Oil futures shot higher Tuesday, closing above $100 for the first time as investors bet that crude prices will keep climbing despite evidence of plentiful supplies and falling demand. At the pump, gas prices rose further above $3 a gallon.

There was no single driver behind oil’s sharp price jump; investors seized on an explosion at a 67,000 barrel per day refinery in Texas, the falling dollar, the possibility that OPEC may cut production next month, the threat of new violence in Nigeria and continuing tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela.

The fact that there was no overriding reason for such a price spike could be a bad omen for consumers already bearing the burdens of high heating costs and falling real estate values. Many recent forecasts have said oil demand growth this year will be less than initially expected, yet prices continue to rise. That suggests they may continue rising as the weakening dollar attracts new investors to the futures market.

And rising oil prices mean higher gas prices.

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The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it””I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt’s conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the “disturber of the peace” that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings.

In 1945, in one of her first essays following the end of the war in Europe, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe””as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.”[2] In one sense she was, of course, absolutely correct. After World War I Europeans were traumatized by the memory of death: above all, death on the battlefield, on a scale hitherto unimaginable. The poetry, fiction, cinema, and art of interwar Europe were suffused with images of violence and death, usually critical but sometimes nostalgic (as in the writings of Ernst Jünger or Pierre Drieu La Rochelle). And of course the armed violence of World War I leached into civilian life in interwar Europe in many forms: paramilitary squads, political murders, coups d’état, civil wars, and revolutions.

After World War II, however, the worship of violence largely disappeared from European life. During this war violence was directed not just against soldiers but above all against civilians (a large share of the deaths during World War II occurred not in battle but under the aegis of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide). And the utter exhaustion of all European nations””winners and losers alike””left few illusions about the glory of fighting or the honor of death. What did remain, of course, was a widespread familiarity with brutality and crime on an unprecedented scale. The question of how human beings could do this to each other””and above all the question of how and why one European people (Germans) could set out to exterminate another (Jews) ””were, for an alert observer like Arendt, self-evidently going to be the obsessive questions facing the continent. That is what she meant by “the problem of evil.”

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Florida’s State Board of Education has voted to use the term “scientific theory of evolution” in new science standards, the first time the word “evolution” has been included.

Florida’s current standards require the teaching of evolution using code words like “change over time.”

Adding the term “scientific theory” before the term “evolution” was a modified proposal at least one board member called a compromise, not standards proposed originally to the committee. The option to include “scientific theory” was made late last week.

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I just wanted to take advantage of a (relatively) slow news day to make a quick point about comments. They are, ideally, ideas, not rants; content, not therapy. They’re at their best when you’re sharing something somebody else might want to read ”” a fact, an opinion, an argument.

A good reminder. Read it all.

But nothing has troubled England quite as much as his remarks this month on the inevitability of certain elements of sharia law in Britain. Sharia, he said, offered a way of arbitration, particularly in marital or family disputes, that could provide an alternative to divorce courts. “Certain conditions of sharia are already recognized in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system,” he said.

The comments ignited a furor that has seen British tabloids call for his resignation and members of his own hierarchy publicly disown him. For some Britons, Williams’s remarks came as an unwanted reminder of the forward march of Islam in their midst. For some in the church, there was a sense of outrage that Muslims would get special dispensation, while Christians get no such favors in secular Britain.

The episode says as much about the personality of the archbishop, say observers, as it does about the knee-jerk tabloid proclivity to judge first and inquire later.

Part of the problem was not what was said (sharia justice has been arbitrating in civil affairs of British Muslims for 25 years) but the way it was communicated. The sentiments were woven into a lofty speech that was not easily boiled down into snappy headlines.

Therein lies the conflict: Williams is a public intellectual, ponderous, studious, and given to rich, convoluted peroration, which doesn’t always sit happily in the era of sound-bite journalism.

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Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in today’s Wisconsin primary, showing a broad reach across Democratic constituencies, including many ”” such as women, lower-income families, and union households ”” that had been strongholds for Clinton in previous contests.

