The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, this afternoon apologised to the Church of England for any unclarity or “misleading choice of words” when he delivered his controversial speech on Islam and the law.

Resisting the temptation to blame anyone but himself for provoking a debate that surprised him by its ferocity, the Archbishop said he took responsibility for anything he had said that had caused “distress or misunderstanding among the public at large, and especially among my fellow Christians.”

But in his speech to the Church of England General Synod today Dr Williams remained unrepentant for putting the subject on the agenda

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Recently, Trinity Episcopal Church mailed letters to 700 active church members, asking them to indicate their preference and return the signed forms by Feb. 15, said member Ron Joaquim, who recently was appointed to speak on behalf of the pastor and church leaders.

Based on informal questioning of parishioners, Joaquim estimates 75 percent to 80 percent of the members favor disaffiliation.

“My prayer is that the whole flock will stay together as we move to a safer pasture,” [Lorne] Coyle said.

The letters are a written poll, Joaquim said, rather than an official vote on disaffiliation. Ultimately, any separation proposal would have to be approved by the diocese.

Coyle said he hopes to finish the conversion by June 1.

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The [Lambeth] Conference begins with a couple of days’ retreat. Some critics have complained that Lambeth is too focused on prayer and reflection and not enough on decision-making; but I am bound to say that I regard this as an extraordinary thing to say about any Christian gathering ”“ as if we could make any decision worthy of the gospel without the utmost attention to listening together to God. I partly understand that some feel there may be an attempt to appeal to the need for prayer and reflection as an alibi for not grasping the nettles; but I would gently but firmly say that it is also possible to use a rhetoric about needing decisive action as an alibi for waiting on God. I simply pray that we’ll get the balance as right as we can.

I respect the consciences of those who have said they do not feel able to attend because there will be those present who have in their view acted against the disciplinary and doctrinal consensus of the communion. Needless to say, I regret such a decision, since I believe we should be seeking God’s mind for the Communion in prayer and study together; but it simply reminds us that even the most ‘successful’ Lambeth Conference leaves us with work still to be done in rebuilding relationships. The decision of some to be absent not only shows the deep differences over theology and ethics that have so strained our connections; it also reflects, uncomfortably for us, some of the legacy of hurt that is felt by some of our provinces at what is experienced as patronising or manipulative or insensitive actions and attitudes on the part of many of the churches of the ‘West’ or ‘North’ ”“ not only the Episcopal Church in the USA, but us as well. That’s hard to hear, but we have to hear it and to offer apologies and seek for better understanding. Lambeth can’t be the end of the story; and if at Lambeth we try to do proper justice to the idea of a Covenant, it must be in the light of that need for a more serious and profound mutuality between us all.

I’ve said in other contexts something about why all this matters; let me illustrate it by looking briefly at one particular situation. What I’ve just said about the legacy of bruised feelings and half-buried resentments is, of course, one of the things that so complicates our political, never mind our ecclesiastical, relationships with the post-colonial world. And nowhere is this more apparent than in Zimbabwe at the moment. A history scarred by exploitation and deep racial injustice can all too easily be used, as it has been there, to turn aside every criticism and even to refuse any proper help when a local regime has fallen victim to its own incompetence, corruption and self-delusion. It has been that much harder for many in this country to know how to respond to the needs of Zimbabwe for fear of simply reinforcing stereotypes of colonial patronage or misunderstanding. We have tried to take our cues from those on the ground locally who are seeking justice and change.

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For 55 years, members of Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church have tithed their 10 percent, money that often went toward maintaining 12 acres of tree-lined church property.

Now they’ve been told that the church where generations have worshipped does not belong to them ”“ but rather to the national denomination they believe has lost its biblical authority and want to cut ties with.

“What about the blood, sweat and tears of the congregation ”“ all of us who have given all these years?” said Jane Constance, a member since 1982 whose four children were baptized and raised in the church. “It’s unthinkable to me, to most of us, that it could belong to them because of a clause most of us didn’t know about.”

