Far worse than the threat from international terrorism is the aggressive process of secularisation that has gripped our country, and most of Europe, and which is becoming ever more frenzied. For example, I guess not many people are aware that it is against the law for state schools to teach the Christian faith as true. Teachers are allowed only to teach about religions. This is atheism by decree, for the only perspective from which one can teach about all religions is the secular perspective. So our children are not brought to a sense of holiness and awe, but are merely taught the meanings of religious terms as sociological descriptions. This deprivation of the spiritual is a form of child abuse.

And then there are the Sexual Orientation Regulations which make it illegal to discriminate on moral grounds between forms of sexual coupling. One might put this epigrammatically: what was once a mortal sin is now only a lifestyle choice. I supported the Homosexual Reform Act back in the 1960s on the grounds that it is not right to criminalise people on the grounds of their sexual orientation.

But the many people who believed that homosexuality should be decriminalised never intended that this should create the proselytising Gay Liberation Movement. The Act decreed that homosexual acts should be “between consenting adults in private” Between means involving two; adult meant 21; and private means behind locked doors. But now the love which once dare not speak its name, shrieks at us in high camp from decorated floats along the high street.

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But what about interchurch marriages? And how do they contribute to ecumenism?

Interchurch marriages create “domestic churches” where, according to some of our frail theological concepts, none should exist. That is, they create churches comprised of divided Christians. As such, according to King (and other writers), they serve as a “sign” or “instrument” of Christian unity ”“ a “foretaste of the eventual reunion of all Christians.”

Practically speaking, an interchurch couple has to shape a shared spiritual life from two traditions, “from the icons of the Orthodox to the simplicity of the Shakers, from Gothic cathedrals to Quaker meetinghouses, from austere, treatise-like homilies to charismatic, dynamic preaching, from gospel choirs to Gregorian chant, from ritualized congregational responses to spontaneous glossolalia, and from altar calls to orderly processions.” This very obviously means that they will have to learn, appreciate, and grow from the concrete experience of once foreign Christian traditions. (I can testify to this personally.) As Cardinal Mercier, who presided over the Malines Conversations between Anglicans and Catholics, once said, “In order to unite with one another, we must love one another; in order to love one another we must know one another; in order to know one another we must go and meet one another.” The search for institutional Christian unity, then, can obviously draw from the practical experiences of interchurch couples, who already have had to love, know, and truly encounter one another.

An interchurch couple’s attempts to truly live a unitive life together mean that they will have to surrender unnecessary biases and prejudices about another Christian tradition. King quotes the Salvatorian priest Jude D. Weisenbeck, “Married couples are better able than most to see their spouse’s tradition in the most favorable light. ”¦ Stereotypes and prejudices melt and flow away when other persons open their hearts to us and we to them in love. ”¦ This capacity to break down barriers can and will reach into future generations.” It can also reach priests and pastors. (In my experience, we should not underestimate the existence of these barriers on a popular level.)

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Has the movement for unity among Christians gone into a coma?

The annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity began Friday, a century after the first such celebration. In many countries, Christians deeply devoted to unity among their separate groups will gather in one anothers’ churches to pray and reflect on passages from Scripture. Since 1968, prayers and readings for the week have been jointly planned by the Vatican and the World Council of Churches.

But for most Christians, the week, centennial or not, carries no more resonance than, say, National Secretaries Week (now officially Administrative Professionals Week).

Has the ecumenical movement lost steam? Or has it, perhaps, fallen victim to its own success? One way or the other, does it make any difference?

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Moves by Congress and the Federal Reserve over the next few weeks could very well determine whether the economy slides into a full-blown recession and the markets continue to be pummeled by bad news, said Mr. Davis of Vanguard.

“There are a lot of wild cards out there right now, including rate cuts by the Federal Reserve and what a tax stimulus package could look like,” Mr. Davis said. “I do not think it is too late to prevent a recession, but we are at a critical juncture.”

