I was against the war from the start, although my opposition never translated into a protest march in Washington or a letter to my congressman. It remained no more than a quietly held belief. Today, there’s talk of leaving Iraq, but I don’t know what to think. I want our soldiers to come home, but can we really abandon the Iraqi people to what is essentially a civil war of our own making?

I don’t have a solution, but I think I may have figured out what’s missing from my perspective on democracy: pain ”” universal, democratic pain. In terms of the Iraq war, this country’s burden is being shouldered by a select few. Some families and communities have been devastated by the war. Others, like mine, have been far too insulated. We can’t truly share the responsibility for our democracy until we all share in its suffering.

And so, in the name of shared pain, I support the reinstitution of the draft.

Read it all.

The British publication International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church commissioned a volume on Covenant and Communion in 2007. This essay was prepared by invitation for that volume several months ago, and it will appear in published form in May 2008. It was posted on the ACI site so that it could be referred to in the context of a General Seminary event in New York last week. The remarks prepared for that context are much briefer, and aimed at a more general audience. They should be posted as well on the ACI site shortly. This was an event attended by Archbishop Gomez and Gregory Cameron, as well as others. Archbishop Gomez is on the ACI Board. I was present as representative of Wycliffe College, University of Toronto.

In order both to set limits and for clarity’s sake-themes to which I shall return- the present essay will undertake theological reflection on covenant and the appropriateness of using this term for work presently before us in the Anglican Communion. This requires some threshold consideration. By ”˜theological reflection’ I mean, giving a comprehensive account of Scripture with concern for its total, mutually-informing witness. I take this to be the concern of one of the Articles, with a long prior history, that scripture be read in such a way that its portions be not repugnant, one with another. The same concern also animates what in our present period is called ”˜canonical reading.’

It will be a basic contention of the present essay that this hermeneutical caution is traceable to the rule (kanon; regula) of faith (regula fidei) in the early church. Indeed, in the period of the formation and consolidation of New Testament writings and especially relevant because of the character of that ”˜work-in-progress,’ the rule grounds Christian convictions about the nature of God in Christ in the witness of the stable, inherited scriptures of Israel. The rule of faith is an appeal to the total witness of scripture, especially the Old Testament, as constituting the speech and work of the selfsame Living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in Israel and in the Apostolic witness to Jesus Christ.

Read it all (follow the link provided at the bottom).

It seems that most of my speaking engagements in recent years have focussed on three topics. Each of these is a subset of that traditionally unmentionable trio – politics, sex and religion. A standard conversation at home is “What are you speaking about this time? War? Homosexuality? The Anglican Communion?”. Of course I’ve often found myself speaking about two of the three on the same occasion – I’m sure you can guess which two! Today I think is a first in that I’m going to speak about all three in the same presentation!

My decision to include war is obviously triggered by the title’s use of ‘conflict’ but also by two memorable quotations. One comes from Herbert Butterfield, the distinguished 20th century Christian historian. He apparently once suggested that one could adequately explain all the wars fought in human history simply by taking the animosity present within the average church choir at any moment and giving it a history extended overtime. The roots of war, in other words, are found within the conflictual life of the church at every level. The other comes from the memorable response in 2000 of the then Primate of Canada to the consecration by the Primate of Rwanda and the then Primate of South East Asia of two American priests to serve as bishops in the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA). “Bishops”, Michael Peers, said, “are not intercontinental ballistic missiles, manufactured on one continent and fired into another as an act of aggression”. The means of war, in other words, have their parallels within the life of the church at every level.

Of course, we are, thankfully, no longer likely to kill each other and that is not an insignificant development and difference from literal ‘war’. However, having said that, the events of recent weeks announced by Changing Attitude are a sad and shocking reminder that physical assault and threats to kill are still real dangers for some who openly identify as gay or lesbian and something all of us need to oppose and make sure we don’t in any way encourage. We must also confess that at a spiritual level Stephen Bates was sadly not too far wrong in calling his book “A Church at War”. We risk as an international body the sort of self-destruction brought by war. We need to recall Paul writing to one of the many New Testament churches wracked by conflict – “You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other” (Gal 5.13-15).

