The Virginia Episcopalian, the official publication of the Diocese of Virginia, is reporting in the current edition that the Executive Board has “authorized the treasurer to open a $1 million line of credit to cover anticipated legal expenses for the near-term. That line has since been increased to $2 million and about $1 million has been accessed.”

In addition, the Executive Board of the Diocese of Virginia authorized diocesan staff to plan “the sale of non-strategic diocesan real property” to raise needed cash.

The Diocese also revealed that nine churches have not paid any of their pledges which Mike Kerr, Treasurer of the Diocese, estimated a loss to the diocese of $50,000. In addition, other churches have not paid their pledges in full causing the diocese is to run a deficit of expenses over income from those pledges.

Read it all

“One of the charges against Iowa is that we don’t really represent the rest of the country,” he said, alluding to the fact that blacks form less than three percent of the caucus participants. “Here’s a chance to make a statement about the inclusiveness of Iowa.”

—Jon Muller, 42, an Obama supporter and the chief financial officer of an education nonprofit group, in the New York Times

The murderous tribal violence that has spread through Kenya in recent days would be horrifying anywhere. It is particularly tragic to see this happening in a country that seemed finally to be on the path to a democratic and economically sound future. There may still be a chance to retrieve some of these hopes. That will likely require stepping back from the suspicious and hastily declared election results that sparked this ugly upheaval.

Officially, those results gave a second term to President Mwai Kibaki, despite independent reports of egregious irregularities. Even the chairman of Kenya’s national election commission now says that he was pressured into an early declaration and cannot say who won.

Kibaki should renounce that official declaration and the embarassingly swift swearing-in that followed. He should then meet with his principal challenger, Raila Odinga, to discuss a possible vote recount, election re-run or other reasonable compromise.

That isn’t likely to happen without outside prodding.

Read it all.

January 3, 2008

Dear Kenyan Friends and Friends of Kenya,

You may have heard that there is a terrible outbreak of violence in Kenya in the wake of the most closely contested election in Kenya’s history. So far probably 300 have been killed. In Eldoret, about fifty were burned to death when an Assembly of God church containing people seeking refuge was set on fire.

I was able to speak with the Archbishop. He and Mama Alice were in good spirits despite the fact that they were unable to leave the house because the streets are so dangerous. He has also been battling malaria, but is feeling better today.

Bishop Murdoch and I are asking that you please re-double your prayers for the Archbishop and for Kenya that peace would prevail. ABp Nzimbi confirmed that the overwhelming majority of Kenyans want peace.

The Rt. Rev. Dr. Bill Atwood

Suffragan Bishop for International Affairs

All Saints Cathedral Diocese, Nairobi

Anglican Church of Kenya

One would be in less danger
From the wiles of a stranger
If one’s own kin and kith
Were more fun to be with.

–Ogden Nash, Family Court

The Archbishop of Canterbury told a national radio audience on December 19 that the gist of his Advent letter was that he “wanted to encourage bishops around the world to come to the Lambeth conference because I think that it is better to meet face to face and talk about these things rather than dealing with them at right angles or through other people or through slogans.”

He said he intended his Dec 14 Advent letter to ”˜set out what I thought were the basic minimum conditions for staying in a close relationship as a world wide church. I wanted to suggest some practical steps in the next few months to make some conversation happen and get some facilitated meeting moving among the Anglican Communion’s disparate factions.’

Plans to hold a pre-Lambeth meeting for conservatives did not signal disloyalty, Dr Williams said, as such a meeting ”˜would not have any official status as far as the Communion is concerned’.

Read it all.

Early in the statement, they warn against two opposing “temptations” in public life that “can distort the Church’s defense of human life and dignity.”

The first temptation is “moral equivalence” that treats issues as diverse as abortion and minimum wage policy, for example, as equally weighty.

The bishops repeatedly emphasize that “the direct and intentional destruction of innocent human life from the moment of conception until natural death is always wrong and is not just one issue among many. It must always be opposed” (No. 28).