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This unbelievable headline caught my eye immediately. Archbishop: Adoption of Sharia Law in U.K. is ‘Unavoidable’

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, has suggested that it “seems unavoidable” that elements of Islamic law be accepted into the British legal system.
I suggest a better headline would have been: “Archbishop of Canterbury Loses His Mind.” Why in the world would the leader of the Church of England advocate for the imposition of Islamic law in Britain?

So profound a misunderstanding of the proud English and British heritage from the leader of the Church of England it is incomprehensible. Ironically, his comments demonstrate either ignorance of or hostility toward the historic commitment of the British people to freedom and self-determination. The first nation to emerge from the political chaos of the Middle Ages, the defiant victor over the militarily superior Spanish Armada in the 16th century, the last bastion in Europe against the forces of fascism in the century past, the people of the United Kingdom surrender their autonomy to no foreign power, secular or religious. Surrender is precisely what the Archbishop now says is “unavoidable.”

Most astonishing, these comments by the Archbishop disavow the most significant underlying values which have defined British history….

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The Title IV Task Force II has proposed a complete revision of Title IV, the main clergy-discipline canons. The group also proposes adding to Canon 17 of Title I a process for disciplining lay leaders and a procedure for dealing with impaired clergy to the Title III ministry canons.

The release of the documents opens a comment period that runs until the end of June.

The task force’s proposed revision is available here.

The current version of Title IV is available here.

The proposed revision of Canon I.17.8 to set up a process for disciplining lay leaders is available here.

The proposal to add a new canon concerning impairment of clergy to Title III is available here.

Each document includes instructions on how to file comments on the drafts.

“We want to be as fully out there to the wider church as we can get with opportunity for people to read all three documents, to respond to us with their comments, concerns, criticisms, suggestions,” said Steve Hutchinson, who chairs the current task force.

Hutchinson, chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah who was a member of the first task force, said the current task force will meet in September to synthesize the responses into a proposal to include in its Blue Book report for the 76th General Convention.

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(With permission-KSH)

When you are reading this, Antoinette and I will be in Wales, at the Hookses, an old farm house, barn and cottage, my old friend and mentor, John Stott bought in 1954, and fitted out as a retreat for himself and a few friends. John is now 86, and invited us to join him for a week there last year but we were unable to go. This year we felt we needed to join him. He only uses it one week a year now, for he has given the property to Langham Partnership International, a missionary organization he founded some years ago.

We will be joining John and his secretary of more than fifty years, Frances Whitehead; his successor as rector of All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, Richard Bewes; Sara Thompson, the widow of John’s assistant that I succeeded at All Souls in 1967; Julian Charley, a noted theologian, and his wife Claire; John Smith, who used to be my colleague at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster), and fellow-resident at the All Souls Rectory when we were single, and his wife Anna; and Neil and Jenny Woodward who are from Australia and New Zealand, and who have recently been caregivers for John. Also joining us will be the author, Roger Steer, who has been commissioned by InterVarsity Press (IVP) to write a biography of John. He wants me to supply him with material from John’s life for his book, so I presume that I will have to come up with reminiscences to satisfy him!

