In this case, a central clue as to what is going on was given by Bp. Schofield’s March 12 Statement in response to the vote to depose him on the basis of his having “abandoned the Communion of the Church” (Canon IV.9.2): “I have not abandoned the Faith,” Schofield stated; “I resigned from the American House of Bishops and have been received into the House of Bishops of the Southern Cone. Both Houses are members of the Anglican Communion. They are not ”“ or should not be ”“ two separate Churches.” Bp. Schofield’s point is straightforward: if the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone is not a “separate church” from TEC, how can he have “abandoned” the “Communion” of TEC’s own ecclesial existence? Does in fact TEC “recognize” the Southern Cone as an Anglican Church with which she is in communion? In what sense, then, is “abandonment” taken?

The basic ecclesial issue, then, is one of recognizability. Yet this is just the issue that is at stake in the Anglican Communion’s current struggles. Archbishop Rowan Williams himself spoke to it straightforwardly last December in his Advent Letter to the Primates. The Anglican Communion’s “unity”, he wrote, “depends not on a canon law that can be enforced but on the ability of each part of the family to recognise that other local churches have received the same faith from the apostles and are faithfully holding to it in loyalty to the One Lord incarnate who speaks in Scripture and bestows his grace in the sacraments. To put it in slightly different terms, local churches acknowledge the same ‘constitutive elements’ in one another. This means in turn that each local church receives from others and recognises in others the same good news and the same structure of ministry, and seeks to engage in mutual service for the sake of our common mission.” The issue of “recognisability”, of course, is more than a matter of Anglican Communion concern; it has become a central feature of ecumenical discernment. And therefore, the fact that the Presiding Bishop, her advisors, and the House of Bishops as a whole can determine that Bishops Schofield and Cox are worthy of deposition under Canon IV.9.2 would seem to indicate that they believe that both bishops and the Province of the Southern Cone do not share with TEC in the “constitutive elements” of “church” in the fundamental ways that provide “communion”.

Read it all.

Dear Father Harmon,

I never comment; however, I have almost stopped reading comments because I find so many of them rude.

Thank you for letting this lay fallow this week. I hope you have a most blessed Holy Week and the break is good for you. Your blog is the only one I read daily. It has been tremendously important to me.

May God bless you and keep you with us,

Read it carefully and read it all.

What are the consequences of a world in which regulators rescue even the financial institutions whose recklessness and greed helped create the titanic credit mess we are in? Will the consequences be an even weaker currency, rampant inflation, a continuation of the slow bleed that we have witnessed at banks and brokerage firms for the past year?

Or all of the above?

Stick around, because we’ll soon find out. And it’s not going to be pretty.

Read it all.

I am an atheist. I have never joined, or been part of, any religious group or organization. I was raised without religion, and without much understanding of what religion is. I have never had much of an identity religiously, and I stayed away from much thought or discussion on the matter. It is only recently that I have really explored the many options for religious beliefs and have decided that rather than saying, “No comment,” I now call myself an atheist.

I am also a parent. I have two children: a 13-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son. They don’t belong to any religious group, either. I never had them baptized, christened, or blessed. Neither of them had a bris, bat mitzvah or first communion. But am I raising “atheist children”? Just because I do not identify our family as religious, are they atheists? I don’t think so. Rather, I am raising questioning children, and those are the best kind of children to send out into the world.

Read it all.

In an interview with CNBC, Alan Schwartz said he expects Bear Stearns fell within the range of estimates that analysts on Wall Street forecast for the fiscal first quarter, which ended last month.

Analysts’ expectations for profit range from 46 cents per share to $1.61 per share.

Schwartz also denied rumors that the company’s liquidity is under threat. Bear Stearns still has a $17 billion cushion against losses, he said. “Our balance sheet has not weakened at all,” he said. “We don’t see any pressure on our liquidity.”

From CNN money, referring to an interview this past Wednesday, March 12th.

Composer Gregorio Allegri’s “Miserere” is a piece of choral music so powerful that a 17th-century pope decreed it could be played only during the week leading to Easter ”” and then only in the Sistine Chapel. Jesse Kornbluth of HeadButler.com talks about the “Miserere” with Jacki Lyden.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Hi Dr. Harmon,

Sorry to hear that comments have been taking a downward turn recently. Will be praying for you all this week as you prepare for Easter (we live in…[ ] and celebrate Easter on the Orthodox calender, so it’ll be another month for us). I really enjoy reading your blog, and I hope people, like you said, will use this time in the church calender to reflect on the holiness and humility of our Savior.

