The God Gap may turning against Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries.

Buried within the exit polls from Pennsylvania are some signs that Obama’s appeal may worsening with culturally conservative regular churchgoers.

That may not be too surprising given the controversies Obama encountered in the six-week run-up to the primary. Despite Obama’s later explanations, his comments at a San Francisco fundraiser that “bitter” small-town Americans “cling to” guns and religion are hardly likely to have endeared him to small-town churchgoers.

That followed circulation of a well-publicized video highlights reel of his former pastor’s incendiary sermons, including one in which the Rev. Jeremiah Wright declares blacks should sing “God Damn America” instead of “God Bless America.” Not only Wright’s comments but the African-style garb that the pastor is shown wearing every time the video clip is rerun no doubt feeds a suspicion that Obama’s outlook on life is far removed from the moral certitudes of religious traditionalists.

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As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor had successfully wired the nerves of his forearm to a computer in New York City’s Columbia University and networked them to a robotic system back in his Reading, England, lab. “My body was effectively extended over the Internet,” Warwick says.

It’s a far cry from his vision of transforming humanity into a race of half-machine cyborgs able to commune with the digital world””there is no spoon, Neo””but such an evolution is necessary, says 54-year-old Warwick. Those who don’t avail themselves of subcutaneous microchips and other implanted technology, he predicts, will be at a serious disadvantage in tomorrow’s world, because they won’t be able to communicate with the “superintelligent machines” sure to be occupying the highest rungs of society, as he explains in a 2003 documentary, Building Gods, which is circulating online.

Something of a self-promoter, Warwick, or “Captain Cyborg” as a U.K. newspaper once dubbed him, has appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and other shows on the TV talk circuit to tout his work. In his 2004 book, I, Cyborg, he describes his research as “the extraordinary story of my adventure as the first human entering into a cyber world.”

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It must be clear that development is not only about the growth of the economy in general; it is about the development of the human being with his/her capabilities and relationships with intermediary social groups (family, social, political, cultural groups etc.) within which he/she lives. This requires a change in perspective that recognises peoples as united by a common factor, their humanity being created with the imprint of the common God creator. Only by starting from this premise can we aim, within pluralist institutions, toward the achievement of the common good, which needs to be the primary objective of any society. The common good is neither an abstract goal nor a simple list of targets. It is simply the realisation of the primary needs of the person: the need of truth, love, and justice. These needs cannot be completely fulfilled but, by nature, the human being tends to support the tension of aiming toward their fulfilment.

As the world’s bishops stated in the Vatican II Council document, “Gaudium et Spes”: “Because of the increasingly close interdependence which is gradually extending to the entire world, we are today witnessing an extension of the role of the common good, which is the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily. The resulting rights and obligations are consequently the concern of the entire human race. Every group must take into account the needs and legitimate aspirations of every other group, and even those of the human family as a whole” (n. 26).

This is the essence of development, and it is something that concerns every person, rich and poor, because every man is always in development. In fact, development is not a target to reach; it is rather a path to follow: we can say that there is true development when persons are put in a position to follow their most important desires and needs. Following this premise, it is clear that the tension toward the common good finds its fulfilment within the relationships that human beings establish among each other. The common good, therefore, is fulfilled within belonging, within a people. As stated by His Holiness John Paul II: “Man, in keeping with the openness of his spirit within and also with the many diverse needs of his body and his existence in time, writes this personal history of his through numerous bonds, contacts, situations, and social structures linking him with other men, beginning to do so from the first moment of his existence on earth, from the moment of his conception and birth” (Redemptor Hominis, n. 14).

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The Holy See is asking for measures to keep the production of biofuels from bringing about increased food prices to the point of threatening starvation in many countries.

Monsignor Renato Volante, the permanent observer of the Holy See at the Rome-based U.N. Organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO), participated in the FAO Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean, which was held in Brasilia, Brazil, April 17-18.

Monsignor Volante proposed that the production of biofuels should not bring about a decrease in the production of agricultural products destined for the food market.

Biofuels are energy sources produced from a variety of different plants or plant products. Many developed countries have begun subsidizing the production of biofuels, which has resulted in decreased production of typical plant foods.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon encouraged today a coordinated effort to face the steeply rising price of food, which he said has developed into a “real global crisis.” He said some 100 million of the world’s poor now need aid to be able to buy food. Riots have broken out in some countries, such as Haiti, over the increased prices.

