; raising the tax on capital gains and dividend income; increased government spending; increased government involvement in the housing crisis; a restriction on offshore drilling and oil exploration in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR); and “card check” legislation stripping workers of their right to a secret ballot in union elections.

On each of these issues, swing voters stand starkly against Mr. Obama. According to the Club’s poll, 73% of voters prefer the federal government to focus on “creating economic conditions that give all people opportunities to create wealth through their own efforts” over “spreading wealth from higher income people to middle and lower income people.” Two-thirds of respondents prefer to see the permanent elimination of the death tax, and 65% prefer to keep capital gains and dividend tax rates at their current lows.

Read it all and take the time to look at the overall poll results also

The following two resolutions were unanimously passed by the Standing Committee of South Carolina at our November, 2008 meeting:

1. Be it resolved that the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina does hereby subscribe to as a standard of faith the Jerusalem Declaration as set forth at the GAFCON conference and affirmed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and further affirms the reforming voice of the GAFCON movement within the Anglican Communion.

2. Be it resolved that the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina does not recognize the non-canonical deposition of the Right Reverend Robert Duncan and continues to recognize him as a bishop in Christ’s one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

The Very Reverend John Burwell
President, Standing Committee of South Carolina

In Kenya, dozens of new-born babies have been named Obama. In Tehran, an Iranian leader has congratulated a US president-elect for the first time since the Islamic revolution. From Cairo to Kuala Lumpur, Americans abroad have been hugged and congratulated, have cast away their Canadian camouflage and suddenly felt they could walk tall again. The world joined America in its grief seven years ago; now all want to share in America’s rejoicing.

Even so, President-elect Obama knows that a difficult inheritance awaits him overseas. US forces are engaged in two wars, and Afghanistan at least is proving a harsh challenge. Pakistan stands on the brink of disaster. Iran, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, massacres in the Congo and Russia’s belligerence all demand skilful diplomacy and determined leadership in the White House. None of these, however, will be the priority for the incoming president. His first task must be to use the goodwill created by his election to restore confidence in America.

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U.S. stocks slid, sending the market to its biggest two-day slump since 1987, after jobless claims jumped and the shrinking economy crushed earnings at companies from Blackstone Group Inc. to News Corp.

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Bishop Robinson, in London as a guest of the gay rights group Stonewall for its annual “Hero of the Year” awards dinner at the Victoria and Albert Museum tonight, said that Mr Obama’s campaign team had sought him last year and he had the “honour” of three private conversations with the future president of the United States last May and June.

“The first words out of his mouth were: ”˜Well you’re certainly causing a lot of trouble’, My response to him was: ”˜Well that makes two of us’.”

He said that Mr Obama had indicated his support for equal civil rights for gay and lesbian people and described the election as a “religious experience”.

Bishop Robinson described his conversations with him as part of Mr Obama’s “extraordinary” outreach to all religious communities, not just Christian groups. Mr Obama, although not a member of The Episcopal Church to which Bishop Robinson belongs, is a committed Christian with the United Church of Christ.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

What a nasty headline that is. ICSC is the International Council of Shopping Centers.

Voters in U.S. 2008 presidential election: c. 131 million
Total voters in all U.S. pres. elections, 1788-1908: c. 137 million

—From the Progressive Policy Institute

Charleston has a special place in the heart of president-elect Barack Obama, as anyone who heard his victory speech Tuesday night could tell.

“Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and on the front porches of Charleston,” he told the crowd of 1 million gathered at Chicago’s Grant Park and millions more watching at home.

Obama spent a warm spring day on one of Charleston’s most handsome porches during a campaign stop in April 2007.

Read it all. It really is a wonderful city in numerous ways. Those of you who have yet to visit, you need to put it on your “some day in the future” list–KSH.

‘It’s been an amazing demonstration of the vitality of the democratic process. A record turnout. And the sense therefore that the issues in the election, the issues about the outgoing American administration, have actually stirred the moral imagination of the United States in ways that people didn’t expect. Given the sort of turnout that we have in British elections it would be quite nice to have an election one of these days that stirred our imagination to that extent.’

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In light of Barack Obama’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential election, many people are considering what his election might mean for race relations in America. Reflections from several African-American Baptist ministers suggest that although they see Obama’s election as an important moment, it must be just one step on a longer road toward racial reconciliation.

“The election of Barack is the beginning of a movement toward the unification of a nation and the pulling down of religious, political and social divides that have poisoned the very fabric of our nation,” said William Buchanan, pastor of Fifteenth Avenue Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn.

“Emotion coursed through my being at the announcement that Barack Obama had become the new president-elect of the United States,” Buchanan told EthicsDaily.com. “The moment was surreal for me, a 61-year-old African-American, who, as a young man in Georgia, witnessed the displacement of my family because of my father’s civic involvement in voter registration for the ”˜Negro.’”

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The Federal Communications Commission has decided to grant Google, Motorola, Dell and Microsoft permission to develop “white space” devices that megachurch pastors worry will interfere with their wireless mics.