Peace to you,

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the second world war. It will end eventually when home prices stabilise and with them the value of equity in homes supporting troubled mortgage securities.

Home price stabilisation will restore much-needed clarity to the marketplace because losses will be realised rather than prospective. The major source of contagion will be removed. Financial institutions will then recapitalise or go out of business. Trust in the solvency of remaining counterparties will be gradually restored and issuance of loans and securities will slowly return to normal. Although inventories of vacant single-family homes ”“ those belonging to builders and investors ”“ have recently peaked, until liquidation of these inventories proceeds in earnest, the level at which home prices will stabilise remains problematic.

Read it all.

I was so very troubled by the deterioration of the comments recently that having said my prayers about it I believe it prudent to take Holy Week and have no comments on any thread for a week.

This achieves several things:

(1) It gives all of us space to step back and focus on the most important week of the Christian year.

(2) It allows some perspective on life, the blog, the news, and our comments thereon. One of the sayings I use in parish ministry is “no one is indispensable,” by which I mean sabbaths need to be taken and ultimately it is up to God. Some people commenting on this site who have been asked to take a time out based on their comments have protested to us by email for months afterward, as if the site depended on what he or she had to say.

(3) It allows some reflection to be taken on what to do about the comments when we return to allowing them during Easter Week. It looks as if after a warning we may need to turn to a more aggressive editing policy at a minimum. Any suggestions you have are welcome.

(4) It gives the elves and me a break in this area (which really does take a lot of work).

In the meantime you can feel free to share any thoughts you have to me by email at: E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com. It is possible that any really important emailed comment may be posted in the main blog if I think it appropriate–KSH.

Pope Benedict XVI issued one of his strongest appeals for peace in Iraq on Sunday, days after the body of the kidnapped Chaldean Catholic archbishop was found near the northern city of Mosul.
The pope also denounced the 5-year-long Iraq war, saying it had provoked the complete breakup of Iraqi civilian life.

“Enough with the slaughters. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!” Benedict said to applause at the end of his Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square.

On Thursday, the body of Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was found near Mosul. He had been abducted on Feb. 29.

Benedict has called Rahho’s death an “inhuman act of violence” that offended human dignity.

Read it all.

Amazing–the fifth largest investment bank in the U.S. goes from 70 to 2 in a week.

The central bank approved a cut to its lending rate to financial institutions to 3.25 percent from 3.50 percent, effective immediately, and created another lending facility for big investment banks to secure short-term loans.

The steps are “designed to bolster market liquidity and promote orderly market functioning,” the Fed said in a statement. “Liquid well-functioning markets are essential for the promotion of economic growth.”

Read it all.

In March 1944, basketball players from the North Carolina College for Negroes played a secret game against military medical students from Duke University.

Rabid segregation kept the teams from playing together in public, and by the end of the clandestine matchup, the North Carolina players had soundly beaten Duke, 88-44.

The secret game was just one of the historic incidents featured in a new ESPN documentary about early African-American basketball pioneers and the historically black colleges and universities that nurtured them. Black Magic tells the stories of many of the players who gradually broke through the barriers of segregation and racism and set the standard for the basketball stars of today.

Read it all–something else to look forward to on television.

It was late on a rainy fall day, and a college freshman named Rey was showing me the new tattoo on his arm. It commemorated his 500-mile hike through Europe the previous summer, which happened also to be, he said, the last time he was happy. We sat together for a while in his room talking, his tattoo of a piece with his spiky brown hair, oversize tribal earrings and very baggy jeans. He showed me a photo of himself and his girlfriend kissing, pointed out his small drum kit, a bass guitar that lay next to his rumpled clothes and towels and empty bottles of green tea, one full of dried flowers, and the ink self-portraits and drawings of nudes that he had tacked to the walls. Thick jasmine incense competed with his cigarette smoke. He changed the music on his laptop with the melancholy, slightly startled air of a college boy on his own for the first time.

Rey’s story, though, had some unusual dimensions. The elite college he began attending last year in New York City, with its academically competitive, fresh-faced students, happened to be a women’s school, Barnard. That’s because when Rey first entered the freshman class, he was a woman.