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Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, said in excerpts from an interview released on Thursday that people airing snippets of his fiery sermons were trying to paint him as “some sort of fanatic.”

Wright, who has kept a low profile since repeated televised airings last month of segments of his sermons, is semi-retired from Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a church the Democratic presidential candidate joined 20 years ago.

In grainy video of sermons he delivered years ago, Wright is seen calling the September 11 attacks retribution for U.S. policies and condemning America’s failings on race.

At one point he shouts to his congregation, “God Bless America? No, God damn America.”

“The persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly,” he told PBS’ Bill Moyers in the interview to be broadcast on Friday.

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JH: What is the effect of this being, going on, continuing unchecked?

ABC: Well certainly among the poorest the effect is the erosion of family life, the erosion of self confidence. There is still a stigma about debt even though it is taken for granted in so many quarters but the stigma means people don’t want to talk about it, they don’t necessarily want to go and get the best advice about it and for young people particularly it does become crippling, especially for children.

JH: And do you think that, putting aside that aspect of it, do you think when we see people becoming in the words of another former government minister, ‘filthy rich’, our attitude is, ‘I want a bit of that myself’ and therefore a good thing for society which is what America has until very recently appeared to believe, or do you think the opposite effect?

ABC: I think it is a bit of both isn’t it. I think there’s a degree of envy and cynicism that’s bred by disproportion and that leads people to feel even more alienated from the rest of society ”“ that the gulf is even greater between themselves, between people who can’t manage there own affairs – can’t take control of their own affairs/ circumstances – and these others. So there may be an element of I’d like some of that but here is also an element of what kind of society is this? Why should I trust this system when it rewards some people so disproportionately in a way that doesn’t connect at all where I am?

JH: So you are simply saying that the government and the politicians are more relaxed about that than you are and that you are taking…?

ABC: They seem to be. I wouldn’t mind if they were a little more worried.

JH: And in what sense? Exemplified how?

ABC: I don’t want to go into the details of how regulation of high salaries might be achieved because my primary concern today is simply with the poorest end of the spectrum where I think more can be done, more rapidly and in a more focused way.

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Painful but important viewing.

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The Rev. Canon William Gandenberger, canon to the ordinary for the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin, said the legal filing by representatives from the newly constituted Episcopal diocese was not unexpected.

“I have been in contact with our chancellor and we are prepared to respond,” Canon Gandenberger said. “We have numerous options and we are looking at all of them carefully.” No decision has been made at this time, he added, noting that the diocese is currently preoccupied with preparations to welcome Presiding Bishop Gregory Venables. As primate of the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone, Bishop Venables claims primatial oversight of the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin and has welcomed Bishop Schofield as a full member of that province’s House of Bishops.

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The government of Iran continues to supply weapons and other support to extremists in Iraq, despite repeated promises to the contrary, and is increasingly complicit in the death of U.S. soldiers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Friday in a stark new assessment of Iranian influence.

The chairman, Admiral Michael Mullen, said he was “extremely concerned” about “the increasingly lethal and malign influence” by the government of Iran and the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, a special force that aids and encourages Islamic militants around the world. The Quds Forces in Iran were created during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and report directly to the leadership of Iran’s theocratic government.

Pentagon concerns about Iranian influence in neighboring Iraq is nothing new, but the content and tone of Mullen’s remarks left the impression that far from abating, the worries about Iran have intensified in recent months.

“The Iranian government pledged to halt such activities some months ago,” Mullen said. “It’s plainly obvious they have not. Indeed, they seem to have gone the other way.”

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There are at least two reasons why the situation of poetry matters to the entire intellectual community. The first involves the role of language in a free society. Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it–be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters. The public responsibility of poetry has been pointed out repeatedly by modern writers. Even the archsymbolist Stephane Mallarme praised the poet’s central mission to “purify the words of the tribe.” And Ezra Pound warned that

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clean. It doesn’t matter whether a good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm. . . .
If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

Or, as George Orwell wrote after the Second World War, “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. . . .” Poetry is not the entire solution to keeping the nation’s language clear and honest, but one is hard pressed to imagine a country’s citizens improving the health of its language while abandoning poetry.
The second reason why the situation of poetry matters to all intellectuals is that poetry is not alone among the arts in its marginal position. If the audience for poetry has declined into a subculture of specialists, so too have the audiences for most contemporary art forms, from serious drama to jazz. The unprecedented fragmentation of American high culture during the past half century has left most arts in isolation from one another as well as from the general audience. Contemporary classical music scarcely exists as a living art outside university departments and conservatories. Jazz, which once commanded a broad popular audience, has become the semi-private domain of aficionados and musicians. (Today even influential jazz innovators cannot find places to perform in many metropolitan centers–and for an improvisatory art the inability to perform is a crippling liability.) Much serious drama is now confined to the margins of American theater, where it is seen only by actors, aspiring actors, playwrights, and a few diehard fans. Only the visual arts, perhaps because of their financial glamour and upper-class support, have largely escaped the decline in public attention.