Obama’s projected victory, his ninth in a row, was quickly answered with twin attacks from opponents in both parties. John McCain, who declared that he will be the Republican nominee after beating Mike Huckabee in Wisconsin, dismissed Obama’s message as ”˜”˜an eloquent but empty call for change,’’ while Clinton launched her most aggressive critique yet on his preparedness for the presidency.

”˜”˜One of us is ready to be commander in chief in a dangerous world,’’ Clinton said at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio.

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From here:

Some more internals from the second wave of AP Wisconsin Democratic primary exit polls:

Among women: Barack Obama 51%, Hillary Clinton 49%. Among independents: Obama 63%, Clinton 34%. Among families with incomes under $50,000 per year: Obama 51%, Clinton 49%. Among union households: Clinton 50%, Obama 49%.

Update—You have to love this:

Whoever they voted for – Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama among the Democrats, John McCain and Mike Huckabee among the Republicans – there was a feeling by many in this region today that this election truly mattered, that Wisconsin was poised to play a role in the making of a president.

The decision of our Bishops not to attend the Lambeth Conference in 2008 is the culmination of ten years of thought, prayer and action. We have played our part in challenging false teaching and practice, always hoping that those who have flouted the strong position taken by the last Lambeth Conference would turn back in repentance. As part of this, we have developed strong fellowship links with the many Anglican christians all over the world who feel as we do that the crisis over human sexuality is of momentous significance, and who are determined not to accept unbiblical teaching and sinful practice.

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From here:

After hearing about the five primates’ intentions to boycott Lambeth, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said February 15 that the conference will be diminished by their absence, and I imagine that they themselves will miss a gift they might have otherwise received. After hearing about the five primates’ intentions to boycott Lambeth, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said February 15 that the conference “will be diminished by their absence, and I imagine that they themselves will miss a gift they might have otherwise received.

The legal battle over same-sex marriage in California is also a clash of religions.

As the state Supreme Court prepares for a three-hour hearing March 4 on the constitutionality of a state law allowing only opposite-sex couples to marry, the justices have been flooded with written arguments from advocates on both sides – including two large contingents of religious organizations with sharply differing views.

On one side are the Mormon church, the California Catholic Conference, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. They describe marriage between a man and a woman as “the lifeblood of community, society and the state” and say any attempt by the courts to change that would create “deep tensions between civil and religious understandings of that institution.”

On the other side are the Unitarians, the United Church of Christ, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Soka Gakkai branch of Buddhism, and dissident groups of Mormons, Catholics and Muslims.

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Let’s consider two recent, related pieces in the University of Miami newspaper.

The first announces the appearance, in selected classrooms, of a new technology called SYNCHRONEYES.

Synchroneyes is the sort of thing universities all over the country are spending your tuition dollars on.

Instead of doing something about disruptive in-class laptop use that costs nothing ”” banning them ”” many universities are starting an expensive war with them.

Synchroneyes marks a major escalation in the classroom technology battle: The professor as spy-master.

With Syncroneyes, the professor can “view all the computer screens in the classroom and redirect the student’s attention if they digress from the lecture topic.”

Elegantly put. Let’s see this interaction in practice.

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The Gafcon organizing committee, which is arranging an alternative to the Anglican Lambeth Conference, has announced that the dates and venue of the Jerusalem conference have been changed.

Following consultations with the Bishop in Jerusalem, the Rt Rev Suheil Dawani, the conference will now be broken into two parts: a consultation for church leaders in Jordan from June 18-22 and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from June 22-29.

“We are very grateful for the feedback that we have received on the many complex issues that confront us,” the Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen (pictured) said on Feb 19.

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So how bad might this downturn get? To answer this question we should ask a true bear. My favourite one is Nouriel Roubini of New York University’s Stern School of Business, founder of RGE monitor.

Recently, Professor Roubini’s scenarios have been dire enough to make the flesh creep. But his thinking deserves to be taken seriously. He first predicted a US recession in July 2006*. At that time, his view was extremely controversial. It is so no longer. Now he states that there is “a rising probability of a ‘catastrophic’ financial and economic outcome”**. The characteristics of this scenario are, he argues: “A vicious circle where a deep recession makes the financial losses more severe and where, in turn, large and growing financial losses and a financial meltdown make the recession even more severe.”