The second temptation is to think that the Church cares about only one issue, dismissing or ignoring all other serious threats to human life and dignity.

The bishops explain that the Church cares about the dignity of the human person in a wide variety of ways, while noting that not every individual can be actively involved in each of these concerns.

The statement helpfully distinguishes between actions that are intrinsically evil, that is, those that are “so deeply flawed that they are always opposed to the authentic good of persons” and can never be condoned (No. 22), and positive policy initiatives that foster human dignity and the common good.

In the category of intrinsically evil actions, the statement names abortion, euthanasia, destructive research on human embryos, human cloning, genocide, torture, racism and the targeting of noncombatants in acts of terror or war.

Read it all.

Finally, there is the question of civil unions. Some politicians and others say that they are against same-sex marriage but in favor of legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, with all or most of the rights and responsibilities of marriage, only falling under a different rubric. If law and policy are at least to do no harm to marriage, it is critical that they avoid treating nonmarital conduct and relationships as if they were marital. There are clear moral lines””and not merely semantic ones””between what is marital and what is not, and the law should respect them. If they are blurred or erased, the public understanding of the meaning of marriage will erode.

Some of the benefits traditionally associated with marriage may legitimately be made more widely available in an effort to meet the needs of people who are financially interdependent with a person or persons to whom they are not married. Private contracts between such people should be sufficient to accomplish all or most of what they consider desirable.

If, however, a jurisdiction moves in the direction of creating a formalized system of domestic partnerships, it is morally crucial that the privileges, immunities, and other benefits and responsibilities contained in the package offered to nonmarried partners not be predicated on the existence or presumption of a sexual relationship between them. Benefits should be made available to, for example, a grandparent and adult grandchild who are living together and caring for each other. The needs that domestic-partnership schemes seek to address have nothing to do with whether the partners share a bed and what they do in it. The law should simply take no cognizance of the question of a sexual relationship. It should not, that is, treat a nonmarital sexual relationship as a public good.

The defense of life against abortion and embryo-destructive research calls America back to the founding principles of our regime and to reflection on the justifying point and purposes of law and government. The defense of marriage, meanwhile, shores up the cultural preconditions for a regime of democratic republican government dedicated to human equality, fundamental human rights, and principled limits on governmental powers.

These causes should not be regarded as distractions from other pressing goals, such as economic growth, assistance to the needy, environmental protection, and the defense of the nation against terrorism. They are, rather, causes that spring from the foundational moral purposes of law and the state. They are today among the most urgent causes.

Read it all.

THE Church of England response to the draft Anglican Covenant was published on Wednesday, in advance of a meeting of the international Design Group later this month.

There is a new draft text, overseen by the House of Bishops’ theological group, and building on earlier work done by the Faith and Order Advisory Group. A key addition is a clause prohibiting interfering in other dioceses or provinces without official sanction.

The text identifies a need for greater theological justification and context, wants a “minimalist” approach to doctrinal argument, and suggests significant revisions in key areas such as Section 6, “The Unity of the Communion”, especially on the part played by the Primates’ Meeting.

Read the whole thing.

Huckabee is also. Interesting.

A Roman Catholic priest was arrested on perjury charges Wednesday, accused of lying about his relationship with a mobster in testimony to a grand jury investigating a casino owner’s possible ties to organized crime.

The Rev. Joseph Sica was arrested outside his home in Scranton. He is an adviser to Mount Airy Casino Resort owner Louis DeNaples, who is the subject of the grand jury investigation.

Read it all.

Read it all.

The Episcopal priest hunches over a worn wooden table at the front of the church. She scrutinizes her masterpiece — God’s masterpiece, she says — and is calm but careful as she fills in razor-thin “kitty whisker lines” on a piece of art that looks finished to the untrained eye.