Read it all.

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

Christians, the Rev. Doug Dortch fears, often move too quickly from Palm Sunday to the Resurrection. Calvary barely gets a pause.

That’s why he likes the Tenebrae service ”” what he calls the “best-kept secret about Christian worship” ”” during Holy Week. Tenebrae, the Latin word for shadows, attempts to recreate the emotional atmosphere of Christ’s passion by extinguishing candles or lights, one by one, throughout the service, which ends in complete darkness and silence.

“The service enables Christians to identify with the betrayal and abandonment and agony of the crucifixion,” said Dortch, pastor of First Baptist Church. “It’s highly experiential.”

He said it answers the age-old question ”” raised by many of the “new atheists” today ”” “how bad things can happen to good people.”

“The only answer that can be given, I think, on this side of the grave, is that God is present with us in the pain and the suffering, just as he was with Jesus,” he said.

Read it all.

One UK economist warned that the world is now close to a 1930s-like Great Depression, while New York traders said they had never experienced such fear. The Fed’s emergency funding procedure was first used in the Depression and has rarely been used since.

A Goldman Sachs trader in New York said: “Everyone is in a total state of shock, aghast at what is happening. No one wants to talk, let alone deal; we’re just standing by waiting. Everyone is nervous about what is going to emerge when trading starts tomorrow.”

In the UK, Michael Taylor, a senior market strategist at Lombard, the economics consultancy, said on Friday night: “We have all been talking about a 1970s-style crisis but as each day goes by this looks more like the 1930s. No one has any clue as to where this is going to end; it’s a self-feeding disaster.” Mr Taylor, who had been relatively optimistic, has turned bearish: “It really does look as though the UK is now heading for a recession. The credit-crunch means that even if the Bank of England cuts rates again, the banks are in such a bad way they are unlikely to pass cuts on.”

Mr Taylor added that he expects a sharp downturn in the real UK economy as the public and companies stop borrowing. “We have never seen anything like this before. This is new territory for us. Liquidity is being pumped into the system but the banks are not taking any notice. This is all about confidence. The more the central banks do, the more the banks seem to ignore what’s going on.”

Read it all.

On Easter Day, John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, will be standing up to his waist in water inviting allcomers to renounce the devil before plunging them in his open-air baptismal tank.

Last week he settled for renouncing John Hutton, secretary of state for business, enterprise and regulatory reform, who has said we need more millionaires and should celebrate the freedom to get rich.

“To celebrate wealth for its own sake is such a strange view,” says Sentamu. “We should celebrate creativity, people who expand our horizons to become more loving and more caring, not celebrate people who are driving big cars. Wealth creation is in order to improve the lives of all, not just for the individual.”

If he rejects the Gospel of John Hutton, he is nonetheless a firm believer in the Gospel of John Lewis, which last week announced profits of £379m and revealed that its 69,000 staff ”“ partners in the business ”“ will receive bonuses worth 10 weeks’ pay.

“That is what I am looking for: the John Lewis model,” he says. “It’s not about making more and more millionaires, because there is no evidence that these millionaires put back what they get out.”

Read it all.

The subprime mortgage crisis continues to claim casualties, and some of them aren’t even homeowners.

In California, scores of renters are being kicked out of their homes, even when they haven’t missed a single rent payment.

Shirley and William Hayes love the house they’ve been renting in a comfortable subdivision outside San Francisco. Even so, they’re moving.

“I have been packing. I have almost all of the linen done. We’re eating out of paper plates, plastic forks, spoons and knives,” Shirley Hayes says.

Read or listen to it all.

“[John] Carroll’s précis of the burden of The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1965), and of Rieff’s aphoristic polemic on the ”˜alternative culture’ of the1960s, Fellow Teachers (1972), is among the most arresting passages in New Makers [of Modern Culture]. ”˜Culture is interdicts””a central body of commanding “Thou shalt nots”’, Carroll summarizes.

They are contravened at the individual’s peril. Every society depends on orders of authority””from parents to teachers, priests to rulers””whose fundamental responsibility is to maintain the interdicts, and by means of guilt-inducing repressions. . . . Cultures go into decline when the interdicts are not defended by the elites, and the remissions take over. This is the condition of the modern West, where it is increasingly forbidden to forbid, and the trend is towards everything being permitted. In place of the traditional response to feeling bad: ”˜Pull yourself together!’ which assumes that individual character is responsible for its own malaise, the modern reflex is remissive. The therapist replaces the priest as society’s central authority figure.”