The Hookses is located in a little valley on the edge of a disused WWII airfield, now occupied by sheep, running down to the Pembrokeshire coast. It looks out onto the Atlantic Ocean, on high cliffs, near the village of Dale. I first visited it in 1964 when I took a group of young people from All Souls Church down there for a weekend. Antoinette and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary there in March 1971. We have returned over the years for visits with John Stott, and our mutual friends. When we first visited it there was no electricity, and light was by paraffin oil lamps!
John Stott used the Hookses as a writer’s retreat. He would leave behind his busy life in London, and spend a week or two writing his latest book. It would seem that every year he has published a new book. His latest is THE LIVING CHURCH: CONVICTIONS OF A LIFELONG PASTOR. Its Table of Contents reveals a comprehensive vision of ministry that is balanced and vital.
1. Essentials: God’s Vision for His Church
2. Worship: Glorying in God’s Holy Name
3. Evangelism: Mission Through the Local Church
4. Ministry: The Twelve and the Seven
5. Fellowship: The Implications of Koinonia
6. Preaching: Five Paradoxes
7. Giving: Ten Principles
8. Impact: Salt and Light
It is followed by three appendixes:
1. Why I Am Still A Member of the Church of England
2. I Have a Dream of A Living Church
3. Reflections of an Octogenarian.
I was extremely fortunate to have begun my ministry under his guidance. His wise and disciplined leadership was a model for me to follow. There is no doubt that much of any effectiveness I have had is due to his example.
What will be the value of this week in Wales? It will give me the opportunity to encourage John at this stage in his life, and to return to him some of the support he has given me over a lifetime. He was a surrogate father in God to me at an impressionable age, and ever since. Now that we have grown old together I appreciate him even more.
It will also give us time to share with one another the challenges of being Christ’s followers in the twenty-first century. There will be times of devotion, study, prayer and discussion. I plan to do some writing of my own. It will be a real group retreat which I pray will strengthen us for the future. Hopefully I will return to be able to serve Christ better. I pray that the Spirit will minister to us during this time, and that I will be able to listen to what God is saying to me.
The last words John Stott wrote in his latest book are about humility. He quoted Michael Ramsey who gave the following advice:
1. Thank God, often and always, carefully and wonderingly, for your continuing privileges. Thankfulness is the soil in which pride does not easily grow.
2. Take care about confession of your sins. Be sure to criticize yourself in God’s presence: that is your self-examination.
3. Be ready to accept humiliations. They can hurt terribly, but they help you to be humble. There can be trivial humiliations. Accept them. There can be bigger humiliations. All these can be so many chances to be a little nearer to our humble and crucified Lord.
4. Do not worry about status. There is only one status that our Lord bids us to be concerned with, and that is the status of proximity to himself.
5. Use your sense of humor. Laugh about things, laugh at the absurdities of life, laugh about yourself, and about your own absurdity. We are all of us infinitesimally small and ludicrous creatures within God’s universe. You have to be serious, but never be solemn, because if you are solemn about anything there is the risk of becoming solemn about yourself.
In conclusion, John Stott ended with his characteristic emphasis on the cross. “It is at the cross of Christ that humility grows. As Emil Brunner wrote, other religions spare us the ultimate humiliation of being stripped naked and declared bankrupt before God. I have no greater desire than to make the apostle Paul’s declaration authentically mine:
”˜May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.’ (Galatians 6:14)”
For someone who has been honored by the Queen for his services, read by millions of people throughout the world, who has raised up generations of Christian leaders in the Third World, and has given all his royalties to buy books for poor pastors, his ultimate teaching on humility is instructive. “Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:7,8)

Hundreds of thousands of Capital One and Bank of America cardholders have been notified in recent months that their interest rates are going up — in some cases to as much as 28% — even though they haven’t been missing payments.

Cardholders are being told they can “opt out” from the higher rates by paying off their balances and taking their business elsewhere. But that’s not really an option for people who may not have thousands of dollars in spare cash sitting in a drawer.

If anything, people’s credit card rates should be heading south following repeated cuts in interest rates at the federal level. So far this year, the federal funds rate has been reduced by 1.25 percentage points and now stands at 3%. Further cuts are expected as the economy slides toward recession.

The Fed funds rate is an overnight lending that banks charge to each other. It influences the interest consumers pay for credit cards, home equity lines and car loans.

David Robertson, publisher of an influential credit card trade publication called the Nilson Report, said a number of factors determine rates for plastic, not least the greater risk of delinquencies these days resulting from the credit crunch.

But he said it seems clear that leading banks, having suffered billions of dollars in losses from the mortgage meltdown, are casting about for new sources of revenue.

“They need to raise rates because they can’t raise fees anymore,” Robertson said. “It’s politically untenable.”

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The neighbouring Bishop of British Columbia, James Cowan, is warning priests and congregational officials in his diocese””which covers Vancouver Island””not to try to take parishes out of his diocese.