So, how are we to think about conflict and making good moral decisions? What I am going to say falls into two parts – broadly a longer one on conflict and one on covenant….

Read it all.

Obama at 82.6, Hillary at 15.2.

According to a recent report by the Pew Forum, Catholicism in the USA is holding steady at about 25% of the population. But underlying this calm is a lot of churn. Immigrants are flooding into the church ”” nearly a quarter (22%) of all U.S. Catholics were born in a foreign country, and almost half of all immigrants (46%) are Catholics. But native-born Americans are fleeing. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church has lost more believers than any other religious group in recent years. Approximately 10% of Americans are former Catholics.

One problem is Catholic education. Young Catholics are shockingly ignorant of the most basic tenets of their faith. Many cannot name any of the four Gospels, or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible. To educate American Catholic youth, however, is to tell them that their church opposes premarital sex, condoms, abortion and the ordination of women ”” teachings that according to Sex and the Soul, a recently released study by my Boston University colleague Donna Freitas, are chasing Catholic youth out of the church in droves.

Young American Catholics treated John Paul II like a rock star. Yes, he was socially and theologically conservative, but at least they could relate to the guy with the “Popemobile” and the smile and the energy to travel to some 130 countries during his 26 years at the Holy See. But can they relate to Benedict XVI? And can he relate to them? What can a pope who is an academic theologian first and foremost offer young Americans, save for dogmas they don’t believe in and rituals they do not understand? Is he coming to scold us? Or to hug us?

We are about to find out.

Read it all.

Watch it all.

Stem cell research using material taken from human embryos continues to be hotly debated. Advocates of using embryos maintain that at such early stages, the cells cannot be considered a human person. However, a recent book by two philosophers argues the contrary.

Robert P. George, who is also a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and Christopher Tollefsen, avoid religious-based arguments and lay out a series of scientific and philosophical principles in favor of the human status of the embryo. In “Embryo: A Defense of Human Life” (Doubleday), they maintain that the status of a human being commences at the moment of conception.

The book starts by recounting the history of a boy named Noah, born in January 2007. He was rescued, along with other frozen embryos, from the disaster that struck New Orleans in 2005. It was Noah’s life — a human life — that was saved, George and Tollefsen point out, the same life that was later implanted in a womb and was subsequently born.

A human embryo, they continue, is a living member of the human species even at the earliest stage of development. It is not some type of other animal organism, or some kind of a clump of cells that later undergoes a radical transformation. Barring some kind of tragic accident, a being in the embryonic stage will proceed to the fetal stage and continue to progress in this development.

The point at issue, according to the authors, is at what stage we can identify a single biological system that has started on the process to being a mature human being. This decisive moment, they argue, comes with conception.

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Bush attends an Episcopal church in Washington and belongs to a Methodist church in Texas, and his political base is solidly evangelical. Yet this Protestant president has surrounded himself with Roman Catholic intellectuals, speechwriters, professors, priests, bishops and politicians. These Catholics — and thus Catholic social teaching — have for the past eight years been shaping Bush’s speeches, policies and legacy to a degree perhaps unprecedented in U.S. history.

“I used to say that there are more Catholics on President Bush’s speechwriting team than on any Notre Dame starting lineup in the past half-century,” said former Bush scribe — and Catholic — William McGurn.

Bush has also placed Catholics in prominent roles in the federal government and relied on Catholic tradition to make a public case for everything from his faith-based initiative to antiabortion legislation. He has wedded Catholic intellectualism with evangelical political savvy to forge a powerful electoral coalition.

“There is an awareness in the White House that the rich Catholic intellectual tradition is a resource for making the links between Christian faith, religiously grounded moral judgments and public policy,” says Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest and editor of the journal First Things who has tutored Bush in the church’s social doctrines for nearly a decade.

