The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out ”” that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

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I needed Kleenex for this one, which is oh so in keeping with the spirit of the season–watch it all.

One by one, the students in Rabbi Norman Linzer’s class last week wrestled with the headlines and their emotions. Some said Mr. Madoff’s religious affiliation was irrelevant; others worried that his Judaism might tarnish their own, that outside eyes would not be able to see past his faith.

Since Mr. Madoff was charged by federal prosecutors with orchestrating a $50 billion fraud, each day has brought new pain to the nation’s best-known Jewish institution of higher education ”” word that another familiar charity tied to Jewish causes had been thrust into financial uncertainty, another university family’s savings depleted.

Yeshiva, a campus of about 7,000 students in Upper Manhattan, is grappling with a sense of personal betrayal that extends beyond the $110 million it says it lost in investments with Mr. Madoff, who had been on the board of trustees since 1996. There is resentment; fear of the revival of ugly, old stereotypes; and, after the fall of a favorite son, uncertainty about how Jewish institutions like theirs should choose role models.

At a school that aims to inculcate ethics and interpersonal morals in its students along with academics ”” to train future doctors, lawyers, educators and financiers to not just be good at their jobs but to perform them in accordance with traditional Jewish ideals ”” the story of Mr. Madoff has turned into the consummate teaching moment.

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There is a teaching in the Talmud that says an individual who comes before God after death will be asked a series of questions, the first one of which is, “Were you honest in your business dealings?” But it is the Ten Commandments that have weighed most heavily on the mind of Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles in light of the sins for which Bernard L. Madoff stands accused.

“You shouldn’t steal,” Rabbi Wolpe said. “And this is theft on a global scale.”

The full scope of the misdeeds to which Mr. Madoff has confessed in swindling individuals and charitable groups has yet to be calculated, and he is far from being convicted. But Jews all over the country are already sending up something of a communal cry over a cost they say goes beyond the financial to the theological and the personal.

This is a really big deal. I was chatting online with a Jewish friend in New York today and he said “It’s shaken the community like nothing I’ve ever seen” with the possible exception of 9/11. Read it all.

This week, pastors throughout the South Hills plan to remind, in their holiday sermons, of the Christian faith’s belief in expectation and aspiration in times of financial and other uncertainties.

Most ministers and priests we talked to said they are praying that their holiday sermons result in small gestures of kindness, generosity and mutual respect that will spread throughout today’s troubled world.

“We are each a point of light in a circle of hope, and each of us needs to pass this hope along to others,” is the message the Rev. Dennis Molnar said he has offered his congregation this Advent season at Wallace Memorial Presbyterian Church, 1146 Green Tree Road in Green Tree.

His Christmas message tonight and tomorrow will remind his congregants to take the light of hope into shadowy places.

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Usually, Cristina Perez’s students at St. Agatha Catholic School begin penning their wish lists as soon as Christmas decorations pop up at nearby International Mall. This year, Perez wants her sixth- and seventh-graders to think about gifts a little differently.

”We have discussed ways in which they can help around the house,” says the West Miami-Dade special education teacher. “We’ve also discussed service projects. If you don’t have money, you can give of your time. Everybody can do something for someone else.”

The idea is to emphasize giving of a different sort — and gratitude. ”I tell them that no matter how bad they have it,” Perez says, “someone else is worse off.”

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Muhammad Fawaz is a very serious college junior with a stern gaze and a reluctant smile that barely cloaks suppressed anger. He never wanted to attend Jordan University. He hates spending hours each day commuting.

As a high school student, Mr. Fawaz, 20, had dreamed of earning a scholarship to study abroad. But that was impossible, he said, because he did not have a “wasta,” or connection. In Jordan, connections are seen as essential for advancement and the wasta system is routinely cited by young people as their primary grievance with their country.

So Mr. Fawaz decided to rebel. He adopted the serene, disciplined demeanor of an Islamic activist. In his sophomore year he was accepted into the student group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Jordan’s largest, most influential religious, social and political movement, one that would ultimately like to see the state governed by Islamic law, or Shariah. Now he works to recruit other students to the cause.

“I find there is justice in the Islamic movement,” Mr. Fawaz said one day as he walked beneath the towering cypress trees at Jordan University. “I can express myself. There is no wasta needed.”

