A VICAR from Yatton who decided to take a course in becoming a white witch has resigned from his day job.
The Weston & Somerset Mercury revealed last week how Reverend Chris Horseman of Westaway Park, has begun his training to become a white witch, whose supposed magic is designed to do good or counteract evil.
In relation to doctrine the Lambeth Conference (and, in England, the development of synodical government) were alternative to legal proceedings. All the experience of nineteenth century legal approaches to doctrine was that such methods failed. There is no reason to think that twenty-first century lawyers will be better judges of doctrine than nineteenth-century lawyers. There is no reason to think that twenty-first century bishops will be any more careful of claims of justice than were nineteenth-century bishops. And the first case in which the Primates find against the promoters will result in the court being blamed for its perverse finding and sections of the church refusing its jurisdiction. Stalemate.
Conferences and synods developed (in part) in order to talk and to keep talking and to enable argument and disagreement to continue within manageable bounds. Discourse, not law, is what keeps a communion together, keeps doctrinal debate in play, and enable both the reassertion of orthodoxy and adaptation to novel circumstances to proceed with the assent and through the reception of the majority.
It won’t please everyone. But, believe me, legal or semi-legal approaches to belief and faith will affront far, far more people.
“I am sorry, but I have a hard time buying the fact that a trader was able to set up a ‘secret trade’ of €4.9 billion without anybody finding out.”
—Ion-Marc Valahu, head of trading at Amas Bank, Switzerland as quoted by Reuters; please note that Societe Generale was recently given the Equity Derivatives House of the Year award
Q. So if we are headed into a downturn ”” you hear the word recession batted about almost every day now ”” how severe might it actually be?
A. I think people need to be careful about the language that they use. I think almost all economists agree that the economy is slowing down. Where people differ is whether that’s going to remain a slowdown but something short of the kind of more serious slowdown that’s often characterized as a recession, or whether we really do get into serious difficulty. And I think it is impossible to have a judgment that you’re going to have a very high level of confidence in, but I think what one can say with a fair measure of confidence is that the risk has increased.
And it’s gotten to the level which calls for policymakers to be very active in all of the various ways they can be to try to address these risks and minimize the probability of serious difficulty ”” or if we have it, minimize the severity and length of that difficulty. And that means the [Federal] Reserve Board and it also means the administration and Congress [will need to act] in a whole host of areas including, but not limited to, the stimulus that’s now being discussed.
We note with great sadness the retaliatory canonical actions of certain members of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, a Province of the Anglican Communion, against a Bishop of another Province of the Anglican Communion, the Right Reverend John David Schofield, Bishop of San Joaquin. We applaud, Bishop Schofield’s Primate, (since December 8, 2007) the Most Reverend Gregory Venables, for coming to the defense of one of his bishops.
We further must call into question the use of the particular Canon pertaining to the abandonment of the Communion inasmuch as the American Province is not a Communion. That particular designation is reserved for the worldwide expression of Anglicanism. In an age when Christianity must be increasingly serious in its endeavors to proclaim the received Gospel of Jesus Christ and to take seriously the Great Commission to “go and make disciples of all nations,” by baptizing, teaching, and obeying all that our Savior has commanded, we are distressed by litigious behavior that inhibits mission ministry.
Forward in Faith North America has endeavored to provide a safe place for orthodox Christians, and has sought a variety of measures, such as Alternative Primatial Oversight, as a means of preserving the “Faith once delivered to the saints.”
We commend Bishop Schofield, as one of the founding members of Forward in Faith North America.
On the issues, John Edwards says he should have the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination wrapped up.
For starters, the U.S. economy is on shakier ground now than it was four years ago when Edwards ran for president, decrying job losses due, he said, to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“We’ve all seen what happens with these trade deals,” he said recently.
But a clearly frustrated Edwards, the Seneca native who is running third in his native state, said his message has been lost in the media glare given two “celebrity candidates.”
More attention is focused on whether he’ll quit after Saturday’s Democratic primary than on what he’s saying.
Late last year, Dinallo encouraged Berkshire Hathaway, the company controlled by Warren E. Buffett, to enter the bond insurance business. At the time, Buffett said he did not want to invest in existing guarantors because of their financial problems, and he started his own firm instead.
Since then, the troubles have worsened. Last week, Fitch Ratings downgraded Ambac’s credit ratings to double-A, from triple-A. MBIA still has a triple-A rating from the three agencies; the others are Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service.
While $15 billion might seem like a large amount of money for banks to commit to bond guarantors at a time when many investors have lost faith in them, Haines said it would be smaller than the billions the banks might have to write down if the companies lost their top ratings or incurred major losses.