In the late 1950s, Kennedy’s Catholicism was a political albatross, and he labored to distance himself from his church. Accepting the Democratic nomination in 1960, he declared his religion “not relevant.”

Bush and his administration, by contrast, have had no such qualms about their Catholic connections.

Read it all.

Third, however, all this has come about not least because Paul has written a painful letter (2.3f.). This too is of course historically controversial: is the ‘painful letter’ 1 Corinthians itself, or is it one of the somewhat disjointed sections of 2 Corinthians itself, perhaps chapters 10-13? I am cautiously with those who think that it is a letter written between the two epistles, and now lost, but that doesn’t take away from the remarkable relevance of 2 Corinthians for our present moment. When the Archbishop issued his invitations, he made it clear as I said that their basis was Windsor and the Covenant as the tools to shape our future common life. That invitation was issued only three months after the remarkable joint statement from the Primates issued in Tanzania in February 2007. After a summer and autumn of various tangled and unsatisfactory events, the Archbishop then wrote an Advent pastoral letter in which he reiterated the terms of his initial invitation and declared that he would be writing to those bishops who might be thought particularly unsympathetic to Windsor and the Covenant to ask them whether they were really prepared to build on this dual foundation. Those letters, I understand, are in the post as we speak, written with apostolic pain and heart-searching but also with apostolic necessity. I am well aware that many will say this is far too little, far too late – just as many others will be livid to think that the Archbishop, having already not invited Gene Robinson to Lambeth, should be suggesting that some others might absent themselves as well. But this is what he promised he would do, and he is doing it. If I know anything about anything, I know that he deserves our prayers at this most difficult and fraught moment in the run-up to Lambeth itself.

Fourth, we have seen, predictably but sadly, the rise of the super-apostles, who have wanted everything to be cut and dried in ways for which our existing polity simply did not, and does not, allow. Please note, I do not for one moment underestimate the awful situation that many of our American and Canadian friends have found themselves in, vilified, attacked and undermined by ecclesiastical authority figures who seem to have lost all grip on the gospel of Jesus Christ and to be eager only for lawsuits and property squabbles. I pray daily for many friends over there who are in intolerable situations and I don’t underestimate the pressures and strains. But I do have to say, as well, that these situations have been exploited by those who have long wanted to shift the balance of power in the Anglican Communion and who have used this awful situation as an opportunity to do so. And now, just as the super-apostles were conveying the message to Paul that if he wanted to return to Corinth he’d need letters of recommendation, we are told that, if we want to go on being thought of as evangelicals, we should withdraw from Lambeth and join the super-gathering which, though not officially, is clearly designed as an alternative, and which of course hands an apparent moral victory to those who can cheerfully wave goodbye to the ‘secessionists’. I have written about this elsewhere, and it is of course a very sad situation which none of us (I trust) would wish but which seems to be worsening by the day.

Read it all–my emphasis (Hat tip: Babyblue).

As Peter Steinfels, the Beliefs columnist for The New York Times, recently noted, there is nothing particularly new in this tension. He wrote that many American Catholics “honor the pope yet disagree with papal positions, whether about using contraception, restricting legal access to abortion, ordaining married men or women to the priesthood or recognizing same-sex relationships.” I would add to that list disgust, more than mere disagreement, with the way the church has handled the priest scandals of the last decade.

But what does all this mean?

It means that I got my Catholic Irish up when I read recently that the Rev. John Hagee, a Texas televangelist, uses code language for the Catholic Church when he speaks of a “false cult system” and ”” what was it again? Oh, yes: “the great whore.” The good reverend says his words have been misconstrued, and I don’t want mine to be: It would be my humble honor to share a dinner of solidarity with the pope ”” a dinner, even, of mackerel.

But all this also means that I read the parish bulletin and the gospels, not papal encyclicals or L’Osservatore Romano. That I mutter more about the priest’s aimless homily or some action by the local bishop than about anything the pope has said or done. That on Sundays, though hardly every one, I try to concentrate on the Gospel and on the celebration of the Eucharist as best I can with a distracted 10-year-old and a squirming 4-year-old. That I never once ask myself: What would the pope do?

