The Situation on the ground for voluntary organisations working with families is “chaotic”, the Bishop of Southwark has said.

He highlighted problems faced by the organisations during a debate on “strengthening families, community cohesion and social action” in the House of Lords on Thursday, February 28.

The Rt Rev Tom Butler said funding continuity was one of the particular issues leading to uncertainty.

He said Christian organisations, such as Welcare in his diocese, are “committed to supporting families through prayer, pastoral care and in other practical ways ”” and through the provision of education”.

Bishop Butler told peers: “I wish to focus on the delivery of family care at local borough level, for here ”” despite what were well intentioned changes in the delivery of services ”” it is our experience that the current situation on the ground is chaotic.”

Read it all.

Listen to it carefully and listen to it all.

But my hopes were dashed when I discovered that this was not at all what the sender of the e-mail had in mind. Instead, the author and those he represents were quite clear that they want The Episcopal Church to change into something it has never been. They support all the changes that the revisionists have been making in our Church over the past 30 years and are eager for more. In reality, they favor updating The Episcopal Church to make it more acceptable to popular norms and contemporary times, rather than having it remain faithful to the historic faith and practice of the ancient catholic church. Instead of wanting to remain Episcopal, what they really want is to “remain under the authority of the General Convention church,” no matter what ”“ even when it violates the teachings of the Bible and happily changes the Biblical teaching on sexual morality. In our liturgy they want to get rid of those masculine images for God ”“ like Father and Lord and King ”“ and replace them with inclusive language images that revise the biblical revelation. Far from wanting to “Remain Episcopal” and to be loyal to the church we have known and loved and served over the ages, what they are striving for is a new, improved, and up-to-date version of The Episcopal Church.

The revisionists, like those represented by the e-mail I received, are clearly in control of this new Episcopal Church, and there seems little hope of reform. Not to be deterred nor turned back from their agenda, they are perfectly willing to sacrifice the church’s unity in order to achieve their goals.

Read it all.

Fed officials are increasingly convinced that the United States is sliding into a recession, and they worry that the deepening credit squeeze will aggravate the problem by making it even harder for consumers and businesses to borrow money for houses, new equipment or new factories.

The Fed’s hope is to relieve some of the pressure on institutions to sell at fire-sale prices, easing the strains on economic activity and making the credit markets feel more comfortable in buying mortgage bonds again.

Despite the staggering sums being offered by the Fed over the past week, some analysts warned that the new infusion of money might not be enough to fill the hole caused by the losses on ill-conceived mortgages during the housing bubble.

“They are essentially creating a $300 billion bank out of nothing,” said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP, a financial research firm.

But while the Fed’s moves may relieve short-term cash problems, Mr. Crandall said, “it doesn’t solve the fundamental issue, which is the decline of capital in the banking system.”

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Reports that the Vatican has published a new list of the seven deadly sins of modern times that includes littering and economic inequality is simply not true, affirmed the episcopal conference of England and Wales.

The conference released a statement today clarifying that an interview published Sunday by L’Osservatore Romano with Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, regent of the tribunal of he Apostolic Penitentiary, was misinterpreted in the media as an official Vatican update to the seven deadly sins, laid out by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century.

“The Vatican has not published a new list of seven deadly sins; this is not a new Vatican edict,” said the conference. “The story originated from an interview that Bishop Gianfranco Girotti gave to the L’Osservatore Romano in which he was questioned about new forms of social sins in this age of globalization.”

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About two-thirds of 211 officials surveyed by the National League of Cities reported an increase in foreclosures in their cities in the past year, according to the online and e-mail questionnaire. A third of them reported a drop in revenues and an increase in abandoned and vacant properties and urban blight.

“There’s a reduction in revenues at the same time that more services are needed,” says Cynthia McCollum, president of the National League of Cities and councilwoman in Madison, Ala., a suburb of Huntsville. “Because of foreclosures, people are stealing, crime is on the rise and we don’t have more money for cops on the street.”

More than a fifth of city officials responding said homelessness and the need for temporary and emergency housing increased in the past year.

The ills of foreclosures are dominating the agenda of the league’s meeting with congressional lawmakers in Washington, D.C., this week to secure federal funding for local initiatives.