Prof Roubini is even fonder of lists than I am. Here are his 12 – yes, 12 – steps to financial disaster.

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It used to be the ultimate million-dollar question: why do people believe in God? But inflation has swollen the price to £1.9 million. This is the sum being handed to Oxford University researchers to explore a topic that has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. The researchers will not be troubling themselves with the matter of whether or not God exists, merely whether belief in God maybe gave Man a Darwinian evolutionary advantage; or whether it is a result of Man’s sociable nature.

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(Church of Uganda News)

A CORRECTION on the Church of Uganda position regarding the Anglican Communion and the Lambeth Conference

“The Church of Uganda is not seceding from the Anglican Communion,” said Rev. Canon Aaron Mwesigye, church spokesperson. “Some press stories have misrepresented our position.”

“The plain fact is that we are simply not attending the Lambeth Conference in July 2008, but we are still very much a part of the Anglican Communion.”

The Church of Uganda broke communion with the Episcopal Church in the United States of America in 2003 after they elected and consecrated as Bishop Gene Robinson, a divorced man living in a same-sex relationship. But, the Church of Uganda has remained a consistently active member of the Anglican Communion.

“It is the Americans who have seceded from the Anglican Communion because of their decisions and their teaching,” Mwesigye said. “They have departed dramatically from the historic faith, teaching, and practice of the Bible and the Anglican Church.”

“How can they still be Anglican when they don’t believe what Anglicans believe?”

The Church of Uganda, along with many other Provinces in the Anglican Communion, urged the Archbishop of Canterbury to see that this crisis was resolved before convening Bishops of the Anglican Communion at the Lambeth Conference.

Since, however, the crisis has not been resolved, and since those who precipitated the crisis ”“ the Americans ”“ have been invited to the Lambeth Conference, the Church of Uganda has upheld its decision not to attend.

“The crisis in the Anglican Communion is very serious,” Mwesigye concluded. “It is not good stewardship of our limited resources to spend more than US$5,000 (8,500,000/=) per person for our Bishops and their wives to attend a three-week meeting which seems, in practice, to have no authority and is blatantly and persistently ignored by some of its wealthier member churches.”

Riot police have arrested the Harare deputy sheriff trying to open the Anglican cathedral for a Sunday service, the cathedral church warden Sekai Chibaya said Monday.

The cathedral had been illegally occupied by a renegade pro-ruling party ex-priest and baton-charged parishioners waiting for the church to be opened and to begin a service, witnesses said.

Watched by a group of about 20 parishioners on Sunday, a locksmith accompanying the deputy-sheriff – whose name was not immediately available – had just used a bolt cutter to open the padlock on the gate to the cathedral when a squad of riot police drove up, Chibaya said.

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Rev. Andrew Hewlett, the parish’s assistant priest, said the people there don’t agree with the theological course chosen by the Anglican Church of Canada.

The people of the congregation “who built the church, paid for it, banged in nails and painted the walls” should have an opportunity to decide on their future, said Hewlett. The same-sex marriage issue “is the presenting issue that gets a lot of press but I think there are deeper issues to do with theology, how we understand Christ, how we understand the Gospel and how we view scripture,” Hewlett said.

Bryant-Scott said the breakaway group “has done something illegal and inappropriate.” A parish leaving the church “simply is not possible,” he said.

“Individuals join churches; individuals can leave churches. An entity, a parish, cannot leave the diocese.”

People can form another church on their own, said Bryant-Scott, but can’t take the organization with them.

Discipline proceedings have begun against the two clergy involved, Hewlett and the Rector Sharon Hayton. Both have been “inhibited,” meaning they cannot participate in ordained ministry.

“I’m hoping to meet with them as soon as I can,” Bryant-Scott said.

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Fidel Castro stepped down Tuesday morning as the president of Cuba after a long illness, ending one of the longest tenures as one of the most all-powerful communist heads of state in the world, according to Granma, the official publication of the Cuban Communist Party.

In late July 2006, Mr. Castro, who is 81, handed over power temporarily to his brother, Raúl Castro, 76, and a few younger cabinet ministers, after an acute infection in his colon forced him to undergo emergency surgery. Despite numerous surgeries, he has never fully recovered but has remained active in running government affairs from behind the scenes.

