Drawn up by a 12-member international team meeting in England, the covenant is the second draft to be proposed; the first draft was released last year and roundly criticized. This draft will be discussed and amended at the Lambeth Conference, a meeting of nearly 600 Anglican bishops, in July. Implementation is likely years away.

While asserting the autonomy of each province, the covenant nonetheless lays out a process through which threats to the “unity of the Communion and the effectiveness or credibility of its mission” may be challenged.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, who heads the Church of England and is recognized by Anglicans as the “first among equals,” would be given the power to make “requests” of national churches based on those challenges. The Most Rev. Rowan Williams is the current Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Anglican Consultative Council, an international body appointed by the 38 provinces, would be the last court of appeals on all disputes. It would have the power to determine if a province has “relinquished the force and meaning” of the covenant, the consequences of which are not specified.

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The Air Force Academy was criticized by Muslim and religious freedom organizations for playing host on Wednesday to three speakers who critics say are evangelical Christians falsely claiming to be former Muslim terrorists.

The three men were invited as part of a weeklong conference on terrorism organized by cadets at the academy’s Colorado Springs campus under the auspices of the political science department.

The three will be paid a total of $13,000 for their appearance, some of it from private donors, said Maj. Brett Ashworth, a spokesman for the academy.

The three were invited because “they offered a unique perspective from inside terrorism,” Major Ashworth said. The conference is to result in a report on methods to combat terrorism that will be sent to the Pentagon, members of Congress and other influential officials, he added.

Members of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a group suing the federal government to combat what it calls creeping evangelism in the armed forces, said it was typical of the Air Force Academy to invite born-again Christians to address cadets on terrorism rather than experts who could teach students about the Middle East.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury provoked a chorus of criticism yesterday by predicting that it was “unavoidable” that elements of Islamic sharia law would be introduced in Britain.

Christian and secular groups joined senior politicians to condemn Rowan Williams’ view that there was a place for a “constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law” over such issues as marriage.

Dr Williams told BBC Radio 4’s The World At One: “It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system. We already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justifying conscientious objections in certain circumstances.”

He added: “There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with aspects of other kinds of religious law.”

Read it all and there are scores of links to other coverage here.

THE Archbishop of York, Dr Sentamu, was due to fly out to the troubled country of Kenya last night for a four-day visit, with the encouragement of the Archbishop of Kenya, the Most Revd Benjamin Nzimbi. The trip has two purposes: to be a fact-finding visit, and an expression of solidarity with, and prayer for, the Kenyan people.

The visit was arranged after a long phone conversation with Archbishop Nzimbi, when it was agreed that it would be helpful. Church leaders in Kenya still appear to be at odds about the best way forward in the conflict.

The Bishop of Mbeere, the Rt Revd Gideon Ireri, in eastern Kenya, told Ecumenical News International on Tuesday that he had serious concerns that the Church was not speaking with one voice.

A delegation from the World Council of Churches in Kenya said this week that political leaders in Kenya believed that the Church there had taken a partisan approach, and were not keen that it should be involved in the mediating process.

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QUESTION: But why would Democratic votes break down so starkly along educational lines?

DR. RETAIL: The consumer marketplace has been bifurcating for years! It’s happening because the educated and uneducated lead different sorts of lives. Educated people are not only growing richer than less-educated people, but their lifestyles are diverging as well. A generation ago, educated families and less-educated families looked the same, but now high school graduates divorce at twice the rate of college graduates. High school grads are much more likely to have kids out of wedlock. High school grads are much more likely to be obese. They’re much more likely to smoke and to die younger.

Their attitudes are different. High school grads are much less optimistic than college grads. They express less social trust. They feel less safe in public. They report having fewer friends and lower aspirations. The less educated speak the dialect of struggle; the more educated, the dialect of self-fulfillment

Did you hear the message of Clinton’s speech Tuesday night? It’s a rotten world out there. Regular folks are getting the shaft. They need someone who’ll fight tougher, work harder and put loyalty over independence.