I am just an American Catholic shirt in a pile of human laundry, rinsing, twirling, praying that things don’t spin out of balance.

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For 70 years the Marriage Guidance Council, now Relate, has acted as honest broker in the love wars. Now it opens its archives for the first time, revealing intimate details of marital strife. Some problems have stayed the same, but the remedies have changed beyond recognition.

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At the end of November, Pope Benedict XVI addressed a Vatican meeting with 85 Catholic international NGOs and expressed support for their work as well as for the importance of the UN system, though he did warn against “moral relativism”.

“A growing tendency within the international organisations is to dislike and discard in principle all semblance of a religious connotation,” said Archbishop Migliore on the challenges faced by Catholic NGOs at the UN. “The intolerance does not reside only in certain fundamentalist religious people, but also in those who – not being believers – do not permit society to be a believer.”

Governments and international institutions have in the past not recognised the vital role that faith-based organisations have to play in delivering humanitarian assistance and promoting human development, says Caritas. For instance, in many African countries the Catholic Church is the primary, if not the sole, healthcare and education provider. International donors have not taken advantage of this valuable resource as a way to deliver aid, with only a fraction of funding going though faith-based organisations.

“We advocate first and foremost not on the basis of our beliefs,” says Dr Ezio Castelli of the Association of Volunteers in International Service USA (AVSI-USA), a development agency with a basis in Catholic social teaching. “We are not advocating for a space to build a ”˜Catholic’ school or hospital, but for governments to recognise the common good of these institutions.”

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A gay couple’s church blessing has been blocked because the ceremony “looked too much like a wedding”.

Paul Sewell, 41, and Andy Nicholson, 42 from Metheringham had planned a civil ceremony and then wanted a blessing in their local church in Dunston.

But the service was cancelled after a small service of friendship prayers grew to a 150-guest celebration.

The Bishop of Lincoln, The Right Reverend John Saxbee, said a parish church was not an appropriate venue.

Read it all.

Read it all. At this stage, I think empathy too high a standard given the level of breakdown in trust, and ask only for some understanding. In any event, I made a comment on Dan’s blog, perhaps you will care to as well.

WHEN A CHURCH congregation breaks with its denomination, the two sides rarely part with a mutual “Go with God’s grace.”

The acrimony is particularly acute in a church divorce now playing out in Fairfax County. The Episcopal bishop of Virginia has declared 11 churches to be abandoned properties. Some congregants threatened to charge diocesan officials with trespassing if they entered the sanctuaries.

The dispute is partly about money. The land and buildings are worth tens of millions of dollars. But it is also about doctrine. Members are angry their leaders ordained an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire.

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The Rev. Neil Lebhar, one of the deposed priests, said the ministers can both still draw their pensions and contribute to retirement funds created for ministers who have left the denomination.

Howard said he was merely making official what the ministers have done by aligning themselves with Anglican bishops. He inhibited, or suspended, the clergy six months before deposing them to give them time to reconsider.

“They did not desire to remain in the Episcopal Church and this just makes it official,” Howard said. “Not one of them came to me and said: ‘I want to be an Episcopalian.’ ”

However, the deposed clergy take exception with the claim they have abandoned communion, Lebhar said. They are remaining true to Scripture and to Anglicanism by quitting the Episcopal denomination, said Lebhar, rector of the Anglican Church of the Redeemer in Jacksonville.

“It’s a little bit like someone divorcing you for being unfaithful when they have been unfaithful,” said Lebhar, chairman of the Jacksonville-based Anglican Alliance, which represents more than 20 congregations in North Florida and South Georgia.

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Deadly rioting broke out this week across Haiti and Egypt, where rampaging inflation has driven up food prices. The United Nations estimates that the cost of food in those countries has nearly doubled in the last two years.