But the icon, which is a painted scene from Scripture, is not finished, and it’s much more than art. It’s a way to have a one-on-one conversation with God, if you ask the Rev. Elizabeth Lilly.

Lilly’s friends and family consider her an unfinished icon, made up of strokes of faith and resilience.

Read it all.

Read it all.

[i]Note from the elves: We’ll accept further comments to the thread by e-mail: T19elves@yahoo.com[/i]

Canadian church leaders have appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury to address moves by dissidents to join a South American church and minister illegitimately in Canada.

In a pastoral statement dated Nov. 29, a week after the Anglican Network met, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate (national bishop) of the Anglican Church of Canada, said he deplored “recent actions on the part of the primate and General Synod of the Province of the Southern Cone to extend its jurisdiction in Canada.” The statement was also signed by the church’s four metropolitans, or regional archbishops.

Referring to Bishop Don Harvey and Bishop Malcolm Harding’s intent to minister to disaffected churches in Canada, Archbishop Hiltz said such ministry is “inappropriate, unwelcome and invalid.”

Read it all.

Check it out.

Diocesan spokesman [Van] McCalister said the posting was accurate. But Abbot Joseph of Holy Transfiguration called it “outdated and not entirely accurate.”

Holy Transfiguration, said Abbot Joseph, is traditional and contemplative; but, he said, “the previous abbot (now deceased) gave Holy Communion to Fr. Schofield (who has not visited our monastery since he became a bishop many years ago.)” The monastery’s practice in administering communion, said the abbot, “is stricter now, and we simply follow the rules of the Church.”

As for being charismatic, the monastery once had “a weekly prayer meeting (very low key by charismatic standards),” said Abbot Joseph, “but we discontinued it years ago.”

The abbot called it “inaccurate” to call Schofield an “extern member” of the monastery (akin to an oblate in Latin monasteries). Holy Transfiguration’s contact with Schofield is “quite infrequent,” said Abbot Joseph, “though we consider him a friend and hold him in respect, and I’m sure he relies on our prayers. He has no canonical relationship to our monastery, but simply a spiritual affiliation.”

Read it all.

To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.

To understand them, consider our concern with world population. Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce.

If most of the world’s 6.5 billion people were in cold storage and not metabolizing or consuming, they would create no resource problem. What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate.

Read it all.

If you’re younger than 35, you’ll probably live long enough to put David Levy’s prediction to the test. Levy says that by 2050 we’ll be creating robots so lifelike, so imbued with human-seeming intelligence and emotions, as to be nearly indistinguishable from real people. And we’ll have sex with these robots. Some of us will even marry them. And it will all be good.

Levy lays out his vision of a Brave New Carnal World in Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, which, despite its extended riffs on sex toys through the ages, is a snigger-free book. Levy’s no Al Goldstein. Rather he’s a 62-year-old British chess master turned artificial-intelligence expert persuaded that robot sex can brighten the lives of many, many unhappy people. “Great sex on tap for everyone, 24/7,” he writes on the final page of the book. What’s not to like?

“Chess” and “sex” aren’t words that normally share the same sentence, but in Levy’s case, the one led to the other. A keen chessman since boyhood, by the time he got to St. Andrews University he played at the international level. At the university he got interested in computers and the challenge of programming machines to play chess. Eventually he earned international recognition for his work on chess-playing computers and natural-language software, and in the mid ’90s headed a team that won the Loebner Prize, widely regarded as the world championship of conversational software. Today he owns a firm that develops electronic hand-held brain games.

Read it all.

You really need to take the time to see this video (the video link accompanies the text story). The birds and their “dances” have to be seen to be believed.

THE soaring price of oil is altering the wealth and influence of nations and industries.

The surging price of oil, from just over $US10 a barrel a decade ago to $US100 yesterday, is altering the wealth and influence of nations and industries around the world.

These power shifts will only widen if prices keep climbing, as many analysts predict. Costly oil already is forcing sweeping changes in the airline and auto sectors. It is intensifying the politics of climate change and adding urgency to the search both for fresh sources of crude and for oil alternatives once deemed fringe.