Now, just days before the national assembly is to meet to select a new head of state, Mr. Castro resigned permanently in a letter to the nation and signaled his willingness to let a younger generation assume power. He said his failing health made it impossible to return as president.

“I will not aspire to neither will I accept ”” I repeat I will not aspire to neither will I accept ”” the position of President of the Council of State and Commander in chief,” he wrote.

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[Cindy] Jacobs then developed what she calls a “prayer strategy” for people from Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minn., to pray for 35 days along Interstate 35.

“We prayed to eliminate systemic poverty, we prayed for safety, we prayed for people caught in drug addictions, and trapped in their lives and hopeless,” she says.

The prayers continued well beyond those first 35 days.

And now the movement is called Light the Highway.

Light the Highway’s Web site lists 22 churches and prayer groups along the interstate ”” in places such as Laredo and Duluth as well as San Antonio, Dallas and Austin, Texas; Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo.; Des Moines, Iowa, and Minneapolis. According to the site, participants do not believe that Isaiah actually refers to Interstate 35. Rather, it says, the Bible is used symbolically “as a catalyst to begin praying, just like those who live in Interstate 40 can use Isaiah 40:3.”

Do travelers think it’s strange when they see a cluster of people ”” heads bowed and hands uplifted ”” on a grassy strip next to the highway?

“What would you rather have? A group of young people praying on I-35 or a group of young people dealing drugs on I-35? Take your pick,” says Steve Hill, the 54-year-old senior pastor at Heartland World Ministries, in the Dallas suburb of Irving.

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The losses keep piling up. Leading brokerage firms are likely to write down the value of $200 billion of loans they have made to corporate clients by $10 billion to $14 billion during the first quarter of this year, Meredith Whitney, an analyst at Oppenheimer, wrote in a research report last week.

Those institutions and global banks could suffer an additional $20 billion in losses this year on commercial mortgage-backed securities and other debt instruments tied to commercial mortgages, according to Goldman Sachs, which predicts commercial property prices will decline by as much as 26 percent.

Analysts at UBS go further, predicting the world’s largest banks could ultimately take $123 billion to $203 billion of additional write-downs on subprime-related securities, structured investment vehicles, leveraged loans and commercial mortgage lending. The higher estimate assumes that the troubled bond insurance companies fail, a possibility that, for now, is relatively remote.

Such dire predictions underscore how the turmoil in the credit markets is hurting Wall Street even as the Federal Reserve reduces interest rates. Already, once-proud institutions like Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and UBS have gone hat in hand to Middle Eastern and Asian investors to raise capital. “You don’t have a recovery until you have the financial system stabilized,” Ms. Whitney said. “As the banks are trying to recover they will not lend. They are all about self-preservation at this time.”

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His advocacy of the rights of gay Christians during the 1990s was misleading: it made him seem the liberal he never really was. He was always an Anglo-Catholic above all. He sought to develop and update the open, liberal side of this tradition, but not in a way that might jeopardise its integrity.

Above all, he refused to combine Anglo-Catholicism with a general liberal agenda. Indeed he revived the Anglo-Catholic suspicion of secular liberalism that dates back to Newman. The liberal state, in this view, offers itself as an alternative community of salvation; it tempts us into supposing that we can dispense with the Church, or at least water it down, and develop a more progressive form of Christianity. This leads to weak forms of Christianity that are unable to resist dangerous ideologies: most obviously, the liberal Protestants of Germany embraced Nazism. It is Williams’ anti-liberal ecclesiology that is the root cause of the present controversy. In a sense it’s not really about sharia law, or Islam: it’s about the relationship between a Catholic conception of the Church and liberalism.

For Williams, authentic Christianity occurs within a clearly defined social body, an “ethical community” as he has sometimes put it. Without this, Christian culture will be dispersed by the cold winds of secularism. There is a need for strong resistance to the various negative spirits of the age: consumerism, celebrity, hedonism and so on, and this resistance can only occur within an alternative social world, walled off from mainstream culture.