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Now that you have read the previous entry which has the full text of the RNS story, read the Albany version. Compare the two and note what has changed–Houston, we have a problem.

It would be easier to let U.S. conservatives secede to join another Anglican province without a fight, said Jefferts Schori, “but I don’t think that’s a faithful thing to do.”

Episcopal leaders are stewards of church property and assets, protecting past generations’ legacies and passing them on to future Episcopalians, according to the presiding bishop. Allowing congregations to walk away with church property condones “bad behavior,” she said.

“In a sense it’s related to the old ecclesiastical behavior toward child abuse,” when priests essentially looked the other way, she said.

“Bad behavior must be confronted.”

But Jefferts Schori can be “heavy handed” in her treatment of conservative bishops and churches who’ve left or distanced themselves from the church, said the Rev. Neal Michell, canon for strategic development in the Diocese of Dallas.

Earlier this month, Episcopal leaders, including Jefferts Schori, charged two conservative bishops with “abandonment,” barring San Joaquin

(Calif.) Bishop John-David Schofield from active ministry and threatening similar action against Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh.

Both [Neal] Michell and [Kendall] Harmon also criticized the presiding bishop’s decision to become involved in a legal battle between the Diocese of Virginia and 11 churches that have split to join Nigerian Anglicans.

“To be so directly and explicitly and publicly and intentionally involved in these processes is terribly counterproductive to the church’s mission,” said Harmon.

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Until recently, like most liberals, I was convinced that 2008 was going to be a Democratic year. While Republicans have been listless and divided, Democrats have been passionate and enthusiastic about their candidates for president. An unpopular war, a sinking economy, a general sense of conservative exhaustion: All pointed toward a Democratic triumph in November. A lot of conservatives had come to grudgingly agree and were preparing to spend four years in political rehab.

But after the first rounds of caucuses and primaries, the prospects don’t look so rosy for the Democrats or so bleak for the Republicans. The presidential race now looks like a tossup — perhaps even with a Republican edge. If Democrats don’t stay smart, tough-minded and realistic, we could blow it yet again.

The first problem is our likely foe. Notwithstanding his loss in Michigan, Sen. John McCain has a plausible route to the GOP nomination, and he remains by far his party’s best bet for holding on to the White House. The Republican field has been so preoccupied with appealing to the party’s hard-core base that it seems that the eventual winner will have little appeal to the independent voters who can swing a general election. Even McCain started out by embracing the evangelical Christians he had once denounced. But as his seemingly dead campaign has been reborn, his initial efforts to pander to the religious right have been forgotten, and he is once again happily running as a “maverick.” Though his nomination is hardly guaranteed, the Arizona senator would provide the GOP with a powerful mix of continuity and change — continuity with the Bush administration on Iraq at a moment when it has become conventional wisdom that the “surge” is succeeding, and a sense of change and freshness from McCain’s cheerfully frank past deviations from conservative orthodoxy.

But the major reason I see trouble ahead for the Democrats is that voting patterns so far, as well as rumbling tensions over race and gender, suggest serious vulnerabilities in both of the Democratic front-runners that McCain (or another rival) could exploit.

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What actually happened in the 1990s is that the church’s official teaching (no sex outside marriage) was tightened. So what the liberals actually want is a break with the entire tradition of the church in respect of its teaching on sexual morality. This amounts to a revolution, for churches have always issued moral rules about sex. To say the church should withdraw from sexual moralism is to jeopardise its entire claim to authority. However, the liberal Anglicans cannot admit that this is what is going on.

The liberal Anglican priest (let’s call him Father Giles) is bitterly critical of the church’s collusion in homophobia. But he fully believes in the authority of the church, and his own authority. He affirms the right of the church to define orthodoxy: the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, is decided by the corporate mind of the church. Likewise a true sacrament is something authorised by the institution. He claims to have authority by virtue of having been ordained into the church. Christianity is not a subjective free-for-all, he insists: it is a communal, traditional thing, with rules.

