Read it all.

The Web site Apple.com attracted nearly 16 million American visitors last month. Some of them got there by typing in the address directly; others used a search engine, linking to company’s site via nearly 25,000 different keywords, including “iTunes,” “iPod” and “iPhone.”

So says Compete, a company based in Boston that tracks Internet traffic. How does it know? It has installed its software in the computers of 100,000 Americans – with their permission – allowing the company to track their every movement on the Internet. It gets additional, anonymous data on about two million American Web users from Internet service providers.

That is a lot of people, but a far cry from the total U.S. Internet population – more than 200 million, according to some estimates. Like other monitors of Internet traffic, including Nielsen Online, Hitwise and ComScore, Compete extrapolates total Web audience figures from such samples, in a system similar to the panel-based research that is used to measure television audiences.

Marketers rely on these numbers because they are skeptical about data submitted by individual Web publishers, which often seem to overstate their own audiences, at least by comparison with independent measures.

Read it all.

Just hours before the Air Force announced the winner of a $35 billion contract to build aerial refueling aircraft on Feb. 29, an Airbus plane lumbered off the runway in Getafe, Spain, and climbed to 27,000 feet to rendezvous with a Portuguese F-16 fighter.

Then, in the skies south of Madrid, the two aircraft edged closer and closer, until they were joined by a 50-foot boom hanging off the back of the big Airbus plane. For the first time, the boom pumped fuel into another plane, 2,000 gallons in all during several connections.

The technology to pass fuel from one plane to another may not be rocket science ”” in fact, aerial fuel booms have been in use for more than 50 years ”” but it helped Airbus’s parent and its partner, Northrop Grumman, establish their technical bona fides.

Eager to enter the American defense market, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, the owner of Airbus, made several bold plays, perhaps none more dramatic than building the $100 million state-of-the-art refueling boom on spec.

As a result, Boeing, the pride of American aerospace, was outmaneuvered on its home turf for a contract that could grow to $100 billion, becoming one of the largest military purchases in history.

Read it all.

The words “sculpture park” bring the rolling expanses of Orange County to mind (Storm King Art Center) or, at least, the river’s edge in Queens (Socrates Sculpture Park). They do not instantly conjure up the traffic-jammed corner of Varick and Canal Streets.

Yet that is where New York’s newest sculpture park will be established: on a recently cleared block owned by the Episcopal Trinity Church, paralleling Juan Pablo Duarte Square on the Avenue of the Americas.

“When they’re idling in traffic trying to get through the Holland Tunnel, they’ll have something to look at,” said Maggie Boepple, the president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which will curate the sculpture park on behalf of Trinity Real Estate, managers of the church’s extensive holdings downtown.

“It’s a tremendous gift to the city,” Ms. Boepple said.

Read the whole article.

Library officials do not track attendance by visitors’ ages. But as buses from churches and nursing homes pull up and people walk gingerly down the steps ”” some on canes, others using walkers ”” it is obvious that the library is attracting an older crowd. Linda Sutton, who helps coordinate volunteers, said her staff loved helping older people, who spend an average of one to two hours touring the library. She added, “We’re so thrilled when we see a group of kids on a school group come through.”

The minister’s elder son, Franklin Graham, who runs the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said the library’s goal was not to glorify his father, or the stadium-style revivals where he preached to 215 million people over more than a half-century. Instead, the library is meant to serve as an evangelical tool.

“We want this not to be a memorial to Billy Graham or something that promotes the successes of his life,” he said. “We want it to point to Jesus Christ.”

Read it all.

The communion and the U.S. denomination have been embroiled in a bitter division since 2003 when the American church authorized the consecration of an openly homosexual bishop.

Bishops from the provinces of Uganda, Nigeria and Rwanda have said they are not going to Lambeth. Instead, they are encouraging bishops to attend the Global Anglican Future Conference in June in Jerusalem.

“What is the use of the Lambeth conference for a three weeks’ jamboree which will sweep these issues under the carpet,” Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria said in January, referring to the issues of sexuality and biblical interpretation. “The issue is that church leaders are endorsing what is wrong.”

The conflict has rocked the U.S. church, too, with scores of parishes leaving and seeking protection under more traditional and conservative primates in Africa and Asia.

On the business docket for Wednesday is a recommended disciplinary action against conservative Bishop John-David Schofield whose Diocese of San Joaquin. Calif., voted to leave the Episcopal Church in December and realign with the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone of the Americas, based in Argentina.