THE most serious question for the future of American culture is whether the arts will continue to exist in isolation and decline into subsidized academic specialties or whether some possibility of rapprochement with the educated public remains.

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In a recent speech Tom Doyle described the Catholic church in the United States as ‘a swamp of toxic waste’, and he accused the US bishops of running ‘a self-serving public relations campaign by which they continue to try to flip the whole mess around, make themselves look like victims and demonise anyone who has ever challenged their collective stupidity, cruelty and total lack of compassion.’

Tom Doyle, welcome to the program. Do these repeated apologies by Pope Benedict and his decision to meet with some of the victims, represent a real breakthrough moment in the clerical abuse crisis?

Tom Doyle: I think it is a breakthrough moment in a number of ways. I think it’s a breakthrough moment because he did more, said more, and communicated more truly human concern in six days that Pope John Paul II did in 25 years with regard to the issue of sexual abuse of clergy, and you have to remember that although this has been front and centre in people’s concerns and in the media since 2002, the public awareness of the issue has been going on since at least 1984, starting in the United States.

Stephen Crittenden: You even were involved at that time.

Tom Doyle: I was very much involved.

Stephen Crittenden: Warning the Vatican.

Tom Doyle: Yes. And the Bishops Conference in the United States. And they knew it. And there were several major explosions since then that received a tremendous amount of media coverage over here, but they would always subside, and we’d lose the momentum somehow or other. Boston January 2002, the momentum has not stopped.

Stephen Crittenden: Was this apology something that also had to happen? Because if it hadn’t happened, it would have cast a pall over the entire trip.

Tom Doyle: I think that’s a good observation and I totally agree. There was a lot of skepticism when the trip was announced months ago, would he say anything about this issue? Would he do anything about this issue? Then even up to just before the trip started, the feeling was that he would probably mention it at least once, possibly once or twice. But there was skepticism that anything concrete would happen.

Stephen Crittenden: I must say I was very surprised that he actually met with victims. I wasn’t expecting that at all.

Tom Doyle: I was very surprised myself.

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IT IS exceptionalism week in the world of American think-tanks. No fewer than three of them””the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and the Manhattan Institute in New York City””have arranged discussions of a fat new book on the subject, “Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation”, edited by Peter Schuck and James Q. Wilson. But, as Hegel feared, do the thinkers understand a concept just as it stops being relevant? Does the owl of Minerva really fly only at dusk?

All countries are exceptional. But America likes to think of itself as exceptionally exceptional, different from other advanced industrial countries not just in its social arrangements but also in its underlying values. America has a smaller state than other comparable countries and a more unequal distribution of wealth. It is also more strongly committed to what Margaret Thatcher once called “Victorian values”””individualism, voluntarism, patriotism.

American exceptionalism has been increasing ever since the rise of the modern conservative movement from the late 1960s onwards. The current Bush administration, with its commitment to conservative values at home and assertiveness abroad, is the most exceptional administration in recent years. But the book raises a new question: is a new cycle, dominated by a rejection of conservatism and a convergence with West European norms, about to dawn?

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The Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin has filed a lawsuit against a deposed bishop who tried to secede from the church last fall to protest the ordination of women and gays.

According to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Fresno Superior Court, John-David Schofield breached his duties to the church last December when he broke from the U.S. Episcopal Church and placed San Joaquin’s parishioners, property and endowments in the hands of the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone of America, based in Buenos Aires.

The diocese, which serves nearly 9,000 parishioners in the Central Valley from Lodi to Bakersfield, split into camps following the 2003 ordination of the Right Rev. V. Gene Robinson, a gay man, in New Hampshire.

His consecration has divided the nation’s 2.5 million Episcopalians between those who applaud the changes and others who interpret Scripture to bar gay relationships.

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Update: An AP article is there.

At the Andover Newton Theological School here, banquets, exhibitions and church services proclaim the bicentennial this year of the school’s founding as the Andover Theological Seminary.