Yet when the church claims authority to rule on sexual morality his tune changes. This aspect of its teaching is mistaken, he says, and amounts to a betrayal of the Gospel. The problem is that this tradition of sexual moralism is part of the traditional authority of the church, which Father Giles claims to affirm. In other words, he accepts the authority of the church when it suits him and rejects it when it does not.

In my opinion, the gay crisis shakes the foundations of ecclesiology.

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Senator John McCain capped his final full day of campaigning in South Carolina with a big rally in an aircraft carrier museum here on Friday evening, as Mike Huckabee delivered his populist economic message on the trail while highlighting his religious beliefs to draw out the evangelical vote in Saturday’s primary here.

As the campaign wound down here, its tone was in stark contrast to the lead-ups to the New Hampshire and Michigan primaries, and there was remarkably little direct sparring between Mr. McCain and Mr. Huckabee, the two leading candidates here, who seemed to be campaigning across the state on parallel paths, rather than engaging each other.

Mr. McCain campaigned along the Atlantic Coast, which has had big population increases in recent years, trying to appeal to veterans and military families by talking about improvements on the ground in the Iraq war, calling for better health care for veterans, and urging cuts in taxes and spending. Mr. Huckabee, meanwhile, worked the uplands, the state’s religious conservative heartland, and spoke at every stop about the economic pain that many South Carolinians are experiencing.

“A lot of Americans wonder, Does government understand what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck?” Mr. Huckabee said at Wofford College, in Spartanburg, noting that the state had hit its highest unemployment rate in years. “Do the people who live in the special bubble of the rarefied air of Washington, D.C., do they truly understand?”

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Home construction plunged last month to its lowest level in 16 years, as builders cut back and their lenders grew wary amid rising delinquent construction loans.

Housing starts plunged 14.2% in December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.006 million, the slowest pace since 996,000 starts in May 1991. Permits, an indicator of future construction, tumbled 8.1% to a 1.068 million pace, the Commerce Department said.

While builders have been scaling back for many months, some said the end of 2007 was the bleakest period yet in the slump, forcing them to make sharp cutbacks.

“The last quarter was the most challenging environment since the downturn started in July 2005,” said Douglas Smith, president of Miller & Smith, a builder in McClean, Va., which sold 350 homes last year. “All of the ramifications from the mortgage meltdown really took hold.”

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Update: According to CNN, in the Detroit area one out of every 138 homes is in foreclosure at the present time,

The call for patience in the 30-year battle for the soul of the Episcopal Church does not resonate as loudly as it once did, however, as the doctrinal differences between the liberal and conservative wings of the church deepen.

For the diocese of Fort Worth, Bishop Jefferts Schori’s Christmas card epitomized the two faiths co-existing within the Episcopal Church. The card sent to all of the church’s bishops shows a mother and child surrounded by three wise women. No mention of Jesus appears on the card, while the card speaks of “wise women throughout time and in every culture know themselves to be seekers and seers of the divine.”

This card “defies explanation” the diocesan leadership said. Bishop Jefferts Schori is an “intelligent woman, so this re-interpretation of Scripture to exclude masculine images must be intentional. This card illustrates in many ways the core problem of the General Convention Church. Scripture cannot be made to conform to us, we must conform our lives and our faith to Scripture,” the diocese said.

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The two remaining contenders here happen to be the two strongest candidates ”” Mike Huckabee and John McCain. Gov. Huckabee is an exciting newcomer who shows a wonderful ability to connect with voters’ concerns, and Republicans could do far worse than to choose him. But his utter lack of knowledge of foreign affairs is unsettling.

It’s not just about Iraq and Afghanistan. As freshly demonstrated by the incident involving U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz last week and the assassination earlier of the opposition leader in the world’s most volatile democracy (which possesses nuclear weapons, and shelters Osama bin Laden), our commander in chief will need a far broader and deeper understanding of our relationship to the world than on-the-job training can adequately provide.