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Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.

“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn.

A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her. “When I finally read the book for myself,” she said, “it was an amazing experience.”

The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.

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It starts just after 10 a.m. EST for those of you who enjoy this kind of thing.

The Veterans Administration says [Jason] Brunson is 70 percent disabled. He has post-traumatic stress disorder, among other medical problems. He and his wife, Ellen, live with their two children and their son’s fiancee in St. Augustine, Fla.

When Jason was in the Army, he earned $3,600 a month. Now, the family lives on less than half of that. After they pay for Jason’s medical costs, the bills and the rent, they have about $9 left. Jason’s wife, Ellen, said she considered moving the family in with her mother before she found help from nonprofit organizations that help veterans and their families. So far, the family says, it has received about $7,000 in financial assistance from the groups. They don’t usually get cash, though ”” the checks go directly to the Brunsons’ creditors.

Listen to it all from NPR.

With its quaint downtown and tree-lined streets, the unpretentious city of Cleveland, Tenn., in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains seems an unlikely epicenter for a $50-billion-a-year financial industry.

But this is where W. Allan Jones founded Check Into Cash, the granddaddy of modern payday lenders, which cater to millions of financially strapped working people with short-term loans — at annualized interest rates of 459%.

“It’s the craziest business,” said Jones, 55, a genial homegrown tycoon who founded his privately held company in 1993. “Consumers love us, but consumer groups hate us.”

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Amid a drumbeat of grim economic reports, President-elect Barack Obama’s top economic advisors met Tuesday to refine plans for a massive stimulus proposal, promising the money would not go toward dubious pork-barrel projects.

Vice President-elect Joe Biden met with seven advisors for an hour here as Obama vacationed in Hawaii. With the incoming administration acknowledging the stimulus plan could cost as much as $775 billion over two years, Biden seemed intent on reassuring Americans the money would not be wasted.

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In the weeks just before Christmas of 1933 ”” 75 years ago ”” a mysterious offer appeared in The Repository, the daily newspaper here. It was addressed to all who were suffering in that other winter of discontent known as the Great Depression. The bleakest of holiday seasons was upon them, and the offer promised modest relief to those willing to write in and speak of their struggles. In return, the donor, a “Mr. B. Virdot,” pledged to provide a check to the neediest to tide them over the holidays.

Not surprisingly, hundreds of letters for Mr. B. Virdot poured into general delivery in Canton ”” even though there was no person of that name in the city of 105,000. A week later, checks, most for as little as $5, started to arrive at homes around Canton. They were signed by “B. Virdot.”

The gift made The Repository’s front page on Dec. 18, 1933. The headline read: “Man Who Felt Depression’s Sting to Help 75 Unfortunate Families: Anonymous Giver, Known Only as ”˜B. Virdot,’ Posts $750 to Spread Christmas Cheer.” The story said the faceless donor was “a Canton man who was toppled from a large fortune to practically nothing” but who had returned to prosperity and now wanted to give a Christmas present to “75 deserving fellow townsmen.” The gifts were to go to men and women who might otherwise “hesitate to knock at charity’s door for aid.”

I can’t say enough good things about this wonderful piece. It moved me so much I shared it with the whole family at dinner. Read it all–KSH.

They played the oddest game in high school football history last month down in Grapevine, Texas.

It was Grapevine Faith vs. Gainesville State School and everything about it was upside down. For instance, when Gainesville came out to take the field, the Faith fans made a 40-yard spirit line for them to run through.

Did you hear that? The other team’s fans?….

“I never in my life thought I’d hear people cheering for us to hit their kids,” recalls Gainesville’s QB and middle linebacker, Isaiah. “I wouldn’t expect another parent to tell somebody to hit their kids. But they wanted us to!”

Makes the heart very glad–read it all (Hat tip: TCW).

A Ferrari-driving vice president of Fry’s Electronics Inc. who was allegedly such a heavyweight gambler that casinos chartered private planes to fly him to Las Vegas has been arrested on charges he embezzled more than $65 million from the retailer to fuel his lavish lifestyle and pay off debts.

Ausaf Umar Siddiqui is accused by the IRS of concocting a scheme in which he cut side deals with some of Fry’s suppliers, buying their goods at higher prices and in greater quantities than normal in exchange for kickbacks of up to 31 percent of the sales price.