“If a person is employed by the Diocese or parish and is found to be acquiescing in or to be actively promoting such separation, this is a ground for immediate termination of employment without notice or severance,” he wrote to all his clergy, churchwardens, and members of parish councils.

The letter was not directed to specific clergy or congregations, and no Diocese of BC parishes are currently listed as belonging to the Anglican Network in Canada, the group that includes congregations that have members actively seeking to come under the jurisdiction of the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone in South America.

However, according to Bishop Cowan, “persistant rumours have come to my attention” that people are working to separate from the Anglican Church of Canada and join the South American Church ”“ a move condemned by church leaders in Canada and strongly discouraged by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

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An embattled Archbishop of Canterbury will confront anger within the Church of England as, on this most critical day of his five years in office, he tries to justify his remarks about Islamic law.

Dr Rowan Williams will open the General Synod in Central London this afternoon with a presidential address in which he will show that he can weather the storm over his recent remarks. He will attempt to set the record straight, insisting that he never advocated a “parallel jurisdiction” of Sharia.

The Archbishop, whose liberal stance has provoked fury among evangelicals, will face further pressure when a senior bishop launches a renewed attack on the Church’s approach to homosexuality.

The Right Rev Michael ScottJoynt, the Bishop of Winchester and fifth most senior clergyman in the hierarchy, will give warning that the Church’s integrity has been “gravely undermined” by its implicit acceptance of same-sex relationships.

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In an interview on Radio 4 last Thursday, Rowan Williams said that the introduction of parts of Islamic law here would help to maintain social cohesion and seems unavoidable. Sharia courts exist already, he pointed out. We should “face up to the fact” that some British citizens do not relate to the British legal system, he said, and that Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.

What he went on to say was more astonishing. He explained to the interviewer, in his gentle, wordy way, that a lot of what is written on this confusing subject suggests “the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody”. He went on: “That principle is an important pillar of our social identity as a western liberal democracy.” How true.

However, he continued: “It’s a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties, which shape and dictate how they behave in society, and the law needs to take some account of that.”

Stuff like this is bad for the blood pressure, but I listened on. “An approach to law which simply said there is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said . . . I think that’s a bit of a danger.”

What danger? And to whom? The danger, surely, is rather the archbishop and those who think like him, who seem unwilling to hold fast that which is good. What is good and best and essential about our society ? it isn’t merely a matter of “social identity” ? is the principle of equality before the law. That principle and its practice have made this country the outstandingly just and tolerant state it is; it is one of the last remaining forces for unity as well.

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The response to the Archbishop tell us much more about our society, media, politicians and (even more sadly) our church than it does about him and what he said. His main failing ”“ and the costs of it are now enormous – amounts to an almost lethal combination of naivety in relation to the soundbite that would be taken from interview and opacity in relation to the lecture. The response is marked by prejudice (including against him ”“ the names of those calling for his resignation are no surprise to those who have followed certain conservative evangelical reactions to him since his appointment, despite the fact that his central argument is one with which they should have much sympathy), ignorance and misrepresentation. And yet, when such a storm results one has to ask why it has happened and its spiritual significance. The Archbishop has clearly touched a very raw nerve as did the Bishop of Rochester a few weeks ago. Interestingly, both of them made a very similar tactical error in relation to how to raise important issues through the media. The comment of the Archbishop of Canterbury in his interview referring to Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali’s article could now be applied to his own references to sharia ”“ “I think the phrase, because it echoed of the Northern Irish situation ”“ places where the police couldn’t go ”“ that was what it triggered in many peoples’ minds. I don’t think that was at all what was intended”. As with that earlier article from a different perspective, this latest incident is perhaps initially most revealing in relation to our attitudes to Islam.