Then did you see the Hopemeister’s speech? His schtick makes sense if you’ve got a basic level of security in your life, if you’re looking up, not down. Meanwhile, Obama’s people are so taken with their messiah that soon they’ll be selling flowers at airports and arranging mass weddings. There’s a “Yes We Can” video floating around YouTube in which a bunch of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and the guy from the Black Eyed Peas are singing the words to an Obama speech in escalating states of righteousness and ecstasy. If that video doesn’t creep out normal working-class voters, then nothing will.

QUESTION: Your cynicism is really interfering with my vibe. I don’t think you’re feeling the fierce urgency of now.

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If you’re sad and shopping, watch your wallet: A new study shows people’s spending judgment goes out the window when they’re down, especially if they’re a bit self-absorbed.
Study participants who watched a sadness-inducing video clip offered to pay nearly four times as much money to buy a water bottle than a group that watched an emotionally neutral clip.

The so-called “misery is not miserly” phenomenon is well-known to psychologists, advertisers and personal shoppers alike, and has been documented in a similar study in 2004.

The new study released Friday by researchers from four universities goes further, trying to answer whether temporary sadness alone can trigger spendthrift tendencies.

The study found a willingness to spend freely by sad people occurs mainly when their sadness triggers greater “self-focus.” That response was measured by counting how frequently study participants used references to “I,” “me,” “my” and “myself” in writing an essay about how a sad situation such as the one portrayed in the video would affect them personally.

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John McCain sought to mend his tattered relationship with conservatives and unify a splintered GOP as he all but clinched the party’s presidential nomination Thursday. Mitt Romney, his former chief rival, dropped out, and a parade of prominent Republicans swung behind the Arizona senator.

“We’re continuing campaigning and not taking anything for granted,” McCain said in an Associated Press interview, still reluctant to call himself anything more than the front-runner. “I certainly think that we have enhanced our chances.”

Only Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul remained in what has been a crowded and wide-open nomination fight for the past year. Both have narrow voting constituencies and are far behind in the hunt for delegates to the GOP’s nominating convention this summer.

Romney’s departure left McCain, whose independent streak rankles many in the Republican rank-and-file, poised to assume President Bush’s position as the party standard-bearer. It was a remarkable turnaround for McCain, whose campaign was barely alive last summer, out of cash and losing staff.

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What went wrong? After all, Mr Romney was perhaps the only candidate who took positions pleasing all the factions of the conservative base. For security types, he promised to stay in Iraq and said that he would double the size of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. For economic conservatives, he talked of tax cuts and touted his success as a businessman (in contrast to his chief rival, John McCain). And he told social conservatives that he was against gay marriage and abortion. What was the “Reagan coalition” not to like about the man?

First was his Mormonism. Most evangelical Christians in the social-conservative base feel that Mormonism is not Christian””some even think of it as a cult. Mr Romney tried (but failed) to pacify them with a speech on faith, saying that “Jesus Christ is the son of God and the saviour of mankind”. He tripped up early in Iowa, the first caucus. He campaigned heavily and far outspent his rivals, but evangelicals instead plumped for a man they felt to be the real item: Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher. Having stumbled in Iowa, Mr Romney’s candidacy looked wobbly. He soon lost New Hampshire to Mr McCain.

He did manage to win a few primaries, for example in Michigan and Nevada. But the party would not rally to him. Some were troubled by his perceived recent rebirth to social conservatism. As the governor of Massachusetts he had been gay-friendly and pro-choice. His newfound opposition to gay marriage and abortion seemed shallow. And this seemed to reflect a more general tendency to go with the political wind. Republicans like their leaders to be steadfast. So social conservatives stuck with Mr Huckabee, who won a clutch of southern states on “Super Tuesday”. Moderate conservatives and independents joined the reinvigorated Mr McCain.