Yuck. Read it all.

To better understand how investors found themselves in their predicament, it helps to take a look at a synthetic CDO called Torquay — named after a small town in Australia’s Victoria state, famed for its surfing. Torquay was born during the credit boom in 2006.

Torquay belongs to the most popular type of synthetic CDO, known as a mezzanine deal. Morgan Stanley estimates as much as $400 billion in mezzanine securities are outstanding. Bankers engineered them to provide the highest possible return while still garnering gold-standard credit ratings. But one feature made them a lot riskier than a similar portfolio of corporate bonds: If losses to defaults rose above a certain threshold — typically between 3% and 6% of the underlying pool of debt — investors would lose all their money.

An arm of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. won a mandate from an Australian bank called Grange Securities to put together Torquay. J.P. Morgan pioneered the use of credit derivatives in the early 1990s. People close to the bank say J.P. Morgan had revenues of $400 million to $500 million from synthetic CDOs in 2006.

J.P. Morgan and other investment banks typically paired with local financial institutions to market synthetic CDOs in Australia, where small investors such as the town of Parkes make up a large part of the market.

The mind boggles. A town in Australia bought a higher yielding instrument with their money, which, if certain conditions were met, would result in them losing all their money. The collateral damage of these pernicious CDO’s and CDS’s continues apace worldwide. Read it all–KSH.

“We really just want the status quo to exist which is leave us alone, let us follow Christ as we have been doing and do that in the building that we’re in right now,” said Anglican priest, Father Carlos Raines.

Last December the Diocese of San Joaquin split from the Episcopal Church over the issue of homosexuality.

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Long ago, it was considered revolutionary to have a copy of the Bible written in the common language of the people. The world’s leading Bible publisher is taking that idea further. Representatives of the publisher are travelling across the country in a big bus, inviting people to help write a new edition of the Bible, one verse at a time.

Listen to it all from NPR.

From here (La Tribune, in french):

Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, the co-founder of hedge fund Access International Advisors, was discovered to be dead by his own hand early Tuesday in his office in Manhattan after losing as much as $1.4 billion in the alleged fraud of Bernard L. Madoff.

(ACNS) The Archbishop of Burundi, the Most Revd Bernard Ntahoturi, recently led a 5-strong ecumenical delegation of church leaders from Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo that met with the presidents of the D.R. Congo and Rwanda in order to convey to them a strong message advocating for peace. “People are tired and want an end to the war,” they said, “and dialogue costs much less than armed confrontation”.

More than 250,000 people fled their homes in the eastern part of the D.R. Congo in order to escape the fighting that broke out between the army and rebels in August. The delegation that was initiated by the AACC added their support to Churches in the D.R. Congo who are working with other agencies to alleviate the suffering of people, especially the displaced; and trying to encourage the disarmament and repatriation of armed Rwandan groups living in eastern DRC.

Like some of Bernard Madoff’s clients, a Florida restaurant owner was lucky enough to withdraw part of his investment before the money manager allegedly confessed to a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Now he’s worried he might be asked to give it back.

53-year-old investor, who asked not to be identified to protect his stake, took out about $600,000 this year from his $1.5 million account, using some of it to pay down a mortgage. He and other Madoff clients who withdrew funds as long as six years ago may be sued on behalf of other victims to return profits and even principal, securities and bankruptcy lawyers say.

“Right now there are Madoff winners and Madoff losers,” said Lynn LoPucki, who teaches bankruptcy law at Harvard University. “Before this is over there will be nothing but Madoff losers.”

What an unbelievable mess. Read it all.

A very wonderful story much in keeping with the spirit of the season–watch it all.

Liberals who see Warren as a garden-variety conservative evangelical defined primarily by his opposition to gay marriage accuse Obama of selling them out. Gays and lesbians enraged by Warren’s strong opposition to gay marriage in last month’s California referendum charge Obama with pandering to white evangelicals and fear the president-elect has gone out of his way to offend them in order to curry favor with straight conservatives.

But a more benign view on parts of the religious left casts Warren as the evangelical best positioned to lead moderately conservative white Protestants toward a greater engagement with the issues of poverty and social justice, and away from a relentless focus on abortion and gay marriage.