“It’s a calculated kind of risk,” he said.
A spokesman for Ambac did not return calls seeking comment. A spokeswoman for MBIA declined to comment.
Analysts say it is unclear how much money would be needed to capitalize the companies adequately. The ratings agencies have changed their requirements several times already as they update their assumptions of defaults and losses on mortgage securities.
Uncontrolled diabetes wreaks havoc on the body, often leading to kidney failure, blindness and death. A new study shows that the nation’s unchecked diabetes epidemic exacts a heavy financial toll as well: $174 billion a year. That’s about as much as the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and the global war on terrorism combined. It’s more than the $150 billion in damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.
The incidence of diabetes has ballooned ”” there are 1 million new cases a year ”” as more Americans become overweight or obese, according to the study, released Wednesday by the American Diabetes Association. The cost of diabetes ”” both in direct medical care and lost productivity ”” has swelled 32% since 2002, the report shows.
Diabetes killed more than 284,000 Americans last year, according to the diabetes association.
Diabetes costs the nation nearly as much as cancer, whose costs in 2006 totaled $206.3 billion, although cancer kills twice as many people, according to the American Cancer Society.
Religion and Hollywood normally don’t sound like mix well — but a Baptist church in Shreveport hopes it will be a good fit.
And Summer Grove Baptist — which built its sanctuary out of an old shopping mall — doesn’t always go by the book.
The church is thinking about selling part of its property to a new film institute and studio. They would exist side-by-side — with the film studio making “family friendly” films with a Christian message.
The congregation votes on the idea next Sunday.
Summer Grove, which moved into the old South Park Mall three years ago, is considering a proposal by the Louisiana Film Institute and Fountain Bridge Studios to buy part of the mall. It’s talking about paying the church approximately $2 million a year over 30 years.
The octave of prayer began in 1908, at the behest of Father Paul Wattson, an Anglican from the United States and founder of the Society of the Atonement, which later became the Franciscan Sisters and Friars of the Atonement.
He set the dates of the annual prayer octave for Jan. 18, which was at the time the feast of the Chair of St. Peter, and Jan. 25, feast of the Conversion of St. Paul.
“One hundred years after the first call to pray together for unity,” continued the Holy Father, “this Week of Prayer has now become a consolidated tradition.”
“Prayer is at the very heart of all Church life,” continued Benedict XVI, commenting on the decree of the Second Vatican Council on Church unity, “Unitatis Redintegratio.”
Rudy Giuliani has hit the skids in a Florida freefall that could shatter his presidential campaign and leave a two-man Republican contest in the state between John McCain and Mitt Romney, a Miami Herald poll shows.
Despite hovering over Florida voters for weeks, Giuliani is tied for third place with the scarcely visible Mike Huckabee in a statewide poll of 800 likely voters.
With his poll numbers slipping back home in the Northeast, Giuliani’s campaign will implode if he can’t turn it around in the six days left before Florida’s Jan. 29 vote, the final gateway before a blitz of primaries around the nation that could sew up the race.
”He may be running for president, but with these numbers he wouldn’t be elected governor of Florida,” said Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, whose firm conducted the survey with Democratic pollsters Schroth, Eldon & Associates for The Herald, The St. Petersburg Times and Bay News 9. Alluding to the timeworn song, Conway added: “If he can’t make it there in Florida, he can’t make it anywhere.”
VII. Seventh, there are difficult and maddeningly slow formal attempts unfolding, yet unfolding nonetheless, within the Anglican Communion as a whole to begin to identify a means of getting through this adjudicatory impasse. It involves a host of synods, including the Lambeth Conference, and a proposed “covenant”, among other things. Since no one has offered an agreeable alternative to these unfolding attempts, they remain the primary means, indeed the only means available to all parties in the dispute to move forward. They are, furthermore, in keeping with the long traditions of catholic order and deserve a presumptive respect. Yet because they are both slow, still imperfectly defined, and legally of untested strength, the ultimate usefulness of these unfolding attempts must depend on a host of other Christian realities that – most would agree – actually define the Church of Jesus Christ far more essentially, primarily, and profoundly than do simply the Constitution and Canons of this or that province or diocese (indeed, that latter are, in a Christian sense, legitimate only to the degree that they embody these prior realities). These realities touch upon the gifts and fruit of the Holy Spirit and the powers thereof that permit a clear following of the Lord Jesus Christ’s own straightforward calling to specific forms of relational behavior. They touch upon matters of humility, patience, longsuffering, honesty and transparency, self-control, and much more. That is, both the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion of which it is still a part and which it has, rightly or wrongly, so disturbed through its executive actions, have been thrown upon a complete dependence upon these gifts and fruit, in a way that must transcend, even while respecting for the sake of the world’s order, particular rules and regulations.