The “white space” devices would use the same radio frequency that wireless microphones use, which means that pastors who use wireless microphones could have their sermons interrupted. Companies like Google and Microsoft want to use the frequencies to send broadband Internet to remote areas of the country.

In a statement issued Tuesday (Nov. 4), the FCC promised to “act promptly to remove from the market any equipment found to be causing harmful interference and will require the responsible parties to take appropriate actions to remedy any interference that may occur.”

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As a result, the Democratic Party, including Senator Barack Obama, focused heavily on outreach to religious voters, including white evangelicals who voted overwhelmingly for President Bush, and talked more openly than ever before about faith.

So did all the God-talk pay off?

The verdict appears to be mixed, but Mr. Obama does appear to have scored some significant victories, especially among Roman Catholics, according to nationwide surveys of voters leaving the polls on Tuesday and telephone interviews of some people who had voted early.

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Washington state’s dramatic Election Day vote to decriminalize assisted suicide – which on Wednesday was drawing media attention around the world – means the debate can no longer be avoided in Canada, especially B.C.

One of the few things that both opponents and advocates of euthanasia for the terminally ill agree on is that it is time to expose this emotion-charged issue to the full light of day.

With the so-called “Death with Dignity” bill receiving the support of three out of five voters, Washington joins Oregon as the only American states to legalize assisted suicide in certain conditions. The Pacific Northwest states enter the company of the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.

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Voters approved Initiative 1000 on Tuesday, making Washington the second state to give terminally ill people the option of medically assisted suicide.

The ballot measure, patterned after Oregon’s “Death with Dignity” law, allows a terminally ill person to be prescribed lethal medication, which would be self-administered.

With about 43 percent of the expected vote counted Tuesday in unofficial returns, I-1000 was being approved by a margin of about 58 percent to about 42 percent.

Supporters, led publicly by Democratic former Gov. Booth Gardner, said the initiative would provide a compassionate way for terminally ill people to die.

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We reflected and agonized about the pain that had characterized our efforts to uphold the Anglican Communion in good stead; the events of Lambeth 1998, the Primates meeting of Dromantine 2005 and Dar-es-Salaam 2007. We thanked God for sustaining us with courage to stand up for the historic and apostolic Christian faith as revealed in the Scriptures. We were particularly thankful for the organs that have mobilized us and kept us focused and engaged around the issues that have plagued the Anglican Communion. CAPA and the Global South were appreciated and Archbishop John Chew who was at the meeting was recognized with deep warmth of Christian love. He warmed up the meeting with the presentation of copies of the Catechism, a product of the Global South. The commitment of the Global South to resource the Communion was underlined by Archbishop Chew and applauded by the meeting. His call for sustained engagement by the Global South with the process of the Anglican Covenant was supported. We further shared our experiences of both GAFCON and Lambeth; and the statements emanating from the two meetings were shared. Those at Lambeth shared how the absence of some of the CAPA Members was acutely felt. They commended the Indaba framework, it provided space for intense and deep conversations guided by Scriptural readings, and they were particularly encouraged by confessions of discomfort by some Bishops from USA and Canada with the persistent undermining of the authority of Scripture by some of their colleagues. Participants from the CAPA family also appreciated the opportunity for fellowship and witness at the Lambeth; the Archbishop of Sudan was particularly commended for his statement. The Lambeth Conference Walk of Witness, which symbolized the Church’s commitment to improving the quality of life of God’s people through the MDGs’ framework and the multicultural worship that permeated the meeting were noted as some of the highlights at Lambeth. The Lambeth Conference, it was highlighted, did not make any resolutions but offered the Anglican Covenant as one the means forward. The GAFCON, it was reported, was a great time of fellowship and spiritual blessings. The Jerusalem venue and the excursions were appreciated by participants as they deepened the reflections, ”˜It was like walking through the Bible Events physically’…

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Barack Obama may not have been the Catholic hierarchy’s favored candidate in the U.S. presidential race because of his support for abortion rights, but the Vatican on Wednesday (Nov. 5) hailed his election as a “choice that unites.”

“America…is truly the country where everything can happen,” said a front-page editorial in the official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. “America is truly the country of the new frontier … able to overcome fractures and divisions that until only recently could seem incurable.”

The article, written by Giuseppe Fiorentino, appeared next to a full-color photo of the Obama family.

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John Green is is senior fellow for religion and American Politics for the Pew Center and one of the absolute top analysts of how religion affects American politics. Less than 9 hours after his first look at the exit poll data late late Tuesday night, he was back on the phone talking to reporters. Iron man!

His take: Comparing the 2004 election to 2008, the biggest shifts were in turnout of blacks, Hispanics and other minorities, and the margins of support for Obama versus Kerry. Ditto about younger voters. So while the exit polls do show shifts within various religious divisions, those changes may be tied directly to those changes in cultural/age/race voting. For instance, younger voters tend to lean to the Democrats, even within otherwise Republican groups. So a modest shift in the white evangelical vote — 3-5% more voted for Obama compared with Kerry 2004 — might be tied more to a higher youth turnout rather than formerly GOP voters going for Obama.

Read the whole thing.