“The American dream for individuals has now become the nightmare for cities,” says James Mitchell, a Charlotte councilman and head of the group’s National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials.

Read it all.

…in the United States, regions that spend the most on health care appear to have higher mortality rates than regions that spend the least, perhaps because of increased hospitalization rates that result in more life-threatening errors and infections. It has been estimated that if the entire country spent the same as the lowest spending regions, the Medicare program alone could save about $40 billion a year.

Overutilization is driven by many factors ”” “defensive” medicine by doctors trying to avoid lawsuits; patients’ demands; a pervading belief among doctors and patients that newer, more expensive technology is better.

The most important factor, however, may be the perverse financial incentives of our current system.

Doctors are usually reimbursed for whatever they bill. As reimbursement rates have declined in recent years, most doctors have adapted by increasing the quantity of services. If you cut the amount of air you take in per breath, the only way to maintain ventilation is to breathe faster.

Overconsultation and overtesting have now become facts of the medical profession. The culture in practice is to grab patients and generate volume. “Medicine has become like everything else,” a doctor told me recently. “Everything moves because of money.”

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Bishop Jim Curry of Connecticut, convener of Bishops Working for a Just World, spoke about the group which is a coalition of active and retired bishops gathered to support each other and other members of HOB to claim a public voice, leadership and advocacy for the church and the world. The bishops meet for training, legislative processes, and trying to demystify the process. They work with the Episcopal Church’s Office of Government Relations. A “go-to” group when legislation is at a critical point such as issues on the Farm Bill.

Bishop Charles Jenkins of Louisiana advocated contacting legislators. “They may not like to hear from us, but if we don’t, someone else will do it for us. It is not unexpected or unwelcome.”

The bishops were briefed by the staff of the Office of Government Relations (OGR) on the MDGs, the Farm Bill and the Jubilee Act for Debt Consolidation. Maureen Shea, OGR’s director, announced there are approximately 22,000 members of the Episcopal Public Policy Network. She presented questions for small group discussion: What are the public policy issues (local, national, and international) most important in your diocese? What obstacles do you face in being involved with public policy issues? What could the Office of Government Relations do to help you get past those obstacles?

Read it all.

More than 3 million teenaged girls have at least one sexually transmitted disease (STD), a new government study suggests.

The most severely affected are African-American teens. In fact, 48 percent of African-American teenaged girls have an STD, compared with 20 percent of white teenaged girls.

“What we found is alarming,” Dr. Sara Forhan, from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a teleconference Tuesday. “One in four female adolescents in the U.S. has at least one of the four most common STDs that affects women.”

“These numbers translate into 3.2 million young women nationwide who are infected with an STD,” Forhan said. “This means that far too many young women are at risk of the serious health effects of untreated STDs, including infertility and cervical cancer.”

Makes the heart sad–read it all.

Pastor Shorty likes to keep his sermons short and simple because that’s the cowboy way and his is a cowboy church.

“We’re not into religion. We’re not into ritual. We’re just here to worship the Lord,” says Glen “Shorty” Huffman of the 50 or so faithful filing into a converted metal barn outside Kersey on a Monday evening.

“You can come here straight from the field with manure on your boots or tractor grease on your jeans. There are people here who would never grace the door of a conventional church.”

Jesus would approve of the informal, “come as you are,” approach, Huffman says.

And the relaxed style, he says, goes a long way to explain why cowboy churches ”” also known as Western Heritage churches ”” number 550 nationwide and are on the rise.

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Read it all.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who has spent much of the day considering his options following allegations that he was linked to a high-priced prostitution ring, will not resign his office on Tuesday, according to a person involved in discussions with the governor.

The governor remained in his Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan a day after law enforcement officials said he was a client of the prostitution ring, which was broken up last week by federal authorities. Things remained uncertain regarding the governor’s future throughout the day. Mr. Spitzer, 48, a first-term Democrat, was said by aides to be considering resigning, but no official announcement had been made Tuesday afternoon.

Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson, who would serve out Mr. Spitzer’s term in the event of a resignation, also said he had not heard from the governor on Tuesday.

“The governor called me yesterday, he said he didn’t resign for a number of reasons, and he didn’t go into the reasons, and that’s the last I’ve heard from him,” he said.

Read it all; it now appears likely he will resign as early as tomorrow.