In Egypt, bread is so scarce that in some places it is sold behind a barricaded wall. In Haiti, the 9,000 U.N. peacekeepers have been ordered not to fire on civilians while widespread looting and violence continues.

The Group of Seven is meeting in Washington this weekend to address instability in the global economy, but many analysts seem skeptical about how effective the organization will be at steadying inflation.

Read or listen to it all.

He returned to North Charleston in 1988 to become rector at St. Thomas Episcopal Church. He remained there until he became the diocese’s bishop suffragan in 1996. He resigned that position last year to clear the way for a new bishop.

[William] Skilton continued working with the Dominican Development Group, which he started about seven years ago to raise money to help build schools and churches. In February, the Rt. Rev. Julio Holguin installed Skilton as assistant bishop of the Episcopal Church in the Dominican Republic.

Skilton will continue to live in North Charleston and travel back and forth several times a year. He’s scheduled to be in Santo Domingo this weekend.

The Episcopal Church calls the Dominican Republic one of the fastest-growing dioceses in the denomination, along with the Diocese of South Carolina, which has adopted it as a companion diocese.

“There is a spirit there,” Skilton said. “It’s very difficult to explain. The church is serving people who don’t have much. There’s a trust there that’s not present as much in this culture.”

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I cannot believe it. Worst crisis since second world war. Banks to “lose” £500 billion. House prices to plummet by a third. Great depression threatened. Really? I recall from my economics lesson a different and no less potent phenomenon: mad journalism disease.

Like most people I have found the credit crunch hard to follow. The world economy, we were told, was tooling along under the guidance, at last, of competent central bankers rather than hysterical politicians. In Britain, Europe and America, indeed in Moscow and Shanghai, the experts were in charge. Gordon Brown boasted the wisdom of his putting the nation’s financial affairs in the hands of an “independent” Bank of England.

Now we are allegedly up the creek. The selfsame bankers’ indulgence of personal and institutional greed, their regulatory incompetence and their blindness to speculative bubbles have shown them to be as fallible as politicians. It beggars belief that they could see no danger in so-called collateralised debt obligations, known to the Victorians as “bad paper”.

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LAWTON: Some analysts believe that academic impulse has created a foreign relations challenge.

Rev. REESE: Benedict has had some problems on the world stage, because I think sometimes he thinks he’s still in a classroom where he can use words that have technical meanings that he has defined and that students are supposed to understand and know. But when he says them on the world stage, people take them at their street level meaning, and as a result there’s misunderstanding.

LAWTON: The most obvious example was his 2006 speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where he quoted a 14th-century emperor who criticized the Prophet Muhammad and accused Muslims of spreading their faith by the sword.

Rev. REESE: He spoke about Islam as being irrational. Well, what he meant was that it’s a religion based on faith, where faith is much more important than reason, you know. He wasn’t saying that Muslims are irrational, you know, but that’s the way it was heard.

LAWTON: The speech set off violent protests in several Muslim nations, a vivid demonstration of the impact a pope’s words can have. The Vatican issued a clarification, and during a visit to Turkey Benedict made a high profile visit to a mosque.

Prof. PHAM: On one hand, a great deal of setback in dialogue certainly occurred. On the other hand, after the initial setback a number of moderate Muslim scholars actually wrote to the pope, 138 of them, and said, “Well, we have some differences clearly, but now that they’re highlighted maybe we should engage in a dialogue,” and so a process of dialogue has begun.

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The poet-priest R. S. Thomas asked why God appeared so frequently in his poems, responded simply: “I believe in God.” Pressed about what sort of God he meant, Thomas replied: “He’s a poet who sang Creation and He’s also an intellect with an ultra-mathematical mind, who formed the entire Universe in it. The answer is in a chapter of Augustine’s Confessions where it says, ”˜They all cried out with one voice, He made us’.”

