Evangelical leaders have called on pollsters to ask Democrats–and not just Republicans–if they are evangelicals when future primaries occur.

“Thus far, the National Election Pool’s exit poll surveys have pigeonholed evangelicals, reinforcing the false stereotype that we are beholden to one political party,” wrote nine leaders, including Sojourners founder Jim Wallis and Christianity Today editor David Neff. “No party can own any faith.”

Their Thursday letter was sent to polling and political directors of media outlets that are represented by the National Election Pool, which supplies poll data to ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and the Associated Press.

An official from the National Election Pool was not immediately available for comment.

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The fundamental task of a religious organization is to serve God, not win in secular politics. Once this distinction is lost, the identity of the religious organization is compromised beyond repair. This is bad not just for the integrity of that religious group, but also for society, which if it is to flourish needs a variety of social institutions performing a variety of functions ”” not every social institution morphing into a political organization.

Specifically for Christians, we (should) know that the mission of the church is to be Christ’s faithful people, and to do its core work of preaching, teaching and serving our neighbors. If it is true (as we boldly believe) that the church is the central location for the work God is doing to redeem the world, then our focus should be on the church’s work, not the state’s. As one aspect of our God-inspired love for our neighbor, we can ask the state and its leaders to do justice, protect life and advance the common good. We can do this in many quite constructive ways, from scholarly work to declarations of principles to activism on specific issues.

But we dare not identify the work of any state, any political party or any politician with the work of God or the task of the church. Every time we do so we end up embarrassing ourselves, enraging the neighbors we are called to love, deepening the culture wars and damaging our own mission.

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When Jane Andrews Parker was growing up in railroad towns in New Mexico and Arizona in the 1920s, her mother said they’d wait until the family moved to a town with an Episcopal church to baptize her.

But her father’s career with the railroad never took them to such a town.

She grew up and married a man who wasn’t a churchgoer. He died in 1996. Now she lives with her daughter and son-in-law, who also aren’t churchgoers.

Parker awoke Sunday, which would have been her mother’s birthday, still unbaptized at 90.

Shortly before noon, two priests at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church poured water over her head and anointed her with oil, saying she was “marked as Christ’s own forever.”

Receiving the sacrament alongside her were her daughter, Dale Holden, 65; her son-in-law, Richard Holden, 67; her granddaughter, Jennifer Wierks, 38; and two great-grandchildren, Jonathan Wierks, 3, and Jane Wierks, 1.

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First, make sure to see the report of the Title IV Review Committee here and the Inhibition itself there.

Second, note the articles from the LA Times, the Bakersfield Californian and the Fresno Bee. An AP article began this way.

The Episcopal Church banned a California bishop Friday from practicing his religious duties until March after he led his congregants to secede from the national church.

Bishop John-David Schofield drew sharp criticism from the U.S.-based denomination when he urged his conservative diocese to sever its ties to the church last month in a fight over the Bible and homosexuality.

Clergy and lay members of the Diocese of San Joaquin became the first full diocese to break from the U.S. wing of the 77 million-member worldwide Anglican family when they voted to secede Dec. 6.

Schofield cannot give sermons, do confirmations or perform any religious rites until the national denomination’s leaders meet to determine a final judgment by March 13, said the Rev. Canon Charles Robertson, canon to Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.

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Describe your job.

I wear four hats. I call them the four P’s. First, I am a priest. I prepare people to communicate with God. This part of my job includes preparing the worship services.

Then, I am a pastor. As a pastor, I am a nurturer. I am there to help the people. In times of sorrow, I weep with them. In happy times, I celebrate with them. I can celebrate a birth in the morning and be at a funeral in the afternoon. It can all happen in a 24-hour period. It can be emotional.

Third, I am a prophet. I must give God’s word to the people. This is the part I love the most. I love the Bible. I wish I had the time to tell it all day.

Fourth, I am a professional. I have to abide by the standards of my profession. I have to be a manager. I manage the budget. I manage the building. I plan for the future. I work with other priests and clergy.

How do you balance everything and still make time for school?

I only take one or two classes a semester. That’s why it’s taking me so long. I have to take care of myself, take care of my health and manage my time. It’s hard, but I have help.

I take Friday off every week to spend with my family. My eldest is 6, then 4, then 4 months. At home, when I walk into the door, all work must remain outside.