Of the 11 Episcopal seminaries in the United States, one recently announced it would end its main residential program, another is shutting down one of its campuses, and a third is selling a good portion of its campus. The changes reflect not only each institution’s own financial or enrollment straits but also changes that are coming in Episcopal seminary education, which has historically played a key role in American theological life. Among them are an embrace of distance education and new, more flexible alternatives to the traditional residential seminary model thus far sustained for centuries, and ever-increasing numbers of collaborations involving other seminaries, Episcopal and non, and non-sectarian colleges, as tiny institutions struggle to survive.

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If there is a single value that lies at the heart of contemporary American culture, it is freedom. After the horror of September 11, we were told that what was under attack was our American love of liberty. Yet our society is conflicted about what freedom means. In current political controversy, opponents always present themselves as defending the values of freedom. In the abortion debate, one side presents itself as defending a woman’s right to choose””freedom! On the other side of the political spectrum, the National Rifle Association presents itself as preserving the “right to bear arms”””freedom! Defenders of unrestrained capitalism talk about “free markets.” Those who represent the opposite side of the economic spectrum talk about “liberation” and “freedom from economic exploitation.” The Libertarian political party speaks of freedom from all government intervention or restraint, whether in the Market Place or the bedroom or perhaps sharing a little hashish among friends.

These various disagreements reflect just how confused and conflicted our society is about this very notion of freedom. For another common theme in contemporary society is the problem of addiction, and the corresponding need to restrain freedom. Since the nineteen seventies, a common cultural symbol is the Rehabilitation Center. It seems almost impossible to attain real celebrity status unless one has dried out at the Betty Ford Center at least once. The actor Robert Downey Jr. and the baseball player Daryl Strawberry go back over and over. In a recently popular movie, Sandra Bullock plays an alcoholic who is so out of control, she ruins her own sister’s wedding by showing up drunk. The title of the movie, Twenty-Eight Days, refers to the number of days it takes to get sober in such a clinic. And exactly what happens at the clinic? Bullock’s freedoms are denied. She cannot have alcohol or drugs. She is not free to come and go when she wants. She has to live by a strict schedule, more Spartan than a Benedictine monastery.

Our culture’s confusion and conflictedness about freedom lies in the fact that we have turned freedom, the “right to choose,” into a value in itself. Yet there is no such thing as freedom to choose””simple and of itself. Freedom is always the ability to choose something. If you were, without explanation, to command me to””“Choose!” “Make your choice now!”””I could only respond with, “Choose what?”

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The reasons for growth and decline in a congregation can often be complex. What is clear is that some congregations are ready for growth when the opportunity comes, and others are prone to decline, no matter how much is done for them. This is because of the way that the existing congregation works – its dynamic. The attitudes of the people, to God, to their priest, to each other and to the newcomer, are actually much more important than the style of the worship and the state of the finances.

Think for a moment about how different types of people make up your congregation. I don’t mean young and middle-aged and old, or black and white and Asian, but rather the way in which groups of people behave. Four types are represented in most congregations….

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For more than a century, American politicians have played on racial fears to divide the electorate and mobilize xenophobic parties. Blacks have been the “domestic enemy,” the eternal outsider within, who could always inspire unity among “we whites.” Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy was built on this premise, using coded language ”” “law and order,” “silent majority” ”” to destroy the alliance between blacks and white labor that had been the foundation of the Democratic Party, and to bring about the Republican ascendancy of the past several decades. The Willie Horton ad that George H. W. Bush used against Michael Dukakis in 1988 was a crude manifestation of this strategy ”” as was the racist attack used against John McCain’s daughter, who was adopted from Bangladesh, in the South Carolina Republican primary in 2000.

It is significant that the Clinton campaign used its telephone ad in Texas, where a Fox poll conducted Feb. 26 to 28 showed that whites favored Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton 47 percent to 44 percent, and not in Ohio, where she held a comfortable 16-point lead among whites. Exit polls on March 4 showed the ad’s effect in Texas: a 12-point swing to 56 percent of white votes toward Mrs. Clinton. It is striking, too, that during the same weekend the ad was broadcast, Mrs. Clinton refused to state unambiguously that Mr. Obama is a Christian and has never been a Muslim.