–Richard Davenport-Hines, “More Muslims” (review of New Makers of Modern Culture, ed. Justin Wintle), Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 2007, p.10. (Hat tip: SP)

Be sure there is something inside you which, unless it is altered, will put it out of God’s power to prevent your being eternally miserable. While that something remains there can be no Heaven for you, just as there can be no sweet smells for a man with a cold in the nose, and no music for a man who is deaf. It’s not a question of God “sending” us to hell. In each one of us there is something growing up which will itself be hell unless it is nipped in the bud. The matter is serious….

–C.S. Lewis, “The trouble with ‘X’,” in Walter Hooper, ed., God In The Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), pp. 154-155, quoted by yours truly in this morning’s sermon

According to an e-mail sent this week from David Booth Beers, the chancellor to the presiding bishop, to about two dozen Pittsburgh Episcopalians representing a spectrum of the diocese, he wrote that the Rev. Jefferts Schori would “poll the House of Bishops in April to see when the House would next like to meet to discuss, among other things, the certification respecting Bishop Duncan. It is not accurate to say that she is seeking approval to proceed; rather, she seeks the mind of the House as to when to proceed.”

The next scheduled meeting of the roughly 300-member House of Bishops is in September.

In January, the Rev. Jefferts Schori warned Bishop Duncan he could be removed from office because of his realignment efforts. His response to her will be made public Monday.

Read it all.

What had Bishop Cox done that led to his deposition? In June 2005, Bishop Cox ordained two priests and a deacon at Christ Church in Overland Park, Kansas, after he was asked to do so by the Primate of Uganda, the Most Rev. Henry Luke Orombi. The following month, Bishop Cox returned to Christ Church and led a service of confirmation.

In April 2005, Christ Church agreed to pay the Diocese of Kansas $1 million over the next 10 years as part of a separation agreement which allowed the congregation to retain its property, and for the clergy to be relieved of their canonical obligations to The Episcopal Church. Christ Church and its clergy subsequently affiliated with the Province of Uganda.

It is important to note that Bishop Cox did not perform acts in any congregation of the Diocese of Kansas without the Bishop of Kansas’ permission. He minstered to a congregation that had left the Diocese of Kansas and had been received into the Province of Uganda. Bishop Cox, as an Anglican Bishop, ministered at the request of an overseas Anglican bishop (in this case the Archbishop and Primate of Uganda) to a congregation that was under his jurisdiction.

In 2006, two bishops””the Rt. Rev. Dean Wolfe, Bishop of Kansas and the Rt. Rev. Robert Moody, Bishop of Oklahoma””presented then Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold with charges that Bishop Cox had violated the Canons of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Griswold forwarded the charges to the Title IV [disciplinary] Review Committee, which determined that there were sufficient grounds to proceed to trial.

Read it all.

How bad will this downturn get? No one can know because we’ve never experienced such a headlong slide in the housing market””and this comes at a time when its current value of $20 trillion accounts for the vast majority of most families’ wealth. Right now most economists expect the U.S. to experience a mild, short recession in 2008. But there is at least a possibility of a steeper decline that the traditional recession remedies””interest-rate cuts here, deficit spending there””won’t be able to handle.

What should be done? For policymakers in Washington””Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and congressional leaders””the sensible course is to insure against the small but scary possibility that things could go very wrong. The potential “insurance policies” are government actions that have a real cost but lessen the risk that a mild recession turns into something worse. The International Monetary Fund endorsed that approach on Mar. 12 as First Deputy Managing Director John Lipsky urged policymakers globally to “think the unthinkable and guard against a downward credit spiral.”

Broadly speaking, policymakers have three options for putting a safety net under the economy. Each has its pros and cons, and the cons become most apparent when the measures are taken to an extreme. That’s why a three-pronged approach that uses each option in moderation may be the best way to go.

Read it all.

I return again to my theme. Who interprets our ecclesiastical law? It is extraordinary to be told that the Presiding Bishop’s Chancellor assures us that the Canons were observed in the matter of the deposition of two bishops this week. In secular society the equivalent would be for the prosecution to assure the court that all was being done in accordance with the law. I leave aside the undoubtedly canonical business of getting, or not getting, the three longest serving bishops to approve of a bill of attainder or of a committee meeting in private signing off on the alleged guilt of the accused.