Clearly, the best Republican candidate to lead our nation at this time is U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona. He has the necessary experience, not just in time served, but in the quality of understanding he exhibits across the board.

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Update: the local paper endorsed John McCain on Thursday in words that included these:

In fact, the senator clearly feels regular communication with the American people has been sorely lacking. He pledges press conferences at least once every two weeks and also said he would go on television once a week ”” even if only C-SPAN would cover it ”” to update the American people “on what’s happened where our young people are in harm’s way.”

In terms of national defense, what he describes as the ‘war against radical extremism’ would never be far from his thoughts. While he believes al-Qaida is on the run, “it is by no means defeated,” and Iraq will continue to be the central battleground. He is encouraged by signs that there is an increased recognition around the world about the nature of the struggle, and he is well equipped to make America’s case in the international arena. Certainly as the victim of vicious torture at the hands of the enemy, there is no one more credible to reassure this country and the world “that we will never torture another person in American custody.”

He has equal credibility on the domestic side, particularly for his opposition to wasteful spending in general and, specifically, such hot-button, pork-barrel earmarks as a $230 million Alaskan “bridge to nowhere.”

The only Episcopal congregation in Lake County to leave the national denomination over the issue of homosexuality and other doctrines has found a new home and ally in its quest to begin worshipping anew — a tiny Pentecostal congregation.

The Rev. Woodleigh Volland and an overwhelming majority of his congregation at St. Edward’s Episcopal Church departed the national Episcopal Church in late October but remained with the 77-million-member worldwide Anglican community.

The dissidents regrouped and formed a new church, Epiphany Celebration Anglican Church, but quickly found themselves with nowhere to worship or hold services.

“We had to move nearly the entire congregation and didn’t have anywhere to go,” said Volland, an ordained minister since 1990 and pastor at St. Edward’s for six years.

Four of the five staff members and 10 of 12 vestry members opted to leave along with 130 of the roughly 170 regular church worshippers, Volland said.

“We stepped out in faith and started completely over,” he said. “It was an extraordinarily difficult decision.”

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Watch and/or read it all.

Archbishops and bishops from both the Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic wings of the Church, who lead 30 million of the world’s 55 million active Anglicans, will make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in June 2008 for the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON: News, 4 January). They are travelling to the places of Christ’s ministry, where the gift of the Holy Spirit was first poured out, in order to strengthen them for what they believe will be difficult days ahead.

The vision, according to the Archbishop of Kenya, the Most Revd Benjamin Nzimbi, is to inform and inspire the invited leaders “to seek transformation in our own lives and help impact communities and societies through the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ”.

The convening Primates have said that their pastoral responsibility requires that they provide an opportunity for their bishops, who would normally have looked to the Lambeth Conference, to meet for prayer, fellowship, and counsel, on matters vital to their Church’s mission and ministry.

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President Bush, acknowledging the risk of recession, embraced about $145 billion worth of tax relief Friday to give the economy a “shot in the arm. ”
Bush said such a growth package must also include tax incentives for business investment and quick tax relief for individuals. And he said that to be effective, an economic stimulus package would need to roughly represent 1 percent of the gross domestic product””the value of all U.S. goods and services and the best measure of the country’s economic standing.

“There is a risk of a downturn,” the president said in his remarks at the White House.

White House advisers say that in current terms, 1 percent would amount to around $145 billion, which is along the lines of what private economists say should be sufficient to help give the economy a short- term boost.

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The economic worries of 1992 helped elect Mr. Clinton, of course. And by the end of the decade, thanks to both his policies and a huge stock market bubble, the American economy was roaring along again. The deep anxiety of 1992 seemed to be a piece of economic history.

No more. Almost 16 years after Mr. Clinton’s speech at Wharton, the economy is again dominating a presidential race. While the details have changed, the main story line remains remarkably similar. A downturn has reawakened fears that the economy no longer works very well for the middle class.