Read the whole thing.

Recently, 60 Minutes heard about an American relief organization that airdrops doctors and medicine into the jungles of the Amazon. It’s called Remote Area Medical, or “RAM” for short.

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, Remote Area Medical sets up emergency clinics where the needs are greatest. But these days, that’s not the Amazon. This charity founded to help people who can’t reach medical care finds itself throwing America a lifeline.

I especially commend the video report to you (a little over 12 minutes). I do not know how anyone can watch this and not be concerned about medical care in this country. We can and we must do better–KSH.

Great piece on a man who remembers his roots.

The faith-based reconciliation presentation which had begun on Saturday continued this evening, led by the Rev. Canon Brian Cox of the Diocese of Los Angeles and the Hon. Joanne O’Donnell of the Diocese of Los Angeles.

O’Donnell reviewed one of the core values of faith-based reconciliation, which is submission to God, the principle of sovereignty.

Acknowledging God’s sovereignty is the single-most important element of faith-based reconciliation, she noted. The basis of unity in the sovereignty of God is harmony, diversity and community.

“Unity is not uniformity,” O’Donnell said.

Read it all.

Fred Hargesheimer was shot down in the southwest Pacific on June 5, 1943. A lifetime later, he sits in his quiet California ranch house amid the snow and soaring sugar pines of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The light blue eyes, at age 91, can’t see as well as they once did. But when he looks back over 65 years, the smiling Minnesotan sees it all clearly ”” the struggle to survive, the native rescuers, the Japanese patrols and narrow escapes, the mother’s milk that saved him. He remembers well his return to New Britain, the people’s embrace, the fundraising and building, the children taught, the adults cured, the happy years beside the Bismarck Sea with Dorothy, his wife.

“I’m so grateful for getting shot out of the sky,” he said.

Garua Peni is grateful, too, as a member of those once-future generations here on New Britain.

“I thank God from the depths of my heart for blessing me in such an abundant way when He brought Suara Auru Fred Hargesheimer,” she said.

Read it all.

A photo and short company bio don’t reveal much about a person.

The U.S. Episcopal Church and its pension fund, both based in New York, received an embarrassing reminder of that when they attempted to target Zimmer Holdings with a dose of shareholder activism.

The recent proxy filing by Zimmer, a Warsaw-based orthopedics company, included a shareholder proposal from the church asking the company to take more steps to diversify its board of directors, “all of whom are white males.” The church pointed to the “cozy clubbiness” that too often has characterized U.S. corporate boards.

There was just one problem.

Dr. Augustus White, a member of Zimmer’s board since 2001 and a noted spine surgeon, is black — a fact Zimmer pointed out right below the church’s proposal.
Zimmer’s Web site carries a photo of White and summary of his career, including a professorship at Harvard Medical School and receipt of the Bronze Star for service in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in Vietnam. Zimmer also said White is recognized for his work in “medical education, diversity and issues of health care disparities.”

Read it all.

A single candidate chosen to be the provisional Bishop of San Joaquin will participate in a two-day walkabout visitation to the diocese immediately after the House of Bishops’ meeting concludes at Camp Allen in Texas on March 12.

The bishops are scheduled to vote on whether to depose the Rt. Rev. John-David Schofield as Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin during a “business session” after Morning Prayer on that day. Bishop Schofield has already formally resigned from the House of Bishops. Bishops with jurisdiction must obtain consent from the House of Bishops to resign, according to national church canons.

Read it all.

Read it all.

Change ringing does sound good. The typical bell tower in the United States is attached to an Episcopal Church (with a few exceptions) and has eight tuned bells that form a diatonic scale. Some towers have 10 (the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., for example) or even 12 bells (Trinity Wall Street).

Invariably, the bells ”” giant instruments cast in a foundry ”” are procured from England. Many are very old. They are mounted in a manner that enables them to rest in the upright position and turn a little more than 360 degrees when rung. A rope is attached to a big wheel in such a way that pulling it gets the bell going in both directions.

A ‘stay,’ or rigid piece of wood, projects from the bell’s crossbeam and reaches the ‘slider,’ another piece of wood fixed at one end but able to slide a little to and fro at the other end. A properly struck bell has just enough momentum to get it back into the upright position with each pull of the rope. The stay reaches the slider, preventing the metal tonnage of the bell from continuing in the same direction. Another pull on the rope and the bell comes ’round the other way.