The Rev. Nick Carter, its president, celebrates the seminary’s history proudly, but he is more engaged by how the school will adapt to the deep ferment in American religion and survive until the 250th anniversary and beyond.

Mr. Carter’s question is shared by scores of other smaller and midsize independent Protestant seminaries that have seen their financial support from denominations wither, their costs increase, and their assumptions about church life and the career of ministry tested by growing fragmentation and change in the pews.

“The church is changing,” Mr. Carter said. “Our concepts of religious leadership, mission, denomination and the status of ministry are being redefined. Other than the Gospel itself, most of the assumptions that our programs of study are based on are being swept away.”

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But while the theory behind “A Nation at Risk” may no longer hold (mediocre education inevitably leads to a weak economy), the report’s desperate language may be more justified than ever, for American education is in turmoil.

Most troubling now are the numbers on educational attainment. One reason that the American economy was so dominant throughout the 20th century is that we provided more education to more citizens than other industrialized countries. “A Nation at Risk” noted with pride that American schools “now graduate 75 percent of our young people from high school.”

That figure has now dropped to less than 70 percent, and the United States, which used to lead the world in sending high school graduates on to higher education, has declined to fifth in the proportion of young adults who participate in higher education and is 16th out of 27 industrialized countries in the proportion who complete college, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

The striking thing about the performance of American students on international comparisons is not that, on average, they are in the middle of the pack ”” which was also true in 1983 ”” but that we have a disproportionate share of low-performing students. We are failing to provide nearly one-third of our young people with even the minimal education required to be functioning citizens and workers in a global economy.

This is particularly distressing news at a time when the baby boomers are aging and a growing proportion of the future work force comes from groups ”” members of ethnic and racial minorities, students from low-income families, recent immigrants ”” that have been ill served by our education system. The challenge today is to build access as well as excellence. That’s the new definition of “a nation a risk” ”” and ample reason for a new commission to awaken the nation to the need to educate all our young people.

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The finances of many states have deteriorated so badly that they appear to be in a recession, regardless of whether that’s true for the nation as a whole, a survey of all 50 state fiscal directors concludes.
The situation looks even worse for the fiscal year that begins July 1 in most states.

“Whether or not the national economy is in recession””a subject of ongoing debate””is almost beside the point for some states,” said the report to be released Friday by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The weakening economy is hitting tax revenue in a number of ways: People’s discretionary income is being gobbled up by higher food and fuel costs, while the tanking housing market means people are spending less on furniture and appliances associated with buying a house.

The situation is grim in Delaware, with a $69 million gap this year, and bleak in California, with a projected $16 billion budget shortfall over the next two years, the report said. Florida does not expect a rapid turnaround in revenue because of the prolonged real estate slump there.

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The Rev. Bob Wickizer climbed the stairs and wooden ladders yesterday inside the steeple of historic St. Anne’s Episcopal Church to reach Annapolis’ town clock.

Eighty feet above the center of downtown, he and Kirsten Chapman, head of the church’s environmental ministry, gingerly stepped over loose wooden planks coated with dust and ducked under the four metal arms of the clock mechanism to get to the 16 incandescent bulbs that illuminate the clock. Chapman slipped in front of one of the four faces and carefully replaced the bulbs with compact fluorescent ones.

This is what it took, on Earth Day, to turn a 150-year-old landmark into a beacon for thinking green.

The new lights promise to keep an estimated 2.5 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere every year by using 75 percent less energy, and save energy and money by lasting 10 times longer. Wickizer hopes that the change will encourage the community to reduce its carbon footprint. Church officials say they believe this is part of God’s will.

“Having dominion over [the Earth] doesn’t mean trashing it,” Wickizer said. “It may have taken the church a while to wake up to that.”

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Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, one of 11 schools in the U.S. dedicated to preparing Episcopal priests, told tenured faculty on Thursday that their jobs would end next year.

Officials at the Evanston seminary insist the school is not closing, but that it is redefining its approach for preparing men and women for priesthood. Earlier this year, the school stopped accepting new candidates and advised first-year students that they should enroll in other seminaries if they wish to earn their degrees from an Episcopal institution.

For more than a century, seminarians have traditionally enrolled in a three-year residential program to earn a master’s of divinity degree that prepares them for the priesthood. Seminary officials said the school would explore the possibility of offering the degree in other formats such as distance learning or short-term residential stints.

“We want to bring the traditional excellence and depth of residential theological education to the new challenges and realities of the 21st Century,” said Rev. Gary Hall, dean and president of Seabury-Western. “People can’t afford to come here. We need to figure out how to bring it to them.”