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We have three principle areas of concern regarding the Draft Covenant:

–The discussion of the foundations which are traditionally held to undergird Anglicanism omits to mention reason, which has long been thought to stand alongside scripture and tradition.
–The wording of section 6 of the Draft Covenant is potentially open to a wide variety of interpretations. For example, to take paragraph 6.3 alone, we feel that the expressions such as ”˜common mind’, ”˜matters of essential concern’, and ”˜common standards of faith’, all require significant further definition before they can bear the weight being placed upon them in the context of this Covenant. We are led to wonder whether the wording of section 6 of the Draft Covenant is fit for purpose in any practical circumstance in which it is likely to be called upon.
–We note that the Draft Covenant invests the Primates’ meeting with considerable and wide-ranging powers. We question whether the Primates’ meeting is the Instrument of Unity best suited to the task being entrusted to it (rather than the ACC, which contains a more wide-ranging representation of Church members).

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AIDS appears to be making an alarming comeback. The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that the incidence of H.I.V. infection among gay men is shooting up, following an encouraging period of decline. The rise of infections among younger gay men, especially black and Hispanic men, is troubling, and the study carries the clear implication that people at high risk of contracting the disease are becoming less cautious.

Statistics gathered by New York City health officials show that new diagnoses of H.I.V. infection ”” the virus that causes AIDS ”” in gay men under age 30 rose 32 percent between 2001 and 2006. Among black and Hispanic men, the figure was 34 percent. Most troubling, the number of new diagnoses among the youngest men in the study, those between ages 13 and 19, doubled.

New York officials say increased alcohol and drug use may be partly responsible since they make unprotected sex more likely. Other basic precautions, including finding out whether a potential partner is infected, are also apparently being ignored.

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I will consider posting comments on this article submitted first by email to Kendall’s E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com–KSH.

The responses show that our Church has at least three different attitudes to the Covenant as a solution to the Communion’s difficulties:

1. The Anglican Communion does not have machinery that allows us to discern the validity or otherwise of differing points of view and the Covenant may be a way of creating such a mechanism. We should be able to trust the international process to resolve any detailed difficulties we may have.

2. The nature of this Draft Covenant, and the underlying assumptions make it an unsatisfactory solution to our difficulties as a Communion, and runs the danger of exacerbating them. We therefore need to keep searching for a different way forward.

3. For Tikanga Maori tino rangatiratanga (self determination), Christian and ethnic identity are of foundational importance. Tangata whenua (the indigenous people) have a rootedness that precedes the Anglican Communion, and would not lightly cede their autonomy.

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If this had been a mere subprime crisis, it would now be over. But it is not, and nor will it be over soon. The reason is that several other pockets of the credit market are also vulnerable. Credit cards are one such segment, similar in size to the subprime market. Another is credit default swaps, relatively modern financial instruments that allow bondholders to insure against default. Those who such sell such protection receive a quarterly premium, based on a percentage of the amount insured.

The CDS market is worth about $45,000bn (€30,500bn, £23,000bn). This is not an easy figure to imagine. It is more than three times the annual gross domestic product of the US. Economically, credit default swaps are insurance. But legally, they are not, which is why this market is largely unregulated.

Technically, they are swaps: two parties swap payments streams ”“ one pays a regular premium for protection, the other pays up in case of default. At a time of low insolvency rates, many investors used to consider the selling of protection as a fairly risk-free way of generating a steady stream of income. But as insolvency rates go up, so will be the payment obligations under the CDS contracts. If insolvencies reach a certain level, one would expect some protection sellers to default on their obligations.

So the general health of this market crucially depends on the rate of insolvencies. This in turn depends on the economy. The US and Europe are the two largest CDS markets in the world. It is now widely recognised, including by the Federal Reserve, that the US economy is heading for a sharp downturn, possibly a recession. The eurozone, too, is heading for a downturn, but possibly not quite as sharp.

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The rector, vestry and most members of Trinity Episcopal Church in Winchester, Tenn., began worship in a new location today as Christ the King Anglican Church.

Charging that the Episcopal Church today is pursuing a “false” gospel, the Rev. William Midgett, his staff, the lay leadership and a number of parishioners left the 149-year-old church last Sunday.