However, like the lecture, the revelation perhaps also goes deeper. What we have witnessed in the last few days is not only the inability of our secular society (especially in and through the media) to think seriously about an important issue. We have also been shown our inability to understand the importance of religious commitments and communities in and for our public life. Deeper still we have had demonstrated our refusal to consider that we need God even for the apparently simple task of understanding ourselves as a society and discerning how we can live together in our diversity of cultures and faiths. Rather than acknowledging this failure to comprehend and seeking to listen, to understand, to dialogue and to learn, our response ”“ from the Prime Minister down – has been one of immediate distortion, disbelief, dismissal and disdain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It therefore looks like our common off-the-shelf understandings of ourselves are indeed ”˜not adequate to deal with the realities of complex societies’. In fact, what the reactions of the last few days have clearly revealed is that our public life and our ability to communicate and reason together as a society faces much more widespread, deep-rooted, pressing and serious challenges than the narrow question of how best to respond to sharia law. It is these challenges, starkly revealed by the ill-informed hysteria of recent days, that, along with the issues the Archbishop’s lecture has so accurately highlighted, we urgently need to address through reasoned and civil public discussion.

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Sean Shevlino and Mike Anthony had every opportunity to succeed: loving parents, good homes, strong schools and the natural ability to play sports. But a series of bad decisions in the summer of 2006 changed the course of their lives.

In a matter of days, the two Wando High School students and a group of friends robbed a store at gunpoint. Sean and Mike then continued with the theft of a car and another robbery.

Now, as many in their graduating class prepare to head for college, Sean and Mike wait to see which state prison will be their home for the next 10 years.

How did this happen?

Read the whole article from our local paper.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Patti Solis Doyle has stepped down as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign manager, the campaign announced on Sunday.
She will be replaced by Maggie Williams, a senior adviser to the campaign.
Ms. Solis Doyle will stay on as a senior adviser and “will continue to be a key part of the campaign,” said Mo Elleithee, a spokesman.
“It’s not a shakeup,” he said. “It will be a seamless transition. She and Maggie are longtime friends and they have been working closely together for the last month.”

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In the course of the centuries the proposal of the following of Christ without compromise, as it is presented to us in the Gospel, has therefore constituted the ultimate and supreme rule for religious life (cf. Perfectae Caritatis, n. 2). In his Rule St Benedict refers to Scripture as the “most exact rule of human life” (n. 73: 2-5). St Dominic, whose words and works proclaimed him a man of the Gospel at all times (cf. Libellus de Principiis Ordinis Praedicatorum, 104: in P. Lippini, San Domenico visto dai suoi contemporanei, Ed. Studio Dom., Bologna, 1982, 110) desired his brother preachers also to be “men of the Gospel” (First Constitutions or Consuetudines, 31). St Clare of Assisi imitated Francis’ experience to the full: “The form of life of the Order of the Poor Sisters”, she wrote, “is this: to observe the Holy Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rule, I, 1-2; Franciscan Omnibus, n. 2750). St Vincent Pallotti said: “Since the life of Jesus Christ is the fundamental rule of our small Congregation… we must aim at what is most perfect always and in everything” (cf. Complete Works, II, 541-546; VIII, 63, 67, 253, 254, 466). And St Luigi Orione wrote: “Our first Rule and life is to observe the holy Gospel, in great humility and in loving sweetness and on fire with God” (Letters of Don Orione, Rome, 1969, Vol. II, 278).

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Despite good intentions, the five friends who sought to follow in Jesus’ footsteps by forming an extended Christian family last year were ill-prepared for the realities of living closely in community.

Two married couples, with five young children between them, moved with a like-minded bachelor into a dilapidated house in Billings, Montana, determined to live a life of simplicity and charity, cutting their living expenses to the bone so they could give generously to the needy and love their neighbors and one another unconditionally.

They were inspired by the early Christians in Jerusalem, who sold all they owned and shared everything, “with one accord…with gladness and singleness of heart.”

“Our focus has to be on God and the way of life he has set out for us, as opposed to the way we want to live, which is very selfish,” said one of the Billings husbands. “Church is not something we attend. It’s something we are,” added the bachelor.