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I ran into a young minister friend of mine during Easter week in the checkout line at Target. His name is Isaac Villegas, and he is pastor of a small Mennonite congregation in Chapel Hill, N.C. Isaac told me he had gotten up early to finish his Maundy Thursday homily, and now he was waiting to pay for two large plastic tubs to be used in the foot-washing ritual that evening. Not an untypical swing of duties for him or any small-church minister — from the solitary study of Scripture to the public drama of a high holy day, with the running of errands in between.

Isaac’s congregation cannot afford to pay him a full salary. He and his wife tithe much of what they do get back to the church. Despite eight years of higher education, including a degree from Duke Divinity School, he has always had to supplement his income with other work. He assists in teaching theology courses at Duke, including one of mine. Before that he combined ministry with carpentry (for which there is precedent in Christianity).

Mostly he works for his church. When he is not preparing Bible studies and sermons, he is in the jails and hospitals counseling the troubled or praying with the dying. Like the duties of most pastors, Isaac’s touch every notch on the life cycle, from baptism to last rites. Some of his best pastoral care is delivered on park benches in verdant Chapel Hill. And since Isaac’s congregation prefers renting space, he doesn’t have an office. This is OK: The ministry itself is called an “office,” giving the office-holder a privileged place in the lives of those who accept him as their shepherd. And all the shepherd has to do in return is model a life of service and apply the assorted symbols of God to every occasion or dilemma known to humankind.

Isaac’s improvisational ministry reflects the realities of a shrinking Protestant church in America.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — What’s black and white and warm all over? A penguin in a wetsuit, naturally. Sounds like a joke, but it’s quite serious for biologists at the California Academy of Sciences, who had a wetsuit created for an African penguin to help him get back in the swim of things.

Bishop Robert Duncan, moderator of the Anglican Communion Network, has released a short statement at the conclusion of the meeting of Network diocesan bishops in Chicago on April 24.

The diocesan bishop of every Network diocese, as well as a dean representing all the Network convocations, met together in Chicago on April 24. It was an extraordinarily productive meeting. As has happened so many times before in the Network’s five year history, deepened understanding and deeper unity, despite remarkably different contexts and strategies regarding the Episcopal Church, were the fruit of the meeting. The Network’s vision of a biblical, missionary and united Anglicanism was again affirmed and embraced,” stated Bishop Duncan.

For Oden, and for “How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind,” the “Africa” he speaks of is anything that happened on the African continent and anyone who lived and ministered on that continent. This avoids the endless debate, for instance, about which Church Father was or was not “African.” How does one define that? By skin color? And by what amount of pigmentation? By nationality? Why wouldn’t any nation in Africa be by definition African? By ancestry?

The ancestry issue coupled with geographical/cultural impact is Oden’s most important contribution. In sum, he argues that even if Augustine, for instance, had a father whose ancestry was Greco-Roman, would that mean that Augustine, living his entire life in Africa was not African? Additionally, given that his famous mother, Monica, was almost definitely of Berber (north African) descent, would that not make Augustine African? And just as important to Oden, can we wipe out the impact on Augustine’s parents and on Augustine of living in the African geography and partaking of the African culture?

So, for Oden, “African Christianity” is the Christianity of any person who was born and/or lived on the African continent. Thus, for Europeans to claim Augustine, Origen, Tertullian, and others is a robbery of immense proportion in Oden’s thinking.

Given this perspective, Oden’s entire book is actually a call for others to build upon his small start. It is a call to take seriously the oral and written tradition of material spoken and penned on the African continent. It is then a call to explore the past, present, and future impact of that legacy.

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As the second Iraq War turned from a quick liberation into a bloodily contested occupation, long-standing liberal fears about the supposed theocratic ambitions of a reactionary American Evangelicalism were supplemented by suspicions of an apocalyptic fanaticism infecting the White House. The fears were always exaggerated and sometimes hysterical, particularly over foreign policy where actions attributed to the malign influence of Zionism, Jewish and Christian alike, are as easily recognized as the standard expression of realpolitik in America’s strategic interest, alongside a long tradition of liberal imperialism. Two developments are crucial in relegating all this to historical rather than current concern. The first is that whoever wins this year’s Presidential election will not be a hostage to the Religious Right, as George W. Bush has half-plausibly been seen as being. The second is a seismic shift in the nature of American Evangelicalism, particularly among the younger generation.