For the Christian this God does not remain unknown, but has revealed Himself to us in Jesus Christ, in the characteristic way in which persons make themselves known to us, not as ideas and abstractions, not as collections of atoms and molecules, or the patterns of energy of sub-atomic particles, but as persons with a capacity for love and relationship. Love always involves both faith and hope. Without this trio there would be no human life as we know it.

That reality points us to the God who made us, and whose being and action the Christian creeds confess, as one who is a communion of love, and life, and relationship, the source of our being, the ground of our knowing, the goal of our living. To say Credo ”” I believe ”” is to open ourselves to the deepest possibility of our lives. As the great preacher St John Chrysostom said: “Let us then draw Him to ourselves, and invite him to aid us in the attempt, and let us contribute our share ”” goodwill, I mean, and energy. For He will not require anything further, but if He can meet with this only, He will confer all that is his part.”

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As the Dalai Lama begins a contentious two-week visit to the United States and the Olympic torch continues its tortuous journey across six continents toward Beijing, the 2008 Games, already tarnished, have become a political as well as an athletic spectacle, with vying theories of human rights and how best to promote them.

Groups devoted to causes as diverse as press freedom, Falun Gong, Tibet and autonomy for Uighur Muslims in China’s far west have used the Games as leverage to highlight issues that had been relegated to advocacy chat rooms during most of China’s long economic boom.

Aggressive street demonstrations in London, Paris and the United States, and mounting calls for President George W. Bush and other world leaders to skip the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in August as a show of protest against China’s internal policies, have produced a nationalist backlash in China. There, both the leadership and ordinary people resent what many see as a plot to disrupt the Games and damage China’s image as a rising power, which the Olympics once seemed likely to burnish.

Politics has not intruded on the Games to this extent since Soviet bloc countries boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles in retaliation for a United States-led boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

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Next up for Pope Benedict XVI, a welcoming nation that wants to get to know him.

Benedict’s first trip to the United States as pope begins Tuesday – a five-day visit to Washington and New York, including a speech at the United Nations. Anyone expecting strident speeches from the man once called “God’s rottweiler” for his role defending Roman Catholic doctrine will be disappointed.

Benedict will deliver an unwavering message that society needs religious values, but this intellectual pontiff will do it in the most positive way possible. After making relatively little headway in his efforts to re-ignite the faith in Europe, America’s roughly 65 million Catholics seem anxious to hear him.

“He has a way of helping us see what the Gospel and what the Catholic faith tradition asks of us that is challenging and not frightening,” Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl, Benedict’s host in the first leg of the five-day trip, told The Associated Press.

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“There are two loves only, Lord,
Love of myself and love of you and of others,
And each time that I love myself, it’s a little less love for you and
for others, It’s a draining away of love,
It’s a loss of love,
For love is made to leave self and fly towards others.

Each time it’s diverted to myself, it withers, rots and dies.

Love of self, Lord, is a poison that I absorb each day;
Love of self offers me a cigarette and gives none to my neighbor;
Love of self chooses the best part and keeps the best place;
Love of self indulges my senses and supplies them from the table of others;

Love of self speaks about myself and makes me deaf to the words of others;
Love of self chooses, and forces that choice on a friend;
Love of self puts on a false front; it wants me to shine, overshadowing others;
Love of self is self-pitying and overlooks the suffering of others;
Love of self advertises my ideas and despises those of others;
Love of self thinks me virtuous, it calls me a good man;
Love of self induces me to make money, to spend it for my pleasure, to hoard it for my future;
Love of self advises me to give to the poor in order to ease my conscience and live in peace;
Love of self puts my slippers on and ensconces me in an easy chair;
Love of self is satisfied with myself; it gently rocks me to sleep.