Today, as was the case 16 years ago, the downturn itself isn’t the main problem. By 1992, as a matter of fact, the economy was already growing again. This year, it’s still possible ”” if less likely after Tuesday’s dismal retail sales report and another sharp decline in stock prices ”” that the country will avoid a full-blown recession.

The main problem now is that the good times are no longer good enough to carry the middle class through the bad times. For much of the last 35 years, the incomes of most workers have been growing far more slowly than they once did. In the current expansion, which started in 2001, the median weekly paycheck of workers has actually fallen 1 percent, once inflation is taken into account, according to the Labor Department.

Economists argue about the reasons for the great wage slowdown ”” technology, globalization, health care costs, the decline of unions, the rise of the new wealthy ”” but it clearly seems to have made people feel more vulnerable to small economic swings. In the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, only 19 percent of those responding said the country was headed in the right direction. That was the lowest percentage since the early 1990s.

Read it all. Note that the title above is that given by the NYT on its front page to this article, the article itself in Wednesday’s paper is entitled “A Revival of 1992’s Glum Mood.”

It seems politicians’ big idea is that since they couldn’t protect us from predatory lenders, outsourcing manufacturers, the crashing dollar and energy speculators, they can at least numb the pain by mailing us $20 bills to rub on our wounds.

—Jon Markman.

In 1972, Mike Huckabee — still in high school — followed the example of thousands of other young Americans. He went to a weeklong festival, waded through mud and listened to rock music. But the throng of students he was a part of was different from the youthful gatherings more often associated with the late 1960s and early 1970s. These young people were in Dallas for Campus Crusade for Christ’s “Explo ’72” — at “Godstock” rather than Woodstock.

It was the perfect trip for a young, conservative Christian like Mr. Huckabee, as Explo ’72 foreshadowed the subsequent emergence of evangelicals as a powerful voting bloc. The assembled students applauded a large contingent of military personnel and cheered the South Vietnamese flag. The Rev. Billy Graham read a telegram from Richard Nixon, and a survey conducted by a local newspaper reported that the students favored Nixon over George McGovern in the coming election by a ratio of more than 5 to 1. They also favored stronger penalties for marijuana possession and overwhelmingly believed that American attitudes toward sex were “too permissive.”

Godstock, however, was about God, not the GOP. Campus Crusade refused to extend an invitation to President Nixon, who dearly wanted to come.

Explo attendees listened to Mr. Graham, Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright and other evangelists who urged them to “change the world” by telling others about Jesus. On several afternoons, Mr. Huckabee visited Dallas neighborhoods, knocked on doors and shared the contents of Mr. Bright’s small booklet titled “Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” Mr. Bright’s message was short and simple: “God loves you, and offers a wonderful plan for your life,” began the tract, which identified Jesus as “God’s only provision for man’s sin.” It is hard to imagine a better training ground for electioneering. Though some Texans probably greeted Mr. Huckabee warmly, he also learned to persevere with his message and remain gracious regardless of disinterest or hostility.

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Archbishop Fred Hiltz, the primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, has urged divinity students from Trinity and Wycliffe Colleges in Toronto not to be discouraged by wrangling in the Anglican Communion over the issue of sexuality, saying he remains optimistic about the fate of Anglicanism.

“Be strong and of good courage,” Archbishop Hiltz told about 60 students, most of them candidates for ordination to the Anglican priesthood. “You’re stepping into a church that’s facing lots of challenges but also grand possibilities.

“Our church is often described as being weary and worn ”¦ as beleaguered. I choose to describe and think about our church as our beloved church.”