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Bishop MacPherson recently wrote his diocese with some reflections on Archbishop Williams’ Advent letter to the primates. In his highly anticipated letter, Archbishop Williams declined to sanction The Episcopal Church for failing to provide the unequivocal assurances sought by the primates’ in their February 2007 communiqué. Archbishop Willaims’ letter also offered no substantive alternative means of resolving the conflict within the Anglican Communion over innovations to church teaching on sexuality, a particular point of contention for Bishop McPherson.

“What hasn’t been said is when the continued extension of conversations and meetings will come to an end and a definitive decision made,” Bishop MacPherson wrote. “What also has gone unstated is when is The Episcopal Church going to be called to a place of accountability by the wider Anglican Communion, Lambeth 2008?

“Throughout all of this I have stated that we needed to follow the process that would prayerfully lead to resolution. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel before us? I can’t answer this specifically, but do know and have shared that in order to remain informed of all that is taking place, and the options that may well come before us, we must remain a part of the conversations.”

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Faithfulness to the Lord of all Creation is cultural faithfulness; it is faithfulness in every realm of human experience, from science to sports, from making movies to making babies, from how we build relationships to how we relate to buildings. Following Christ is a matter first of inner transformation, and then of living faithfully in accord with the order of Creation as he made and is redeeming it, in all of our cultural convictions and practices concerning a host of abstractions and concrete realities: food, sex, time, music, history, language, technology, family, justice, beauty, agriculture, and community.

–Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio

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Forty years ago, as the civil rights fight in the U.S. reached its height, a tragic episode at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg added fuel to the fire.

In the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, as it has come to be called, three students were shot dead and 28 were wounded by state police after a peaceful protest outside the segregated All-Star Bowling Lanes. The event will be re-enacted by students of what is now South Carolina State University at 3 p.m. today.

The group, led by student government President Jeremy Rogers, will carry picket signs as they march before the now- vacant bowling alley on Russell Street. The march will proceed to the campus, where the protest will continue near the Washington Dining Hall, according to organizers. The demonstration will conclude at Mitchell Hall Field, where a ceremonial bonfire will be lit and survivor Cleveland Sellers will speak.

The student reenactment comes a day before the big event: a commemoration ceremony set for 11 a.m. on Friday at the school.

The “Truth and Reconciliation” program, to be held in the Martin Luther King Jr. Auditorium, will feature a filmed introduction by Tom Brokaw, whose recent book “Boom!” includes a discussion of the historic incident.

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The day after Super Tuesday, when so much was supposed to become so clear, evangelicals are as divided — and sought after — as they were the day before.

“There was this expectation, I think, over the course of the last year, that evangelicals — both the vanguard, the leadership of the movement, and the rank and file — would kind of congeal around a single candidate,” said Dan Gilgoff, political editor at Beliefnet.com.

“What you’re seeing is McCain, Huckabee and Romney are really splitting those votes.”

As the election season plows along, the three major Republican candidates are each facing challenges as they try to woo evangelicals. At the same time, the continuing evangelical dispersal has some pointing to a natural opening for Democrats in their attempts to lure evangelicals away from the GOP.

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Read it all and and the resolutions are here.

Check it out, especially the personal pieces in response to Mark Lawrence’s consecration (pages 8 and 9).

Ugh.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, died Tuesday at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said. He was thought to be 91 years old.

“He died peacefully at about 7 p.m.,” said Bob Roth, a spokesman for the Transcendental Meditation movement that Maharishi founded. He said his death appeared to be due to “natural causes, his age.”

Once dismissed as hippie mysticism, the Hindu practice of mind control known as transcendental meditation gradually gained medical respectability.

He began teaching TM in 1955 and brought the technique to the United States in 1959. But the movement really took off after the Beatles attended one of his lectures in 1967.

Maharishi retreated last month into silence at his home on the grounds of a former Franciscan monastery, saying he wanted to dedicate his remaining days to studying the ancient Indian texts that underpin his movement.

“He had been saying he had done what he set out to do,” Roth said late Tuesday.

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‘We can end a war. … We can save the planet. … We can change the world.”