“For us, it came down to choosing between two gospels,” the former rector said. “We recognized there was one (gospel) the church has held onto for 2,000 years, and what’s being promoted now looks very different from that.”

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Republican voters have sharply altered their views of the party’s presidential candidates following the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, with Senator John McCain, once widely written off, now viewed more favorably than any of his major competitors, according to the latest nationwide New York Times/CBS News Poll.

The findings underscored the extraordinary volatility in the Republican race and suggested that the party was continuing to search for a nominee to rally around. Nearly three-quarters of Republican primary voters said it was still too early for them to make up their minds “for sure,” meaning that they could shift their allegiances yet again if one or more of Mr. McCain’s rivals breaks through in the two Republican primaries this week, in Michigan and South Carolina.

On the Democratic side, Senator Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa has improved his standing within the party on a critical measure: his electability. The percentage of Democrats who say he would be the strongest candidate against the Republicans has more than doubled in a month, to 35 percent from 14 percent in December.

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Interesting that all 4 games this weekend were such good games.

Watch it all; God bless pastor Steve.

As adult obesity balloons in the United States, being overweight has become less of a health hazard and more of a lifestyle choice, the author of a new book argues.

“Obesity is a natural extension of an advancing economy. As you become a First World economy and you get all these labor-saving devices and low-cost, easily accessible foods, people are going to eat more and exercise less,” health economist Eric Finkelstein told AFP.

In “The Fattening of America”, published this month, Finkelstein says that adult obesity more than doubled in the United States between 1960 and 2004, rising from 13 percent to around 33 percent.

Globally, only Saudi Arabia fares worse than the United States in terms of the percentage of adults with a severe weight problem — 35 percent of people in the oil-rich desert kingdom are classified as obese, the book says, citing data from the World Health Organization and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

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In the current downturn, something more unsettling than a traditional swing in the business cycle appears to be at work: The United States has become increasingly prone to financial bubbles — huge, seemingly irreversible rises in the value of one sort of asset or another, followed by sudden and largely unforeseen plunges.

What makes bubbles so dangerous is that their consequences, when they burst, are wider, often more damaging, and certainly more unpredictable than those of ordinary downturns.

“We are more prone to bubbles than we used to be,” said John H. Makin, a former senior Treasury official with several Republican administrations and now a scholar with the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

“The old-fashioned recession, where the consumer ran out of gas or there was an economic policy mistake, doesn’t seem to occur much anymore,” said Alice M. Rivlin, a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve and Clinton administration budget director. “As we’ve seen from recent events, bubbles seem to be playing a bigger role.”

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“I think we continue to muddle along with enthusiasm,” Jefferts Schori said. “You can’t say it’s not enthusiastic. I look at the shift in terms of relationships across the communion in the last 10 or 15 years and I’m enormously heartened by that. Far more dioceses and congregations in this church have partnerships with the communion than was true a number of years ago, and in that sense the Anglican Communion on the ground is alive and real and growing in vitality because people are engaged in mission work together in the broadest sense.

“Yes, there is some conflict in the highest governing levels in the Anglican Communion,” she said. “The reality is that mission work is growing and increasing.”

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After kneeling to receive the laying on of hands from Schori and other bishops, Sloan emerged as a bishop himself, wearing the tall hat known as a miter and carrying a shepherd’s staff called a crozier.

“It’s really overwhelming, humbling and exciting,” said Sloan, who is known by his nickname Kee.

“I was overwhelmed, not just about when to put the hat on and all those little details, but at the sense of love for our church and for me.”

Sloan will serve under Bishop Henry N. Parsley, the head of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama, which includes more than 30,000 Episcopalians across the north-central part of the state.

“I really look forward to working with him,” Parsley said. “He is well-loved and well-respected.”

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In fact, the only safe lesson to draw is that the battle for the White House is an extraordinarily fluid affair. Everything is up in the air. That is not just because this is the most open election in America since 1928 (the last time that no incumbent president or vice-president was in the race); it is because Americans don’t really know what they want. Sure, they are desperate for “change”: with the economy reeling, politics gridlocked, young people dying in Iraq and the Bush administration a global byword for callous incompetence, huge numbers of Americans have long believed their country is on the wrong track. But what sort of change? And who can deliver it?