That there is an overwhelming desire on the part of our bishops to shoot as many admirals as possible on their quarterdecks “for the encouragement of others” is respectably British but questionably Christian. I am often told nowadays that our doctrine and much of our tradition is the fruit of victory. “Winners write history.” Well it would seem obvious that we are in the hands of “winners” now and the history they are writing -may I become modern and wax anecdotal? – is that we make examples of at least one very old man whose wife is in the grips of a terminal disease, look as if we are after another elderly bishop, all in an attempt to “discipline” a bishop who has attempted to run off with the family silver, and perhaps warn two or more others not to do the same or else?

The “or else” is that without any form of trial or judicial hearing a group of persons will vote to declare that such persons have been deposed from the Sacred Ministry, our canonic version of a Bill of Attainder. The wretched bishops are obviously guilty and so “Off with their heads. ” Ah! we say but that means “our” sacred ministry rather than that of the Church Catholic. Yet we are not prepared to say “from the ministry ofthis jurisdiction”. It’s OK to imply it, or merely suggest that we don’t mean that which the language states.

Read it all.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates said Thursday he expects the next decade to bring even greater technological leaps than the past 10 years.

In a speech to the Northern Virginia Technology Council, Gates speculated that some of the most important advances will come in the ways people interact with computers: speech-recognition technology, tablets that will recognize handwriting and touch-screen surfaces that will integrate a wide variety of information.

“I don’t see anything that will stop the rapid advance,” Gates said, noting that technological change driven by academia and corporate researchers continued even after the Internet stock bubble burst in 2000.

Read it all.

Last month, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, gave a nuanced, scholarly lecture in London about whether the British legal system should allow non-Christian courts to decide certain matters of family law. Britain has no constitutional separation of church and state. The archbishop noted that “the law of the Church of England is the law of the land” there; indeed, ecclesiastical courts that once handled marriage and divorce are still integrated into the British legal system, deciding matters of church property and doctrine. His tentative suggestion was that, subject to the agreement of all parties and the strict requirement of protecting equal rights for women, it might be a good idea to consider allowing Islamic and Orthodox Jewish courts to handle marriage and divorce.

Then all hell broke loose. From politicians across the spectrum to senior church figures and the ubiquitous British tabloids came calls for the leader of the world’s second largest Christian denomination to issue a retraction or even resign. Williams has spent the last couple of years trying to hold together the global Anglican Communion in the face of continuing controversies about ordaining gay priests and recognizing same-sex marriages. Yet little in that contentious battle subjected him to the kind of outcry that his reference to religious courts unleashed. Needless to say, the outrage was not occasioned by Williams’s mention of Orthodox Jewish law. For the purposes of public discussion, it was the word “Shariah” that was radioactive.

In some sense, the outrage about according a degree of official status to Shariah in a Western country should come as no surprise. No legal system has ever had worse press. To many, the word “Shariah” conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed. By contrast, who today remembers that the much-loved English common law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more? How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most European countries authorized torture as an official component of the criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the common law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands. When the British applied their law to Muslims in place of Shariah, as they did in some colonies, the result was to strip married women of the property that Islamic law had always granted them ”” hardly progress toward equality of the sexes.

Read it all.

James Willman seems to be a nice enough guy: polite, good-humored and hard-working, pumping gas seven days a week at the Amerigo Gas Station in the tiny Big Sur town of Gorda, about 35 miles north of Cambria.

But at least once a day, Willman said, someone pulls in and starts cursing him.

“They say all kinds of stuff”””˜You ought to be shot,’ or ”˜Where’s your mask?’ ” Willman said. “I’m like, ”˜Hey, I just work here.’ ”

The reason for consumer hostility is that the station is serving up what might be the costliest gas in the land.

This week, as crude oil flirted with $110 a barrel and gasoline prices surged nationwide, a gallon of regular at Amerigo was going for $5.20.

Read it all.

But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, “You are my God.” My times are in your hands; deliver me from my enemies and from those who pursue me. Let your face shine on your servant; save me in your unfailing love.

–Pslam 31:14-16

This was really very entertaining from NPR–listen to it all.