A few years ago, if you’d suggested that a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination consider airing these sentiments in ads broadcast during the Super Bowl, most political pundits would have said you were insane. The Super Bowl, watched by nearly a third of the U.S. population, is about football, beer and machismo. It’s not about the antiwar movement, the environmental movement, the antipoverty movement or peace, love and understanding.

But on Sunday, Barack Obama aired a 30-second Super Bowl ad that drew unabashedly on the iconography of the American left — and no one batted an eyelash. The ad offered images of rallies and protest marches, of poverty and environmental destruction, of the devastation of war and of beaming, hopeful, multiracial crowds. Broadcast not to a niche demographic of activist students or South Carolina African Americans but to a cross-section of football fans, the message was unashamedly nostalgic and idealistic.

The Obama ad highlights a recent sea change in Democratic politics, one that’s impossible to understate. Just a few short years ago, Democrats were on the defensive. On national security issues, the party’s Beltway power brokers anxiously debated how best to look “tough.” That led easily into a depressing sort of “me tooism,” as Democrats competed to show that they weren’t the wimpy, soft creatures of Republic caricature but hard, chest-beating types, willing to embrace wars, abandon civil liberties and kill terrorists deader than dead.

On domestic issues, Democrats were also running scared. Most congressional Democrats voted to support Bush’s ruinous 2004 tax cut, for instance. And in general, Democrats did their darnedest to avoid using words or images that would remind the average American of the 1960s. The conventional wisdom was that bringing up the antiwar movement or the women’s movement or race or poverty would be a gift to the right.

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The federal government could make this happen by entering into an arrangement with American banks that hold subprime mortgages, in which homeowners typically pay a low interest rate for two or three years then face much higher payments. Here’s how it would work: The government would guarantee the principal of the mortgages for 15 years. And in exchange the banks would agree to leave their “teaser” interest rates on those loans in effect for the entire 15 years.

This would instantly give the lending banks new capital. As these mortgages would be guaranteed by the Treasury, they would suddenly be assessed, on bank balance sheets, at their original value – and a significant amount of the banks’ lost capital would be restored. Plus, the banks would receive, from most of the homeowners with subprime mortgages, up to 15 years of teaser-rate payments.

By solving the bank capital crisis immediately, this strategy would ensure that fewer families would lose their homes, that fewer neighborhoods would deteriorate because of abandoned housing and that, as a consequence, there would be less downward pressure on local real estate prices and property tax revenues.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the UK seems “unavoidable”.
Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4’s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

Dr Williams argues that adopting some aspects of Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court.

He says Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.

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The leaders of the 11 seminaries connected with the Episcopal Church have agreed that the schools they lead will consolidate their efforts in four areas of theological education.
The agreement came during a January meeting at Grace Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Attending the meeting were deans and trustees — including many board chairs — from nearly all 11 of the seminaries, along with many of the bishops who serve on some of the seminaries’ boards.

The collaborations will be distance learning, Spanish-language ministry preparation, Anglican Communion partnerships, and seminary-diocesan partnerships for local ministry development education.

“The spirit of cooperation” that was present during the meeting is “critically important” to the success of the plans, and marks a major change in the way the seminaries relate to each other, the Very Rev. Ward Ewing, dean and president of the General Theological Society (GTS) and convener of the seminaries’ Council of Deans, told Episcopal News Service.

“This is a big deal because we say we’re not going to be Lone Rangers anymore,” agreed Donn Morgan, dean of Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) and Ewing’s predecessor as convener.

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The fate of $600-$1,200 rebate checks for more than 100 million Americans is in limbo after Senate Democrats failed Wednesday to add $44 billion in help for the elderly, disabled veterans, the unemployed and big business to the House-passed economic aid package.

Republicans banded together to block the $205 billion plan from advancing Wednesday, leaving Democrats with a difficult choice either to quickly accept a House bill they have said is inadequate or risk being blamed for delaying a measure designed as a swift shot in the arm for the lagging economy.