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This week’s flood of readings on inflation, retail sales and earnings is just what a data-hungry Wall Street has been anxious for.

But it could be a case of the old saying, be careful what you ask for, because you might actually get it. Evidence that consumers and companies are cash-strapped could mean the economy is on a fast track toward recession ”” or already in the midst of one.

“I think we’re going to look back on fourth-quarter earnings and instead of thinking the recession is coming, if there is one, it already started,” said JPMorgan equities analyst Thomas J. Lee.

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Update: There is more here, including this:

The unemployment rate leaps to a two-year high, record numbers of people are forced from their homes and Wall Street nose-dives again. Such is the fallout from a housing meltdown that threatens to slingshot the country into a recession.

The big economic question these days is whether the weakening economy will survive the strains or collapse under them.

The odds have grown that the economy will slip into a recession. At the beginning of last year, many economists put that chance at less than 1-in-3; now an increasing number says it has climbed to around 50-50. Goldman Sachs, the biggest investment bank on Wall Street even thinks a recession is inevitable this year.

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The National Bureau of Economic Research, which determines when the country is in recession, defines it as a “significant” decrease in economic activity over a sustained period of time. Typically, a recession is marked by two successive quarters of negative growth in gross domestic product, but not always. (GDP is the value of all goods and services a country produces in a given period of time.) The bureau considers a wide range of fiscal barometers, including payrolls, productions, sales and incomes. Because much of this data takes months to compile, the country is often in the midst of a recession, or even past it, before the condition is diagnosed.

The economy carries our dreams like a jumbo jet, a complicated and critical vehicle of cause and effect.

Executives scan its indicators like pilots on a flight deck, looking for favorable winds and smooth swaths of air. Federal bankers and policymakers fuss over its engines and machinery like grease-smeared mechanics, constantly tweaking and tuning. The rest of us hang on and hope for the best; when it plummets, with it go our lives, our futures.

After years of calm climbing, the U.S. economy is hitting some bumpy air and starting to sputter. Though the view is still cloudy and many indicators show that all’s well, most experts are predicting a “slowdown” if not a swoop into recession.

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THE movie “Juno” is a fairy tale about a pregnant teenager who decides to have her baby, place it for adoption and then get on with her life. For the most part, the tone of the movie is comedic and jolly, but there is a moment when Juno tells her father about her condition, and he shakes his head in disappointment and says, “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when.”

Female viewers flinch when he says it, because his words lay bare the bitterly unfair truth of sexuality: female desire can bring with it a form of punishment no man can begin to imagine, and so it is one appetite women and girls must always regard with caution. Because Juno let her guard down and had a single sexual experience with a sweet, well-intentioned boy, she alone is left with this ordeal of sorrow and public shame.

In the movie, the moment passes. Juno finds a yuppie couple eager for a baby, and when the woman tries to entice her with the promise of an open adoption, the girl shakes her head adamantly: “Can’t we just kick it old school? I could just put the baby in a basket and send it your way. You know, like Moses in the reeds.”

It’s a hilarious moment, and the sentiment turns out to be genuine. The final scene of the movie shows Juno and her boyfriend returned to their carefree adolescence, the baby ”” safely in the hands of his rapturous and responsible new mother ”” all but forgotten. Because I’m old enough now that teenage movie characters evoke a primarily maternal response in me (my question during the film wasn’t “What would I do in that situation?” but “What would I do if my daughter were in that situation?”), the last scene brought tears to my eyes. To see a young daughter, faced with the terrible fact of a pregnancy, unscathed by it and completely her old self again was magical.

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Much of the national leadership of the Christian conservative movement has turned a cold shoulder to the Republican presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, wary of his populist approach to economic issues and his criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But that has only fired up Brett and Alex Harris.

The Harris brothers, 19-year-old evangelical authors and speakers who grew up steeped in the conservative Christian movement, are the creators of Huck’s Army, an online network that has connected 12,000 Huckabee campaign volunteers, including several hundred in Michigan, which votes Tuesday, and South Carolina, which votes Saturday.

They say they like Mr. Huckabee for the same reason many of their elders do not: “He reaches outside the normal Republican box,” Brett Harris said in an interview from his home near Portland, Ore.