So, how bad could this get?
Until a few months ago, it was accepted wisdom that the American economy functioned far more smoothly than in the past. Economic expansions lasted longer, and recessions were both shorter and milder. Inflation had been tamed. The spreading of financial risk, across institutions and around the world, had reduced the odds of a crisis.
Back in 2004, Ben Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve governor, borrowed a phrase from an academic research paper to give these happy developments a name: “the great moderation.”
These days, though, the great moderation isn’t looking quite so great ”” or so moderate.
The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession. –Sherlock Holmes
Percentage of the workweek that a typical worker spends in meetings: 25. Odds that a person at a meeting doesn’t know why he’s there: 1 in 3.
–Annabelle Gurwitch, Fired, as quoted in Reader’s Digest, December 2007 edition, page 60
Here’s a mind-boggling fact: people who are opposed to the Iraq war look very favorably towards Sen. John McCain – supporter of President Bush and the troop surge in Iraq.
No, that is not a typo. In New Hampshire, for instance, exits polls show that he did very well with those opposed to the war. And he did poorly among big supporters of the war in both New Hampshire and Michigan.
Go figure.
Question: I would just simply respond to say that that’s true as I look to my brother next to me and say, you’re doing something wrong. But as a church, as a body, we’ve been given authority in Holy Scripture to say that these things are abhorent to God. And we’ve also been given a duty to share that because those that haven’t heard the Good News are truly perishing and without the Gospel of Christ they are perishing. And if we, out of fear of offense, fail to give them the Gospel, then we are accomplices in their death. We’ve been given an enormous responsibility and an enormous trust by our Lord, and I think we shirk it when we deny what’s written in Scripture.
Bishop Katharine: My understanding of the essential k_?___ , the central proclamation of Jesus, is that God loves you. Jesus came to show us that. Jesus gave his life to show us that, and we can argue about the details beyond that. I won’t disagree with you that proclaiming the Gospel is the centerpiece of what we do. I would continue to have conversation with you, I hope, about how we impose our particular understandings of aspects of that ? . And I think that’s been the struggle of the Christian journey from the beginning.
Question: Do you agree, [is] the Fed ahead of the curve? A lot of people have been criticizing it for being slow to respond to the credit crunch, for instance.
Answer: No, I think the Fed was, up until today at least, quite far behind the curve. They had not recognized the severity of this credit crisis.
First, they thought it would be confined to the subprime area of the mortgage market. It has since spread from the mortgage market to credit cards and auto loans. It has hurt the economy much more than the Fed I think originally thought.
So I think today’s action, being extremely urgent on the part of the Fed, was an effort to catch up with the curve, to recognize how severe this credit crisis is, how severe the increase in the cost of credit is to households and businesses, and the danger that that might push the economy into recession.
The Fed never uses the word “recession,” but, indeed, we could already be in one.
If it’s true that a house divided cannot stand, then black churches across South Carolina should be shaking. Take, for instance, Bible Way Church of Atlas Road in Columbia.
The black megachurch’s pastor, Darrell Jackson Sr., is a paid consultant for Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
In the pews, longtime Bible Way parishioner Anton J. Gunn directs the statewide political operation of Clinton’s main rival, Senator Barack Obama.
The congregation as a whole, some 10,000 strong, sits somewhere in the middle, according to both men.
“I think we have a lot of people who support Hillary Clinton, and we’ve got a lot of people who support Barack Obama,” Jackson said.
Foreclosures and default notices skyrocketed to record peaks in California and the Bay Area in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to a report released Tuesday. The information was a fresh reminder that the slumping real estate market is continuing to have a serious impact on homeowners, particularly those with risky subprime mortgages.
Lenders repossessed 31,676 residences in California in the October-November-December period, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a La Jolla research firm. That was a dramatic 421.2 percent increase from 6,078 in the year-ago quarter.
In the Bay Area, foreclosures rose an equally stunning 482.5 percent to 4,573 in the fourth quarter, compared with 785 a year ago. Contra Costa County, with 1,558 foreclosures, up 533.3 percent from a year ago, had the most, followed by Alameda County with 1,026 (a 514.4 percent increase) and Solano County with 704 (up 528.6 percent).
“Foreclosure activity is closely tied to a decline in home values,” DataQuick President Marshall Prentice said in a statement. “With today’s depreciation, an increasing number of homeowners find themselves owing more on a property than its market value, setting the stage for default if there is mortgage payment shock, a job loss or the owner needs to move.”