Only from within a religious subculture can secular modernity be seen for what it is: dehumanising. He has referred to secularism’s “unspoken violence”, and to modernity as “an atmosphere in which people become increasingly formless, cut off from what could give their lives … some kind of lasting intelligibility”. He sees secular liberalism as a quietly nihilistic force that robs human life of full significance, as a demonically subtle tyranny that looks and feels like freedom.

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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is in Kenya for a day of talks with political protagonists and leaders. She’s delivering a message from President Bush: Stop the violence and return to democracy. Bush is in Tanzania on the second leg of a five-nation African tour that is focusing on U.S. humanitarian efforts on the continent. Rice’s trip to Kenya girds former U.N. chief Kofi Annan’s mediation efforts there.

Listen to it all from NPR.

More conservative Anglican congregations will join those that have already cut ties with the Anglican Church of Canada, the head of a breakaway group predicts.

In the past week, seven parishes voted to leave the Anglican Church of Canada to seek the authority of a South American archbishop in a long-running dispute over theological issues, including the blessing of same-sex marriages, which they oppose.

So far, six Anglican parishes in Ontario, eight in British Columbia and three in Alberta have decided to operate outside the jurisdiction of the Anglican Church of Canada and joined the recently formed Anglican Network in Canada. Ten of the 17 breakaway parishes have voted to align themselves with the more orthodox, traditional Province of the Southern Cone, which covers most of South America. More are expected to consider the issue in the following week.

“I’m quite confident that this is just a beginning,” said Bishop Donald Harvey, moderator of the recently formed Anglican Network in Canada, a “haven” for breakaway congregations that is under the jurisdiction of the South American archbishop, Gregory Venables.

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It’s always intriguing to see which churches have grown and which denominations have faded in the past year. According to the 2008 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (a Bible of sorts for us religion writers), the fastest-growing religious body in 2007 was the Jehovah’s Witnesses at 2.25 percent.

Following them were the Mormons at 1.56 percent and the Roman Catholics at .87 percent. Compare this to last year’s states that had the Catholics out front at 1.94 percent, followed by the Assemblies of God at 1.86 and the Mormons at 1.63.

The denomination with the biggest decrease is the Episcopalians at 4.15 percent.

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The College of William & Mary, the nation’s second oldest, lost its president last week after a culture-war clash that began when he ordered the removal of an 18-inch brass cross from the altar of the historic Wren Chapel.

His decision, an act of legal principle to some and a blunder of liberal activism to others, touched off a revolt among conservative bloggers and alumni of the state-supported school in Williamsburg, Va., and led to his resignation Tuesday.

The dispute underscores the deep divide over the role of religion in public institutions, and shows how an ideological firestorm can be sparked on a college campus.

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Read it all. Blog readers with additional documentation or clarifying information on this are encouraged to email the blog host.

But if there’s a flaw in the movie, it’s in how dashing Douglas’ character is.

“The idea that Gekko was this shiny, beautifully dressed, magnetic, charismatic superstar suited a lot of people in the business world very nicely,” says screenwriter Stephen Schiff, who’s writing a sequel to the movie.

Although Bud Fox ultimately turns against him and Gekko heads to jail, the character’s charisma undercuts the film’s moralizing.

“What do you want to be coming out of the movie? Do you want to be Bud Fox, broken and downtrodden and never having quite made it?” asks Schiff. “Or do you want to be Gordon Gekko, who, yeah he’s going to jail, but what a swashbuckler he was until the very last moment?”

Both Douglas and Stone have said that a lot of young people they meet see Gekko as a role model. But George David Smith, a business historian who teaches at NYU’s Stern School, says that Gekko is definitely not a capitalist hero. Gekko, says Smith, would have more trouble operating today because regulators pursue that kind of manipulation more aggressively.

Audiences may get a chance to see how Gekko would fare in today’s economy. A sequel to Wall Street, called Money Never Sleeps, is in the works.

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Controversy has surrounded the comments Rowan Williams recently made about Sharia. The religious think tank Ekklesia has now weighed into the debate with the suggestion that the Archbishop’s speech demonstrates the need for the disestablishment of the Church of England. Jonathan Bartley, the co-director of Ekklesia, and the Right Reverend James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, gave their views.

Listen to it all (just under 7 minutes).