The brothers fell for Mr. Huckabee last August when they saw him draw applause on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” for explaining that he believed in a Christian obligation to care for prenatal “life” and also education, health care, jobs and other aspects of “life.” “It is a new kind of evangelical conservative position,” Brett Harris said. Alex Harris added, “And we are not going to have to be embarrassed about him.”

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Commenting on the view that a society without religion will collapse, Dawkins writes: ‘Perhaps naively, I have inclined towards a less cynical view of human nature than Ivan Karamazov. Do we really need policing – whether by God or each other – in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner? I dearly want to believe that I do not need such surveillance – and nor, dear reader, do you.’

But this overlooks a number of points. First, many people who have strong moral commitments without any religious foundation were shaped by parents or grandparents for whom morality and religion were fundamentally bound up. Moreover, many of those in the forefront of progressive political change, who have abandoned religion, have been driven by a humanism that has been essentially built up by our Christian heritage as Charles Taylor has recently brought out in his magisterial study, A Secular Age. How far are we living on moral capital?

Then, although I believe there is a shard of goodness in every human person, there is a dark side to our nature that it is sentimental to ignore, one which is still wreaking such terrible havoc. As WH Auden put it: ‘We have to love our crooked neighbour with our crooked heart.’ This points to the need for both self-knowledge and grace. At the beginning of this new year, with the world so stricken with growing inequality, corruption, decadence and conflict, each of us, believer and unbeliever alike, need all the help we can get.

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“My predecessors met some thirty years ago in St. Louis in the hope of organizing a home for faithful Anglicanism in this country. That project split into the many fragments of the Continuing Churches, rendering us unable to stop or even slow the march to control of the Episcopal Church by revisionists. The revisionists make the secular fads of the moment their supreme authority, and Scripture a historical curiosity. As a bishop in one of the churches of the Continuum, I must confess that we have sinned and pray God not only to forgive us but also to redeem the work we have attempted so ineptly.”

–The Rt. Rev. Louis Chopin Cusachs, in response to Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi’s “What is Anglicanism?”, First Things 180 (February 2008): page 5.

A LACK of priests and ministers in rural Victoria has forced farmers and teachers to take to the pulpit to conduct church services.

Ordained ministers from Australia’s three major Christian denominations are working more than 50 hours a week to meet the spiritual needs of rural communities.

But an ageing clergy and the tyranny of distance have left many rural parishes without a full-time priest or minister.

A recent study found that 14 per cent of rural Protestant and Anglican churches around Australia have adopted a lay church leader in the past five years.

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Once again I find myself both in much sympathy with AM but also ultimately unconvinced by their critique. I too believe it would have been best if all the Primates met to evaluate TEC’s response. However, it cannot be denied that there were clearly serious problems ”“ financial, logistical, political – with that way forward. Indeed, a case can be made that to call such a meeting at this time would have been to put on this Instrument more pressure than it could be expected to bear and be action damaging to the Communion. It is ultimately the Archbishop’s decision whether to call an emergency meeting and he clearly took advice from the Primates about whether this was needed. The consultation with the Primates showed limited support for this way forward. Apparently only 3 of the 26 Primates who replied requested such a meeting! For the Archbishop to call an unscheduled meeting when there was such limited demand would probably be irresponsible, especially if, as claimed, several primates were very hostile to the idea.

The proposed alternative is one AM describes as the creation of a “hand-picked team of supposed specialists to determine the future life of the Communion in all its representative bodies”. In addition to its rather cynical tone, this description seriously distorts the role of that group according to the letter.

It is not some separate “hand-picked team” doing its own thing but a group who will work ”˜in close collaboration with the primates, the Joint Standing Committee, the Covenant Design Group and the Lambeth Conference Design Group’. The reason it is needed is because, far from “acting alone in this”, the Archbishop wishes to work collegially on ”˜the unanswered questions arising from the inconclusive evaluation of the primates to New Orleans’. Although clearly different, there are parallels in this way forward with Windsor’s proposed Council of Advice (paras 111 and 112). There is nothing at all to suggest that it will “determine the future life of the Communion”, it will simply “take certain issues forward to Lambeth”. Far from determining the future life “in all its representative bodies” it is, as noted, working closely with those bodies and “will feed in to the discussions at Lambeth about Anglican identity and the Covenant process” – a sign, once again, of the importance of attending Lambeth and supporting and shaping the Covenant process.

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