David Porter, tower captain at Grace Episcopal Church, is teaching me the hand stroke. The hand stroke and back stroke together cause a complete two-dong ring. A circle of practiced ringers can achieve ‘perfect striking’ with even and orderly strokes. The rings of the bells overhead should be evenly spaced. It requires concentration and adroit maneuvering.

Read it all.

Nevertheless, it is true that agreement among exegetes is capable of surmounting antiquated contradictions and of revealing their secondary character. It can create new avenues of dialogue for all the great themes of intra-Christian controversy: Scripture, tradition, magisterium, the papacy, the eucharist, and so on. It is in this sense that there is, indeed, hope even for a church which undergoes the afore-mentioned turmoil. However, the actual solutions which aim for deeper assurance and unity than merely that of scholarly hypotheses cannot proceed from there alone. On the contrary, wherever there develops a total dissociation of Church and exegesis, both become endangered: exegesis turns into mere literary analysis and the church loses her spiritual underpinnings. That is why the interconnection between church and theology is the issue: wherever this unity comes to an end, any other kind of unity will necessarily lose its roots.

Read it carefully and read it all (emphasis mine).

But she tried very, very hard before giving up.

After explaining that they would be reading through the creed phrase by phrase, Woodward would give the charge:

“When the phrase is something you understand on one level or another, and believe, stand up or remain standing. When the phrase is something that makes no sense to you, or is something you do not believe, sit down or remain sitting.”

The resulting dance, he says, appeared to be something akin “to a rebellious exercise class,” with folks popping up, sitting down and squirming to watch their neighbors as they stood and sat and stood again.

At the end, Woodward would ask what they had observed. “The answers were always the same: No one stood all the way through the creed, and no one stayed seated all the way through, and there was always someone standing for every phrase.”

The article is mistitled, it should say that what it tells us is that we are a church which is failing to teach the faith effectively and is not doctrinally serious. Can you imagine if the Founding Fathers of America took this approach with, say, the Declaration of Independence? In any event, read it all–KSH.

“The question was always, ”˜Would the economy hang on by its fingernails?’ ” said Ethan Harris, the chief United States economist at Lehman Brothers. Based on the employment report, Mr. Harris said, “there’s a very high probability that we’re in a recession now.”

Even the one apparent piece of good news in the employment report was a mirage. The unemployment rate fell to 4.8 percent, from 4.9 percent in January, but only because more people stopped looking for work and thus were not counted as unemployed by the government.

Over the last year, the number of officially unemployed has risen by 500,000, while the number of people outside the labor force ”” neither working nor looking for a job ”” has risen by 1.3 million.

Employment has risen by 100,000, but even that comes with a caveat: there are also 600,000 more people who are working part time because they could not find full-time work, according to the Labor Department.

“The decline in the unemployment rate,” said Joshua Shapiro, an economist at MFR, a research firm in New York, “should not be viewed as good news.”

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad visited Baghdad this week to show Iran’s support for the Iraqi government. The visit can be seen as a major diplomatic setback for the United States.

Listen to it all.

Poet Robert Frost gave a series of informal lectures at Dartmouth College in 1947. Transcripts are now being published, using recordings that were in college’s archives for decades.

Take the time to listen to it all, you get to hear Robert Frost’s own voice.

In the middle of campaign season, about 250 Episcopalians gathered for some electioneering of their own yesterday morning as they came out to meet, greet and grill the six men and women who hope to be the diocese’s next bishop.

The process of picking the new leader of the Diocese of Maryland – which encompasses the central and western regions of the state – is an unusually democratic one, with clergy and delegates from each of the diocese’s 117 churches coming together to make their choice at a convention later this month.

B. Hopkins, a lay delegate from Holy Trinity Church in Churchville, called the open selection process “a virtue of our church.”

Read it all.

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all…As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.

–G.K. Chesterton

FRESH from her victories in three out of four states last week and surging back in the national polls, Hillary Clinton has crafted a new strategy for winning the Democratic nomination which she believes will legitimise her claim to be president.

Clinton thinks she can win a majority of the popular vote in primaries and caucuses, even if she cannot overtake Barack Obama, her rival, in the number of “pledged” delegates who will vote to choose the candidate at the Democratic national convention in August.

The New York senator has unnerved Obama, who has been left reeling by a series of errors from senior policy advisers. The two opponents face an ugly six-week battle in the run-up to a potentially pivotal primary in Pennsylvania next month.