It is possible that what I saw in the ad is different from what Mrs. Clinton and her operatives saw and intended. But as I watched it again and again I could not help but think of the sorry pass to which we may have come ”” that someone could be trading on the darkened memories of a twisted past that Mr. Obama has struggled to transcend.

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Read here and there for starters. After that, check out Zadok here (and Father John Zuhlsdorf has the italian text here if you are up for it).

Now compare all that to the inaccurate Nightline report here.

People “are walking away from their homes in droves not because they lost their jobs but because home prices are falling,” Leamer said.

Many prominent economists and institutions, including Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, have already declared the economy to be in recession. That is commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of decline in gross domestic product.

UCLA predicts that GDP will dip by 0.4% in the second quarter of this year, but then rebound. Anderson expects GDP to be growing at 2.5% by the end of this year.

In staking out the contrarian position, Leamer noted that UCLA bucked other forecasters in 2001 by correctly predicting that year’s recession.

“We got it right, and we stood alone back then,” he said. In jest, he added later that he had “submitted my resignation letter, in the event I am wrong.”

Read it all.

It is very helpful to have the full text of this, thanks to Episcopal Cafe.

The Rev. Canon Philip Groves, facilitator for The Listening Process, addressed the gathering. He is charged with monitoring The Listening Process. He expressed his appreciation of the contributions of the Episcopal Church to The Listening Process over the years. He added that other Anglican provinces have a listening process and processes are “frequently going on very quietly.”

He reviewed the resolution that “requests the Primates and the ACC to establish a means of monitoring the work done on the subject of human sexuality in the Communion and to share statements and resources among us.”

Groves called for the need to reflect, communicate, and engage.

“The Church must be diverse because humanity is diverse; it must be one because Christ is one,” he quoted from Andrews Walls in The Ephesian Movement.

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“I am delighted that Bishop Whitmore will be joining us in the Diocese of Atlanta,” said the Rt. Rev. J. Neil Alexander, Bishop of Atlanta, in an article published on the diocesan website. “In our years together in the House of Bishops, I have come to deeply respect Bishop Whitmore for his integrity and his principled way of engaging the full life of the church. He has been faithful over many years in his commitment to The Episcopal Church. He brings gifts that are complementary to mine and will not just fill in around the edges. He will be able to join me in leading the mission and ministry of this great diocese.”

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Comptroller General David Walker estimates that Washington has promised $53 trillion in Social Security and Medicare benefits without funding them. In real dollars, that means every American — this means you — owns a $175,000 share of the federal debt. It’s as if you have a second mortgage — for a home you don’t own.

These days, there has been much finger-pointing at a system that allowed lenders to issue mortgages that violated the basic tenets of fiscal responsibility. How is it, people now ask, that banks could issue so many loans to buyers for homes they could not afford?

How indeed? Washington continues to authorize retirement and medical benefits without putting aside the money to pay for them. Editorials and think tanks sound the alert. Yet you hear little public complaint about the situation. Even in a presidential election year, voters are not demanding that White House hopefuls promise to balance the books.

If the sky falls, will Americans then ask why they were not warned? Every year of inaction adds another $2 trillion to $3 trillion to the tab, noted Alison Acosta Fraser of the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Alice Rivlin of the left-leaning Brookings Institution is the fourth member of the Concord Coalition’s “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour.” Asked what presidential hopefuls Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain propose to do about the pending crisis, Rivlin answered that essentially “they’re ignoring it almost completely.”

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Entertaining stuff from Bird and Fortune on the markets and the subprime mess.

The House of Bishops was informed March 10 that full invitation is “not possible” from the Archbishop of Canterbury to include Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire as a participant in this summer’s Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops.

Robinson, addressing the House, urged the other bishops of the Episcopal Church to participate fully in the conference, and thanked all who are willing to “stay at the table.”

Robinson told the House that he respectfully declined an invitation to be present in the conference’s “Marketplace” exhibit section.

Robinson confirmed for ENS that he plans to be in Canterbury during the July 16-August 3 once-a-decade gathering, but not as an official conference participant or observer.

Read it all and please take the time to read Gene Robinson’s address to the House of Bishops as well.

What does commitment to “Global South work” mean for two iconic primates from Africa and Asia? Such clarification is necessary. Without which Anglicans across the Southern Hemisphere do not have a shared platform on which they can discuss how to support one another in promoting the common good.