The long oil-price boom is posing wrenching challenges for the world’s poorest nations, while enriching and emboldening producers in the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela. Their increasing muscle has a flip side: a decline of US clout in many parts of the world.

Steep gasoline prices also threaten America’s long love affair with the automobile, while putting strains on many lower-income people outside big cities, who must spend an increasing share of their budgets just on fuel to get to work.

Read it all from the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal.

Under the former Bishop, Riah Abu el-Assal, the diocese was closely linked to Fatah and the late PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and was a champion of the Palestinian cause. Anglican Palestinians have played a disproportionally prominent role in Palestinian life and are found in the professional classes, as well as in politics and civil society and include the late Columbia University Professor Edward Said, politician Hanan Ashrawi and Canon Naim Ateek, the president of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre.

One consequence of this activist stance was that it partially protected Palestinian Anglicans from the predations at the hands of Islamist or political activists.

Bishop Darwani has quietly moved away from some of the rejectionist policies espoused by Bishop Riah, and was instrumental in setting up the Archbishop of Canterbury’s dialogue commission with the chief rabbinate of Israel.

However, public identification as a pro-Israel church is a worrisome development for the small Arab Anglican community in the Palestinian Authority territories, and could have baleful consequences its leaders tell ReligiousIntelligence.com.

The leadership team of GAFCON contacted ReligiousIntelligence.Com to say that a letter was sent to Bishop Suheil Dawani on December 24, two days prior to the press announcement. Two of the leadership team, Archbishop Peter Akinola and Archbishop Peter Jensen, had already reqested a meeting with him to discuss his concerns with him in the next two weeks.

Read it all.

Those who peruse the big Anglican blogs know that “Communion Conservatives” (those who advocate contending for the faith by staying in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion) and “Federal Conservatives” (those who are convinced one or both of those bodies are too far gone to the point they think it best orthodox at least prepare to leave) are rather close to each other’s throats at the moment.

To be honest, I have my opinion as to which side is most at blame, but that’s not my concern right now. This post may even seem a bit vague because I don’t want to engage in figure pointing. For my concern is that anger between the two sides is getting to and past the point that it will make it difficult for these two sides of orthodox Anglicans to work together in the future.

That distresses me. If it turns out the Federal Conservatives are right and the Communion Conservative eventually find staying in TEC and the like to be untenable, I want the Comm-Cons to feel they have a refuge in Common Cause and/or whatever church bodies the Fed-Cons form. Likewise, if a miracle happens and the Anglican Communion or even the Episcopal Church sufficiently reforms, I want Fed-Cons to feel they can return. I hope the current divisions between the two are temporary. And even if Comm-Cons and Fed-Cons remain on different tracks, I want them to be able still to work together on those things they can.

Read it all.

Here comes the world’s newest superpower. The rest of the world is gloomily contemplating economic slowdown and even recession. Not in Beijing. China is set to make 2008 the year it asserts its status as a global colossus by flexing frightening economic muscle on international markets, enjoying unprecedented levels of domestic consumption and showcasing itself to a watching world with a glittering £20bn Olympic Games.

The world’s most populous nation will mark the next 12 months with a coming-of-age party that will confirm its transformation in three decades from one of the poorest countries of the 20th century into the globe’s third-largest economy, its hungriest (and most polluting) consumer and the engine room of economic growth.

Once regarded at best as a sporting also-ran, China is widely tipped to top the medals table in the Beijing Olympics in August, an event in which the country’s leadership is investing huge importance and prestige.

Read it all.

In fact, psychologists at the University of Leicester in Britain recently produced the world’s first map of happiness. Using data from the emerging science of happiness, they created a color-coded atlas of bliss, a topography of the human spirit, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. It’s not climate or topography or some mysterious “energy” that is at work here, but national culture. Some cultures are simply better at producing happy citizens than others.