Democrats boosted Obama in Wyoming last night in state caucuses that gave the Illinois senator a comfortable victory. With almost all votes tallied he beat Clinton by 59% to 40%.

Read it all.

Following lunch, the Rev. Canon Brian Cox of the Diocese of Los Angeles and the Hon. Joanne O’Donnell of the Diocese of Los Angeles led a presentation on faith-based reconciliation.

O’Donnell said the goal was not to reach reconciliation but to lead a reconciling life. She was not advocating for agreement, but for a transformation of attitude toward persons whose ideas may differ from your own.

Cox presented eight core values for religious and faith-based reconciliation: pluralism; inclusion; peacemaking; social justice; forgiveness; healing; sovereignty; and atonement.

This was followed by small group discussions on the question presented by Cox: How do my world view, core values and collective identity influence my perception of the conflict in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion?

Read it all.

The Bible Society has released an anotated edition of the Holy Scriptures, highlighting over 2000 passages addressing questions of “social justice.”

Whilst poverty and injustice are “two of the biggest issues of our day,” the president of the Bible Society, the Rt. Rev. NT Wright of Durham said, the new Poverty and Justice Bible, shows that in “speaking out” on these questions, “God got there first.”

The impetus for the Poverty and Justice Bible arose from a comment from American pastor Rick Warren who stated that although he had studied the Scriptures, he had overlooked the passages that spoke of God’s love for the poor.

The new Bible highlights over 2000 passages address social justice issues and comes with a 32 page study guide that looks at issues of fair trade, farming and equality in education.

Read it all.

The new Anglican Bishop of Waiapu is American David Rice, the Dean of the Anglican Cathedral in Dunedin.

Bishop-elect Rice was born and raised in Lexington, North Carolina, and he won an athletic scholarship to Lenior Rhyne College, where he played tennis and gridiron – he’s 193cm tall – and he took degrees in history and religion.

He later won a place at the Duke University’s Divinity School, gained a Master’s Degree in Divinity, trained for ministry in the Methodist Church.

In 1991 David and his wife Tracy came to New Zealand, and for two years he served as minister to the Thames Uniting Parish, before returning to another five-year posting at a Methodist church in his home town of Lexington.

Read it all.

Senator Barack Obama continued his string of victories in caucus states on Saturday, projected to be beating Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Wyoming by a wide margin.

The victory, while in a state with only 18 delegates, was welcome news for the Obama campaign as it sought to blunt Mrs. Clinton’s momentum coming off her victories in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday. Mrs. Clinton had campaigned here Friday, a day after her husband and daughter, signaling the stakes every contest holds in the fierce battle for the Democratic nomination.

Party officials reported extremely high turnout at caucus sites across the state. More than 1,500 residents of Laramie County came to cast votes at the caucus site in downtown Cheyenne, filling the auditorium. Hundreds more waited outside for hours until they could enter and vote.

Wyoming Democrats, usually a lonely bunch in an overwhelmingly Republican state, basked in their moment in the spotlight.

Read it all.

Read it all.

On Oct 31 US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori suspended him after a review panel found there was prima facie evidence to proceed against him for his actions as a parish rector in the 1970’s.

Bishop Bennison is accused of covering up the sexual abuse of a 14 year old girl by his brother. The family of the victim brought charges against the bishop in 2006, accusing him of having knowledge of the offense, but taking no action. He is also accused of withholding information of the abuse from the Diocese of Los Angeles when his brother applied for ordination.

In May Bishop Bennison will answer charges before a civil court brought by the former president of Forward in Faith, USA, the Rt. Rev. David Moyer.

In a legal first, the Pennsylvania court will allow Bishop Moyer to test the legality of the use of the “abandonment canon” used to rid him of the Anglo-Catholic leader.

Read it all.

Three months after the Diocese of San Joaquin took a momentous vote to leave the U.S. Episcopal Church, the bishop leading the charge says there’s a lot of work to do and there’s no looking back.

John-David Schofield, 69, bishop of the Fresno-based diocese for 20 years, says he never has felt he was leading people down the wrong road.

“The conviction of ‘this is right’ has done nothing but grow,” he said Friday morning in his office in the diocesan headquarters at St. James’ Cathedral.

On Dec. 8, the local diocese became the first American diocese to secede from the U.S. Episcopal Church since the Civil War, largely over differences with the national body’s approval of same-sex blessings, ordination of a gay bishop, the role of women in the church and how to interpret the Bible over such issues.

Read it all.