Ironically, after four months together they had not as yet met a single neighbor nor given aid. According to Stephanie Simon, writing in the Los Angeles Times, “When it came to food, clothing, and entertainment, they had not been able to agree on ground rules, beyond a vague vow ‘to live a continually more modest lifestyle.'”

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Sixty-one percent of the public believes the economy is now suffering through its first recession since 2001, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

The fallout from a depressed housing market and a credit crunch nearly caused the economy to stall in the final three months of last year. Some experts, like the majority of people questioned in the poll, say the economy actually may be shrinking now. The worry is that consumers and businesses will hunker down further and pull back spending, sending the economy into a tailspin.

“Absolutely, we’re in a recession,” said Hilda Sanchez, 44, of Waterford, Calif.

Squeezed by high energy and food bills, “we can’t afford the things that we normally buy,” she said. “We are cutting corners in our spending. For our groceries, we are buying a lot of generic and we are eating out less.”

For many, the meltdown in the housing and mortgage markets has proved especially disturbing. Record numbers of people were forced from their homes, unable to afford the monthly loan payments. People watched their single biggest asset fall in value, a reason to tighten the belt.

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Very cool–check it out.

When is the next year when Easter is as early as it is this year? No peaking or researching, think and take a guess.

Ajinbayo Akinsiku wants the world to know Jesus Christ – just not the gentle, blue-eyed Christ of old Hollywood movies and many illustrated Bibles.

Akinsiku says his Son of God is “a samurai stranger who’s come to town, in silhouette,” here to shake things up in a new, much-abridged version of the Bible rooted in manga, the Japanese form of graphic novels.

“We present things in a very brazen way,” said Akinsiku, who hopes to become an Anglican priest and who is the author of “The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation.” “Christ is a hard guy, seeking revolution and revolt, a tough guy.”

Publishers with an eye for evangelism and for markets have long profited by directing Bibles at niche markets: just-married couples, teenage boys, teenage girls, recovering addicts. Often the lure is cosmetic, like a jazzy new cover.

Sales of graphic novels, too, have grown by double digits in recent years. So it makes sense that a convergence is under way, as graphic novels take up stories from the Bible, often in startling ways. In the last year, several major religious and secular publishing houses have announced or released manga religious stories.

The medium shapes the message. Manga often focuses on action and epic. Much of the Bible, as a result, ends up on the cutting room floor, and what remains is darker.

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When I visit Dad I worship at Church of the Cross in Ticonderoga, New York. It snowed all night and is still snowing presently so the drive from Silver Bay to Ticonderoga was quite treacherous, even on the ploughed roads. There is maybe 1 to 1 /2 feet of snow on the ground; it is a beautiful winter wonderland. During worship the snow came off the roof and spilled onto the parish walkway so the rector, Marjorie Floor, announced that unless one wanted to go through a lot of snow to get to the parish hall the best means available was through the main worship area–KSH.

Making things even worse by indicating they have no understanding of Christianity and its relationship to Britain’s common law, the Anglican Church stepped in to defend the Archbishop of Canterbury after he faced fresh criticism from MPs, Muslim leaders and rights activists over his comments that the adoption of parts of sharia law in Britain was “unavoidable”.

Dr Williams has “sought to carefully explore the limits of a unitary and secular legal system in the presence of an increasingly plural society”, said the Church in a memorandum to MPs.

Common law is indeed unitary, that is, it is one body of law for all, whether they are Christians, the adherents of another faith, or non-believers, but it is not a “secular” law. It was founded on Judaeo-Christian principles and created by Christians for practical and spiritual reasons.

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There has been a mixed reaction to Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams’ comments about adopting Sharia law in Britain from politicians, spiritual and cultural figures in the United Kingdom.

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If you heard Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s victory speech on Super Tuesday, you may have noticed him speaking in what is almost a separate dialect. Some listeners have even asked us what he was talking about. So NPR headed off to the National Mall in search of people who understood Huckabee’s biblical allusions.

It proved almost as hard as getting a camel through the eye of a needle.