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In examining the origins of the conservative movement in the Episcopal Church, Hassett challenges some widespread opinions held by members of the liberal community. The oft-repeated charge that the support of Global South bishops for American conservatives at the 1998 Lambeth Conference and subsequently was “bought,” she dismisses as reflecting an inadequate grasp of where most of the Southern bishops stood. That there are problems with the disparities of wealth between North and South and how wealth is shared between the two cannot, she believes, explain why the crisis has developed as it has done. More controversial, especially in America, will be the conclusion she draws from her experience of worshipping and talking with the St. Timothy’s, regarding the genuineness of the professions of concern for moral teaching that come from groups like AMIA. “Although homosexuality is often singled out for particularly vehement opposition,” she writes, “my time at St. Timothy’s showed me that evangelical Episcopalians’ responses to homosexuals are framed in the same language of sin and the need for transformation through a relationship with Jesus Christ that they apply to their own lives.” (42)

Conservatives, however, should not become complacent. Hassett has her own view of the myth that has grown up around Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, which has led some to see the shift in the locus of power to the Global South as the inevitable triumph of Christian orthodoxy. (249-52) Her Ugandan experiences demonstrate that the sense of a monolithic Southern Church that one can sometimes derive from the statements of certain primates is far from accurate. She notes, for example, the greater degree of tolerance for homosexuality (though not a denial of its sinful nature) displayed by the Bakolole fellowships that emerged from the East African Revival; the understanding of homosexuality as an imported “colonial” practice that has made it a matter of nationalist well as religious significance; and the continued reservations expressed by Ugandan bishops and priests about the wisdom of constituting AMIA.

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Watch it all. Truly reprehensible stuff–makes the heart sad

McCain and Mike Huckabee are neck and neck heading into Saturday’s Republican primary in South Carolina, where the outcome could hinge on a bloc of undecided evangelical voters, according to a new McClatchy-MSNBC poll.

The survey, by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, found a battle between McCain, an Arizona senator, and Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, for the lead. It also revealed a close struggle for third between former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson.

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For nearly 23 years, Lisa Larges has sought to become a Presbyterian minister, but she has twice been formally rejected because of a long-standing ban on gay ordination by the Presbyterian Church USA.

But in what appears to be the first national test of a 2006 policy change by the church, Larges, of San Francisco, has moved a step closer to joining the clergy.

After a debate that lasted deep into the night Tuesday, the San Francisco Presbytery, a regional governing body of the national church, voted 167 to 151 to support Larges’ application for ministry, despite opponents’ warnings that the action violated the church’s constitution and would immediately be appealed.

“I’m in shock,” Larges, 44, said Wednesday. “I still feel stunned, honestly, and deeply grateful both to the folks who supported me and to the presbytery for stepping up.”

The Presbyterian Church USA, the nation’s largest Presbyterian group with 2.3 million members, is among many mainline Protestant denominations that are struggling to reconcile conflicting beliefs on biblical authority and the role of gays in the church. In some, including the Episcopal Church, the divide is so deep that many fear it may tear denominations apart.

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Today, The Diocese of Virginia and The Episcopal Church filed their opposition to the motion by Virginia Attorney General Robert McDonnell to intervene in the consolidated church property cases currently being heard in Fairfax Circuit Court by the Hon. Randy I. Bellows.

In stating their opposition, the Diocese and the Church noted that the Commonwealth had failed to meet the requirements that govern intervention in such a dispute and that the state “lacks any right or interest in the subject matter,” namely the property unlawfully occupied by individuals in the CANA breakaway congregations. The Diocese and the Church raised no objections, however, to the Attorney General filing an amicus curiae or friend of the court brief on the matter of the constitutionality of section 57-9 of the Code of Virginia which is at issue at this stage in the case.

The Diocese and The Episcopal Church have argued that it would be unconstitutional for the court to apply section 57-9 in such a way to rule that a division had occurred within the Diocese or the denomination at large. Such a ruling would be an unconstitutional intrusion by the state into the affairs, doctrine and polity of a hierarchical church.

A trial was held in November on the interpretation and application of that section of the Code of Virginia. The judge has not yet issued a ruling. The third and final post-trial brief ordered by the judge also was filed today.

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