In what follows, I shall chart the emergence of “Global South Anglican”, and place its rise within the broader historical developments of churches in the Southern Hemisphere. I shall end with some broader questions for the future of the Communion.

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Check it out.

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Read it all.

Read it all.

King Canute would have appreciated the dilemma. He famously ordered the sea to halt at his feet in order to demonstrate to sycophantic courtiers that even a monarch was powerless before the forces of nature.

The Churches are now faced with a tide of secularism that seems equally irresistible. In fact, their defences are being over run so fast that they are sometimes at a loss to know how to respond.

Should they be trying to hold back the seemingly inevitable, as some demand, or should they accept the limitations of their powers and beat a strategic retreat, ready to fight another day?

The Government’s decision to abolish the blasphemy laws, despite the deep reservations of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, is just the latest wave to crash over them, part of a tsunami of change that is shifting the ground beneath their feet.

The dilemma has been further sharpened by the departure from Downing Street of Tony Blair and the arrival of Gordon Brown.
Blair, the most overtly Christian Prime Minister since Gladstone, was always willing to tailor his reforms to recognize the historic role of the Churches in society – at least until his power waned at the end of his premiership.

Brown, though a son of the manse whose values are shot through with a Calvinist sense of justice and duty, has no brief with what he sees as anachronistic privilege.

During the Blair era, the changes were creeping and incremental, and Church leaders always knew they had an open door at Number 10 to argue their case for special treatment, to the fury of the secular lobby.
Nevertheless, the Blair regime forced through a raft of gay equality regulations that blunted the moral authority of the Churches and eroded the Judeo-Christian assumptions that underlie the political consensus.
In the short time since Brown’s arrival, the Churches have hardly been given time to draw breath before the next chill wave has struck. Within days, there came the unilateral announcement that the Prime Minister was relinquishing his right to choose between candidates for bishoprics, symbolically weakening the historic ties between Church and State.
Church authorities, forced onto the back foot, acquiesced with alarming speed after the Government agreed to emphasise the implausible claim that the Church’s Establishment status would be unaffected by the reform.
In fact, the Church’s genuine position had been stated a few weeks earlier in an official report by a group set up to review senior ecclesiastical appointments; that had concluded that such a reform would be deeply unsettling as it would hasten the unraveling of the subtle web that entangles the Church, monarchy and Parliament.
Apparently, Church advisors, who had been expecting the usual period of consultation before any changes were announced, concluded that Brown was not open to negotiation and that strategic retreat was the best option.

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, then announced a new law to ban the stirring-up of hatred against gays, which is currently being debated in the House of Lords as part of the Criminal Justice Bill. Both the Roman Catholic and Church of England bishops have resisted this more strongly, arguing in a joint statement that a homophobic hatred law could restrict the freedom of Christians to say that homosexual behaviour is sinful.

But the Government has so far shown no inclination to accept a Church-backed amendment to the homophobic hatred law that would ensure that preachers who voice such “politically incorrect” views did not face up to seven years behind bars.

Finally, the Church was last week uncomfortably bounced into accepting the demise of the nation’s ancient blasphemy laws. Having signalled that it would not stand in the way of the abolition of laws that are widely regarded as unfit for purpose, they were again wrong-footed by the speed with which the Government moved to introduce an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill to do just that.

Again the Church has put up a token resistance, with the Archbishops arguing that such a development will leave the Churches even more vulnerable to secularist assaults. But there is little evidence that anyone in the Government is seriously listening these days.

So the omens are hardly propitious for key battles that lie ahead, from the status of the bishops in a reformed House of Lords – a key disestablishment issue – to the role of faith schools in an increasingly secular society. The bishops should have a case that will resonate with the public; the electorate, unsettled by rapid changes in society, is sympathetic to many of the traditional values that the Church encapsulates.

But the bishops themselves are divided not only over social and political issues but also over the more fundamental question of what they actually believe. Their splits are painfully public. Until they can achieve a greater unity within their own ranks, they will always be giving ground.

–Mr Jonathan Petre is Religion Correspondent at the Daily Telegraph; this article appeared in the March 8, 2009, edition of the Church of England Newspaper, page 24