Read it all and also take the time to read an opposing point of view from Richard Cohen.

The growing alliance of Mr. Obama and Mr. Warren ”” each of the two publicly refers to the other as “friend” ”” suggests that Mr. Obama hopes to capitalize on the signs of potential generational and political divisions within the evangelical Christian flock. For his part, Mr. Warren is increasingly being spoken of as a kind of minister to the nation, a status previously occupied by the Rev. Billy Graham.

V. Gene Robinson, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, whose consecration caused a painful divide in his church because he is openly gay, said that when he heard about the selection of Mr. Warren, “it was like a slap in the face.”

Bishop Robinson had been an early public endorser of Mr. Obama’s candidacy, and said he had helped serve as a liaison between the campaign and the gay community. He said he had called officials who work for Mr. Obama to share his dismay, and been told that Mr. Obama was trying to reach out to conservatives and give everybody a seat at the table.

“I’m all for Rick Warren being at the table,” Bishop Robinson said, “but we’re not talking about a discussion, we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.”

Read it all.

Over the last half-century, the American Church has become an embarrassment to the global Church. They ceased to be Anglican in any meaningful sense, or in some cases even Christian, and the rest of the Anglican world finally decided to clean house. Certain people hijacked the American Anglican “family name,” but had no real ideological connection to the historic faith.

The world is telling them to go find their own house.

Only the most narrow minded person, whose vision of Christianity is parochial enough to see the Church as primarily European and North American, could be confused about the situation. The amazing thing is how patient the global majority has been with the struggling, shrinking American church.

Global Anglicans are a tolerant group, but are finally telling the liberal interlopers to go their own way and stop pretending to be Anglican. They are reaching out to the actual Anglicans that remain in North America and are working to rebuild the American branch of the movement. Worldwide Anglicanism is trying to save the brand!

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During this holiday season of hard times, not even houses of God have been spared. Some lenders believe more churches than ever have fallen behind on loans or defaulted this year. Some churches, and at least one company that specialized in church lending, have filed for bankruptcy. Church giving is down as much as 15% in some places, pastors and lenders report.

The financial problems are crimping a church building boom that began in the 1990s, when megachurches multiplied, turning many houses of worship into suburban social centers complete with bookstores, gyms and coffee bars. Lenders say mortgage applications are down, while some commercial lenders no longer see churches as a safe investment.

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That’s what Robin Shahan did. The San Ramon, Calif., computer programmer was laid off from Chevron in 1999 and SBC in 2004. In 2005, AT&T let her go when her contract ended. When she was still unemployed months later, Shahan began upgrading her skills. She reviewed a technical book for a friend, which landed her name on the back cover, and read more than 7,000 pages of technical material. She rewrote some of her old applications in the new technologies she’d studied. She posted answers to hundreds of questions on Internet message boards.

“It was like giving myself a pop quiz every day,” says Shahan, who danced around her living room when she was offered a job in March. Shahan was in a position to turn her unemployment into something positive and that helped ease her fears. But the isolation was challenging, she says.

“Prayer helps,” she says. “But if you let your thoughts get the best of you, you can wind yourself up pretty fast. After all, it is like the ultimate rejection, but most of the time it doesn’t have anything to do with you,” she said about a layoff.

Read it all.

The judge dismissed a last-ditch effort by the diocese to keep the property when it claimed in September that part of the historic Falls Church in Falls Church city is actually owned by Christ Episcopal Church in Alexandria.

The judge seemed incredulous that the diocese would make such a claim, which, he said, contradicted the testimony of one of the experts ”” church historian Edward L. Bond ”” who appeared on the stand on behalf of the organization.

“Alexandria’s ownership of this property is an 11th-hour revision in theory made 17 months into this litigation, which was designed to fit into the narrowing window left by this court’s multiple letter opinions,” the judge wrote.

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Bishop John Packer said he agreed “in principle” he agreed with the proposal to move the education provision over to local authorities.

But he added: “My fear, however, is that it will be underfunded and that because it is hidden away from the general population of those local authorities, not much pressure will be put on them actually to achieve the aims that are to be expressed in the Bill.

“I hope that there will be particular expression of the ways in which we can provide support and encouragement for young offenders.

Read it all.

See what you think.