The terms of engagement in America’s “culture wars” have been subtly changing since the 1990s with the economic, intellectual, social and political coming of age of many Evangelicals in the Bible Belt. This has been brought about by the rise of the oil and real-estate industries, and the occupational and geographical mobility of a considerable part of the younger generation of Evangelicals. They have flocked not only to Evangelical private colleges but also to the Ivy League universities (partly through radical access initiatives after the 1960s) and on to New York, Silicon Valley and even Hollywood as lawyers, bankers, IT professionals, academics and filmmakers.

They constitute a new cosmopolitan Evangelical stratum….

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In this, the third of four excerpts from Daniel McGinn’s new book House Lust, McGinn explores what is behind the growing obsession with homes — it’s “house lust,” a phenomenon that says as much about our times as it does about the homes we live in.

When I tell people who live in ordinary-size houses that I’ve been visiting 9,000-(and even 29,000-) square-foot homes, I hear two common reactions. The first involves the cost of these homes: People marvel at how anyone could (or would want to) foot the seven-(or eight) figure price tags homes like this carry. But the second reaction is more common, and it has less to do with finances and everything to do with family dynamics. People worry that if they lived in such a large space, they’d become disconnected or isolated from other family members, as everyone hangs out solo in sunrooms, grand conservatories or luxurious bedrooms. In Potomac View, Md., where nearly every child’s bedroom features an en suite sitting area and bath (and very often their own TV and video-game system), it seems like a valid concern. Indeed, so many kids today are being raised in homes that feature a bathroom for every bedroom, some experts say today’s teenagers have grown unusually squeamish about undressing in school locker rooms or sharing gang-style dormitory showers.

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After struggling with soaring heating costs through the winter, millions of Americans are behind on electric and gas bills, and a record number of families could face energy shut-offs over the next two months, according to state energy officials and utilities around the country.

The escalating costs of heating oil, propane and kerosene, most commonly used in the Northeast, have posed the greatest burdens, officials say, but natural gas and electricity prices have also climbed at a time when low-end incomes are stagnant and prices have also jumped for food and gasoline.

In New Hampshire, applicants for fuel subsidies under the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program received an average of $600 in a one-time grant and up to $975 for the extremely poor who rely on heating oil or propane, the costliest fuels. But those grants, which in recent years have covered 60 percent of heating costs, covered only about 35 percent of those costs this winter, said Celeste Lovett, director of the state’s energy aid program. The state will have given aid to about 34,500 people by the end of April, Ms. Lovett said, a 5 percent increase over last year and the highest number ever.

The most immediate challenge is to help the high number of consumers who are far behind in electric and gas payments, said Mark Wolfe, director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, which represents state aid officials in Washington.

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As a global battle pits senior Anglicans against each other, more than 300 conservative Christians who have broken from the Anglican Church of Canada will gather at an evangelical church in Delta on Friday to welcome their new leader, South American Anglican Archbishop Gregory Venables.

The meeting takes place the same week 11 Anglican Church of Canada clergy in Greater Vancouver resigned from the denomination to serve under the authority of the South American primate, who was asked this week by Canadian Primate Fred Hiltz not to intervene in his jurisdiction.

The gathering of the Anglican Network in Canada Friday and Saturday at South Delta Baptist Church includes 15 congregations, eight from B.C., that have severed ties with the 700,000-member Anglican Church of Canada.

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A high-efficiency furnace seems like a good choice for any aging building. But two?

That’s right, says Rev. Robert Lemon of St. John-in-the-Wilderness church.

When he and his congregation in Bright’s Grove decided it was time to “go green” they opted for two new furnaces so that portions of the church, hall and office can be separately heated.

In one year, the church has saved about $700 in natural gas consumption, making the investment economical as well as ecological. “That’s very good and over time it means the furnaces will pay for themselves,” Lemon said.

St. John-in-the-Wilderness Anglican church is 152 years old and has had numerous upgrades over the years. But in 2006, when an office was added, the congregation began to take energy efficiency seriously.

“We realized we could do better and we began to make changes,” Lemon said.

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Canon Darling is the vicar of the parish of St James in Dandenong and was among the first women in Australia to be ordained a priest in St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne, in 1992.

She will become an assistant bishop.

The Melbourne Anglican Diocese made the announcement today.

Melbourne Archbishop Philip Freier said Canon Darling was a woman of deep faith and outstanding pastoral ability.

Canon Darling said she was delighted by her appointment for women in general.

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