What is more serious, Lord, is that love of self is a stolen love. It was destined for others; they needed it to live, to thrive, and I have
diverted it. So the love of self creates human suffering.
So the love of men for themselves creates human misery.
All the miseries of men,
All the sufferings of men;
The suffering of the boy whose mother has slapped him without cause and that of the man whose boss has reprimanded him in front of the workers. The suffering of the ugly girl neglected at a dance, and that
of the woman whose husband doesn’t kiss her anymore.
The suffering of the child left at home because he’s a nuisance and that of the grandfather made fun of because he’s too old.
The suffering of the worried man who hasn’t been able to confide in anyone and that of the troubled adolescent whose worries have been ridiculed;
The suffering of the desperate man who jumps into the canal and that of the criminal who is going to be executed, The suffering of the unemployed man who wants to work and that of the worker who ruins his health for a ridiculous salary.
The suffering of the father who piles his family into a single room next to an empty house and that of the mother whose children are hungry while the remains of a party are thrown into the garbage,
The suffering of one who dies alone, while his family, in the adjoining room, wait for his death, drinking coffee.

All sufferings,
All injustices, bitterness, humiliations, griefs, hates, despairs, All
sufferings are an unappeased hunger, A hunger for love.
So men have built, slowly, selfishness by selfishness, a disfigured world that crushes them;
So the men on earth spend their time feeding their self-love,
While around them others with outstretched arms die of hunger.
They have squandered love.
I have squandered your love, Lord.

Tonight I ask you to help me to love.
Grant me, Lord, to spread true love in the world.
Grant that by me and by your children it may penetrate a little into all circles, all societies, all economic and political systems, all laws, all contracts, all rulings; Grant that it may penetrate into offices, factories, apartment buildings, movie houses, dance halls;
Grant that it may penetrate the hearts of men and that I may never forget that the battle for a better world is a battle of love, in the service of love.

Help me to love, Lord, not to waste my powers of love, to love myself less in order to love others more and more, That around
me, no one should suffer or die because I have stolen the love they needed to live.

————————
Son, you will never succeed in putting enough love into the heart of man and into the world, For many and the world are hungry for an infinite love, And God alone can love with a boundless love.
But if you want, son, I give you my Life,
Draw it within you.
I give you my heart, I give it to my sons.
Love with my heart, son,
And all together you will feed the world, and you will save it.”

–Michel Quoist, Prayers (English translation of the 1963 French original, Avon Books, 1975, pp. 100-104)

[The Rev. Matthew] Moretz told the conference that people who operate in the virtual world of the internet’s social-networking sites are not opting out of reality. They experience real social interaction and real emotional reactions. They experience community, he said.

“We should be embracing this social fact,” Moretz said, arguing that both lay and ordained Episcopalians can preside over these new “gathering[s] of humanity” in ways that can show what it means to be the body of Christ in new places.

“The story is the same but the territory is new,” he told conference participants, alluding later during a workshop to the way that St. Paul used the infrastructure of Roman roads to spread the Gospel.

Moretz suggested that communicators who want to operate as people of faith in what he called the frontier territory of the internet must have an online persona that is authentic and points to “the real you” so that they can bring a sense of being places of stability on the web.

“Our gift to these other worlds is our integrity,” he said.

Read it all.

These days everyone is worried about oil. The primitive black goo has been linked to climate change, economic disruption and other problems, but make no mistake: We still need oil, and lots of it. Not only is American demand rising””this year it’s expected to top 21 million barrels per day””but ascendant economies in India and China have developed huge appetites for the stuff. The stark reality is that the supply is finite. “Peak oil” theorists argue that production is already maxed out, meaning imminent shortages and sharper price spikes; more optimistic experts believe that day is 20 to 30 years away. Both camps agree that the task ahead is twofold: Develop new supplies while learning to stretch existing reserves.

There has not been a major find on U.S. soil since Prudhoe Bay in 1968, which means most major exploration has moved to the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where drilling and production are difficult and expensive. Last year, a Chevron-led consortium announced the discovery of the Jack field, 270 miles off Louisiana. It may hold 15 billion barrels, which would more than double domestic reserves. “The technology that is being brought to bear is phenomenal,” says energy writer Robert Bryce, author of Gusher of Lies. “What we are seeing today in offshore drilling is the terrestrial version of the space program.” Bryce is among those pushing to open offshore leases along the East and West coasts currently under federal moratorium but estimated to hold as much as 19 billion barrels of oil and 86 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas.