Not surprisingly, democracies tend to fare better than dictatorships, though it’s not clear which way the river of causality flows. Perhaps happy countries tend to embrace democracy and not the other way around. Trust of others is another prerequisite for a happy nation, and that is a troubling fact for fans of American happiness. In 1960, 58% of Americans felt most people could be trusted. By the 1990s, only 35% held that view. Indeed, given our economic and military muscle, the U.S. occupies a modest spot on the atlas of bliss. We are not as happy as we are wealthy.

The map contains more than a few surprises. Latin American countries, for instance, are among the happiest in the world, despite their relative poverty and often shaky political situations. “The Latino bonus,” some researchers have dubbed this phenomenon. One explanation: the close family ties found in Latin American countries and among many Latinos in the U.S.

Read it all.

During the recent approval process for historic preservation status for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, City Councilwoman Linda Saul-Sena said what she likes best is that the 1904-built church “has changed very little.”

The church’s surroundings, however, will undergo major changes this year.

With $2.5 million raised, the project will see the bulldozing of a two-story building and construction of a children’s chapel in the northeast corner of the church complex, which occupies a city block between Twiggs and Madison streets.

Before the work begins, the Rev. John Reese was compelled to move forward with seeking the local landmark designation. It was a decision years in the making.

Read it all.

Read it all.

ARE ANGLICAN PRIMATES prepared to overlook private blessings of same-sex couples, just not public ones?

“No way,” says a leading conservative archbishop.

But ”“ as one version of the story goes – a high-ranking Anglican official gave the nod to private blessings in speaking with an Episcopal bishop before American prelates responded to the primates (provincial leaders) in September. Moreover, the official was said to have based his okay on a claim that the Church of England also has a policy permissive of non-public homosexual blessings.

The official in question – Canon Kenneth Kearon, Secretary General of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) ”“ told TCC the report is “not quite accurate,” maintaining that he stressed the language of the 2004 Windsor Report and primates’ requests in speaking with the bishop in question – Washington Bishop John Chane. He also said it was “extremely unlikely” that he would have mentioned practice in the Church of England.

Bishop Chane commented little on his conversation with Kearon, but confirmed to TCC that there are differing interpretations on the matter of same-sex blessings within the Episcopal House of Bishops (HOB) – a fact that again calls into question claims by some Anglican Communion officials that The Episcopal Church (TEC) has “given the necessary assurances” on the matter.

Read it all.

The battle over homosexuality that has threatened to split the Anglican Communion could be decided at a June meeting in Jerusalem. On December 26, a conservative coalition led by the archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, announced a June 15-22 conference in the Holy Land to chart the church’s future course.

Divided into liberal and conservative factions, the 80-million member Anglican Communion is on the verge of breaking up over the consecration in 2003 of a gay priest as bishop of New Hampshire.

However, Anglicans are as divided over Israel as they over homosexuality. While the meeting will focus on the current crisis facing the church, some Anglican and Jewish supporters of the gathering hope the presence in Jerusalem this June of conservative Anglican bishops from every continent will present an opportunity to broaden Israel’s support in the developing world.

Read it all.

Master Sgt. Cindy Rathbun knew something was wrong three weeks after she arrived in Iraq in September 2006. Her blond hair began “coming out in clumps,” she says.
The Air Force personnel specialist, in the military for 25 years, had volunteered for her first combat zone job at Baghdad’s Camp Victory. She lived behind barbed wire and blast walls, but the war was never far.

“There were firefights all the time,” Rathbun says slowly, her voice flat. “There were car bombs. Boom! You see the smoke. The ground would shake.”

As the mother of three grown children prepared to fly home last February, she took a medic aside. Holding a zip-lock bag of hair, she asked whether this was normal. “He said it sometimes happens,” she says. “It’s the body’s way of displaying stress when we can’t express it emotionally.”

Read it all.