We started by recounting this story: In November, as Huckabee surged in the polls, a student at Liberty University asked him what was driving his startling success. Huckabee responded, “It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people.”

We played the tape for Leitha Anthony, who was waiting to go into the Washington Monument. Did she know what he was talking about?

“That’s when Moses … had to feed all the people, the multitude of people that left Egypt,” Anthony hazarded. “That’s what it was?”

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Nearly 100 leading laity in the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh have signed an open letter expressing their “strong support for the godly direction” of Bishop Robert W. Duncan Jr. in removing the diocese from the national church and realigning it with a more biblically conservative province of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

The letter, the idea of Edith M. Humphrey, a professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and Leslie Thyberg, chair of the diocese’s board of examining chaplains, was written in response to a separate letter last month by 12 conservative clergy who broke with the bishop in declaring their intention to remain in the Episcopal Church.

“We were just talking about the letter that the 12 clergy had written openly to the diocese and we were concerned that people might not understand the whole story,” said Dr. Humphrey, a member of the Church of the Ascension in Oakland.

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A transcript of conversations between Jérôme Kerviel, the trader whom Société Générale says cost it nearly 5 billion euros ($7.2 billion), and a broker at one of the bank’s subsidiaries suggests that the second man had an intimate knowledge of Kerviel’s surreptitious trading and that Kerviel was well aware of the gravity of his actions.

The correspondence took place in instant messages sent on the Reuters system from October 2007 to January. The messages add to pressure on Société Générale to explain how Kerviel could have engaged in the furtive trades alone. They also show a side of Kerviel that was alternatively fearful and boastful.

The second man, Moussa Bakir, a 32-year-old broker at Newedge, Société Générale’s futures brokerage previously known as Fimat, was released after 48 hours of questioning by the French financial police.

Bakir faces further questioning in the case, French officials said on Saturday. Judges named Bakir as a person of interest to the investigation, a status between a formal suspect and an ordinary witness.

In excerpts of the exchange, first published on the Web site of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur on Saturday and confirmed by a person with knowledge of the investigation, Kerviel and Bakir tried to calm each other and made jokes about going to prison.

Read it ll.

The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled Friday that electrocution is cruel and unusual punishment, outlawing the electric chair in the only state that still used it as its sole means of execution.

In the landmark ruling, the court said the state Legislature may vote to have a death penalty, just not one that offends rights under the state constitution. The evidence shows that electrocution inflicts “intense pain and agonizing suffering,” it said.

“Condemned prisoners must not be tortured to death, regardless of their crimes,” Judge William Connolly wrote in the 6-1 opinion.

“Contrary to the State’s argument, there is abundant evidence that prisoners sometimes will retain enough brain functioning to consciously suffer the torture high voltage electric current inflicts on a human body,” Connolly wrote.

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Healthcare remains another important point of difference. And here we have a three-way split. McCain would attempt to bring down costs and make insurance more affordable by stimulating competition and cracking down on the big pharmaceutical companies that he believes overcharge patients. Obama has some as-yet-unspecified plan to make insurance more accessible to those who want it. Clinton, clinging to the approach that proved politically disastrous when she headed her husband’s healthcare taskforce, would make insurance compulsory, even for young workers who neither need nor want it, and deduct the cost from their pay cheques if necessary.

Enough detail to make the broad point. This is one of the few elections that create for Americans what Ronald Reagan once called a time for choosing. In 1932 we elected Franklin Roosevelt and put paid to the notion that “that government is best which governs least”. In 1980 we elected Reagan, a Roosevelt-Democrat turned Republican, and put paid to the conservative war against Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This year we will have to choose between a man who is confident that America can ”“ indeed, must ”“ play a leading role in maintaining world order, even at the expense of domestic spending, and a man or woman who believes that America must concentrate its resources on the home front, while relying more on international institutions to keep the world’s democracies safe from its enemies. Little wonder that this American election has attracted so much attention in Britain and around the world. What happens in America won’t stay in America.

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Watch it all from NBC.