Tapping vast unconventional sources that don’t flow to the surface is also hugely challenging. The oil sands of Alberta, Canada, contain 175 billion barrels of proven reserves””the largest in the world outside Saudi Arabia””but the oil costs as much as $15 per barrel to produce, compared to $2 for Saudi crude.

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The situation became untenable at Good Shepherd, Fr. Gerber said, after the House of Bishops’ meeting in New Orleans last September. In October, a majority of the vestry insisted on having the congregation participate in a discernment process over its future. Instead of the more-typical 40-day process, Fr. Gerber said he and the diocese worked out a lengthier version that originally was supposed to last beyond the election of a bishop coadjutor next month. A parish referendum scheduled to occur April 13-20 was terminated early, Fr. Gerber said, after the diocese insisted on knowing which way he intended to vote.

Fr. Gerber said he anguished over his decision, which was made even more difficult because he believes he was treated fairly by the diocese and because of the many friendships he has built during 19 years of ordained ministry. Good Shepherd dedicated a $2-million parish hall on Palm Sunday. Fr. Gerber said the diocese offered to provide the parish temporary financial assistance if the loss of members and income after the vote put the Episcopal congregation at risk of default on the mortgage payments.

In the end, Fr. Gerber said he realized he had more in common theologically with Anglicans outside The Episcopal Church than he did with those inside it. Instead of a parish referendum and more consultation, he and the diocese have agreed on a short announcement during Sunday services about the new congregation. St. Timothy’s Anglican Church will hold its first service the following Sunday in a nearby high school auditorium.

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As one whose responsibility it is to guard the faith, unity and discipline of the church, let me be clear. The diocesan policy I uphold is not one of my own invention or devising. Rather, it is the teaching of the Church for 2,000 years as derived from the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. It is based on the order of creation as recorded in Genesis and reasserted in the Gospels when Jesus says: “From the beginning of creation ”˜God made them male and female.’ ”˜For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’” (Mark 10:6-8).

Obviously, there have always been people who for one reason or another are unable or unwilling to live by this standard. These “exceptions to the rule” are matters of personal conscience between the individual and God. They do not, however, supplant or replace the traditional teaching of the Church, which until recent times was unquestioned as the behavior expected of all Christians.

The Episcopal Church and the other churches of the Anglican Communion have traditionally held together the Liberal, Catholic and Evangelical wings of the church by common worship and a common relationship with a bishop in the historic succession. This theoretically provides us with balance, correction and comprehension for the sake of truth.

What we are seeing in our national church and in other parts of the Anglican world is Liberals moving out on their own without benefit of the moderating and balancing effects of Catholic and Evangelical perspectives.

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[In the 19th century] Britain was the workshop of the world, dominating science, manufacturing and trade.

To many Victorians, unquestioning of the ideology that underpinned much imperialism, British supremacy was a simple matter of racial supremacy – Europeans, and the English in particular, were fated to be the masters.

The truth is that we are masters of the world no more.

The global power shift from the West to the East is no longer just a matter of debate confined to learned journals and newspaper columns – it is a reality that is beginning to have a huge impact on our daily lives.

What would those Victorian masters of old have made of the fact that Chinese security men were on the streets of London this week, ordering our own police about and fighting running battles with British protesters while bewildered athletes carried the Olympic torch on its relay through the capital?

It was a brazen display of how confident China has become of its new place in the world, just as the British Government’s failure to take a firm stand on Chinese abuses of human rights shows how craven we have become.

The dire warnings from the International Monetary Fund this week that the West now faces the largest financial shock since the Great Depression, while the Asian economies are still powering ahead, simply underlines our vulnerability in this new world order.

The desperately weakened American dollar appears to be on the verge of losing its global dominance, in the same way as sterling lost it a lifetime ago.

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