The tally was 58-41 to end debate on the Senate measure, just short of the 60 votes Democrats would have needed to scale procedural hurdles and move the bill to a final vote. In a suspenseful showdown vote that capped days of partisan infighting and procedural jockeying, eight Republicans – four of them up for re-election this year – joined Democrats to back the plan, bucking GOP leaders and President Bush, who objected to the costly add-ons.

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Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday issued a replacement for a contentious Good Friday prayer in Latin, removing language that many Jewish groups found offensive but still calling for the Jews’ conversion.

However, representatives of Jewish groups as well as traditionalist Catholics quickly condemned the new prayer, though for different reasons. Jewish groups said it was still offensive, and traditionalists said they preferred the version that was replaced.

“It’s disappointing,” said Rabbi David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, who for 20 years has worked on Jewish-Catholic relations with Benedict as pope and, earlier, when he was a cardinal.

The prayer was a focus of dispute last year when Benedict allowed for greater use of a traditional version of the Latin Mass, called the Tridentine rite. That decree improved ties with Catholic traditionalists, who oppose the sweeping changes to church liturgy made from 1962 through 1965 during the Second Vatican Council.

The prayer is not part of the standard service used by most of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics, who celebrate Mass in their local languages.

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We have a Duke Blue Devils basketball nut in our house and last night Duke beat North Carolina.

Take a moment to enjoy it.

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean on Wednesday voiced concern over the prospect of a brokered convention at the end of the party’s White House nominating contests.
“The idea that we can afford to have a big fight at the convention and then win the race in the next eight weeks, I think, is not a good scenario,” Dean said according to excerpts of an interview with NY1 television.

In state nominating contests so far, no clear winner has emerged among Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the party’s nomination ahead of November’s presidential vote to replace George W. Bush in the White House.

“I think we will have a nominee sometime in the middle of March or April. But if we don’t, then we’re going to have to get the candidates together and make some kind of an arrangement,” said Dean, who failed in his bid for the party’s nomination in 2004.

“Because I don’t think we can afford to have a brokered convention — that would not be good news for either party.”

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Evangelical voters played a major role in Super Tuesday’s Republican primaries, especially in the South, providing a huge boost for former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and possibly costing Mitt Romney victory in some states, analysts said.

Nationally, Huckabee, Romney and Senator John McCain roughly split the evangelical vote, exit polls showed yesterday. But in the South, the vote among Christian conservatives was significant, and Huckabee drew the largest percentage of them by far.

For example, in Alabama, 78 percent of GOP primary voters said they are evangelical Christians, and 48 percent of them supported Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister. Their votes helped Huckabee win the state, reviving his struggling campaign.

An ebullient Huckabee, speaking to cheering supporters, declared that his strength in the South has made the Republican primary campaign a two-man race, “and we’re in it.”

Huckabee also won large shares of the evangelical vote in Georgia, Tennessee and Missouri.

In other parts of the country, the percentage of conservative Christian voters was smaller, and they spread their support among the three candidates. For example, in Massachusetts, only 20 percent of Republican primary voters described themselves as evangelicals, but 60 percent of them favored former governor Romney, according to exit polls. In Illinois, meanwhile, 42 percent of Republican voters said they were evangelical Christians, and 38 percent supported McCain.

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But our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ,

who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself.

–Philippians 3:20,21

Advocates for same-sex marriage plan to introduce legislation in the Maryland General Assembly today [Tuesday] that would abolish civil marriage ceremonies now confined to heterosexual unions in the state and replace them with domestic partnerships for all couples.

The bills represent an unusual new tactic in the effort to push legal rights for gay couples through the House and Senate during the legislature’s 90-day session. Sponsors of the measure say they are attempting to address head-on the concerns of lawmakers who oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds.

Under their proposal, all couples — straight or gay — would be on equal footing with secular unions. Religious marriage in churches, synagogues and mosques would be unaffected, as would existing civil marriages.

The word “marriage” would be replaced with “valid domestic partnership” in the state’s family law code.

“If people want to maintain a religious test for marriage, let’s turn it into a religious institution,” said Sen. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Montgomery), the bill’s Senate sponsor.

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