Since the rise of the religious New Right two generations ago, the religion-and-politics battle in America has been fought on many fronts. The most obvious one involves electoral politics, although even here the story is not so straightforward as often depicted. As Richard John Neuhaus showed two decades ago, the new activism of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants in the 1970’s did not begin as a political offensive intended to woo America from secular liberalism, let alone from the Democratic party. Instead it was a defensive reaction to attempts by the Carter administration to bring federal regulatory pressure to bear on religious schools, thereby threatening to inundate the enclaves that evangelicals and fundamentalists had created to escape the cultural meltdown of the 1960’s.1 Only in time did what started as self-defense””“leave us alone”””become a significant political movement promoting traditional morality in public life.
Viewed through a wider historical lens, the revolt of the evangelicals can also be seen as one episode in an ongoing struggle over the meaning of the religion clause of the First Amendment. For the first century and a half of the Republic, that clause had been a backwater of constitutional jurisprudence. This began to change with a series of Supreme Court decisions springing from the Everson case in 1947. What struck many as an effort to drive confessional religion from the public square and to establish secularism as a quasi-official national creed provoked a challenge by religious intellectuals and activists representing a wide variety of theological and denominational positions; their arguments were buttressed by legal scholars, some of them devoutly secular in cast of mind.
Nor is that all. If the religion-and-politics wars have been about politics””including the politics of constitutional interpretation””they have also been about ideas. To claim a place for religious conviction in the public square is implicitly to challenge the “secularization hypothesis” propounded for decades by modern sociologists and historians””the idea, that is, that modernization inevitably leads to a dramatic decline in religious conviction and a weakening of the culture-forming effects of religion. Perhaps less obviously, it is also to challenge the secularist or Jacobin version of the Whig theory of history, according to which the evolution of Western democracy should be seen as a development away from religion, and against Christianity in particular.
All of these disparate strands have been involved in the latest phase of the religion-and-politics wars: the rise of what Christopher Hitchens has hailed as the “new atheism.” The commercial success of Hitchens’s God Is Not Great, following on the heels of similar books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), may not have added very much to the sum total of our knowledge about either religion or the impact of religious conviction on our politics. But these best-sellers have kept both the polemical and the political pots boiling, and sharpened the question of what role””if any””religious conviction, or even religiously-informed moral argument, should play in American public life.
In this he differs from his competitors. Mitt Romney is the very model of a modern venture capitalist. Mike Huckabee is the very model of a modern evangelical. Rudy Giuliani is the very model of a modern can-do executive. They are impressive modern men all. But John McCain is a not-so-modern type. One might call him a neo-Victorian ”” rigid, self-righteous and moralizing, but (or rather and) manly, courageous and principled.
Maybe a dose of this type of neo-Victorianism is what the 21st century needs. A fair number of Republican and independent voters seem to think so, if one can infer as much from their support of McCain at the polls. But, amazingly, a neo-Victorian straightforwardness might also turn out to be strategically smart.
McCain has been the only Republican candidate who hasn’t tried to out-think the process. Perhaps out of sheer necessity, after his campaign imploded last summer, he simply picked himself up and made his case to the voters in the various states.
Meanwhile, the other G.O.P. candidates are creatures of our modern age of analysis and meta-analysis, and their campaigns have sometimes been too clever by half.
Natasha Randall was 17, had a large circle of friends and was studying childcare when, without any indication that she was unhappy, she hanged herself in her bedroom.
Her death last Thursday was the latest in at least seven apparent copycat suicides in Bridgend, South Wales, that have alarmed parents, health authorities and police, who believe that they may be prompted by messages on social networking websites such as Bebo.
Within days two 15-year-old girls, both of whom had known Tasha, as she called herself, had also tried to take their lives. One cut her wrists and was later discharged from hospital into the care of her parents. The other tried to hang herself and spent two days on life support before showing signs of recovery. Police have since visited the families of 20 of Tasha’s friends, urging them to keep an eye on their daughters.
A new study, “Poverty and Racism: Overlapping Threats to the Common Good,” is part of Catholic Charities’ campaign to cut the U.S. poverty rate in half by 2020. It was officially released by the Rev. Larry Snyder, the group’s president, during a Mass Monday at Blessed Sacrament Cathedral in Detroit.
“We are convinced that without a conscious and proactive struggle against racism, our efforts to reduce the plague of poverty will be in vain,” the study says.
For example, the study cites evidence that the poverty rate for African Americans in the U.S. is 24 percent–three times the rate for whites. Latinos and Native Americans also suffer from poverty rates above 20 percent, according to the study.