I’m all for more serious moral debate in politics, and I support the right of all to display their conscience in public, whether it be red, blue, or purple. Yet, as an American who is both liberal-minded and entirely secular, I can’t help but wonder what we might be losing along the way.

For what it now means to say that poverty or health care are values issues is that evangelicals have started talking about them, and what it now means for liberals to take values seriously is to start talking about them as evangelicals do. As at the recent Compassion Forum among the Democratic candidates, faith and values are now running mates. Such thinking precludes the possibility of a public moral language that transcends sect and invokes the civic values we share as Americans and world citizens.

This would be a betrayal of a great tradition. The Judeo-Christian virtues of love, mercy and humility have a unique place in the moral heritage of the West. But no less important is the Stoic and neo-Stoic philosophers’ notion of universal human reason ”” a secular conscience ”” that reveals our earthly good and grounds our natural rights.

We Americans have our own civic scriptures. The American testament has its Creation narrative: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, The Declaration of Independence. It has an Exodus: the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation and the New Deal. Its Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians is Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists; its Psalms, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The original moral values are enunciated in the Preamble to that American Talmud, the Constitution: justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare and liberty.

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Now that Earth Day is over, let the planning begin for the summer solstice and World Humanist Day in June.

The Institute for Humanist Studies, an Albany, N.Y.-based nonprofit, is calling attention to its calendar of atheist holidays on its Web site, www.secular seasons.org. The group wants nonbelievers (or at least people who don’t celebrate religious holidays) to have a handy reference guide of the calendar of holidays honoring free-thinkers, banned books and nature, among other themes.

Matt Cherry, executive director of the Institute for Humanist Studies, said his group is trying to expand options and alternatives for secular holidays. He said he hopes even people affiliated with a particular religion will consider the options.

“Some religious holidays are about culture and tradition, not theology,” he says. “Even people who go to church only on Christmas or to synagogue on the High Holidays do so out of cultural heritage, not because they believe the religious doctrines associated with it.”

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Demand is up for food assistance. Local soup kitchens and food pantries all report increased traffic since the beginning of the year, and some say donations are down.

Churches, a primary source of donated goods, continue to provide non-perishable items to agencies that distribute to the needy. But the growing demand is causing the need gap to widen.

Volunteers and program administrators at faith-based organizations such as Our Lady of Mercy Community Outreach, Seacoast Church’s Dream Center, Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church, Tricounty Family Ministries and Hillcrest Baptist Church independently confirmed that service providers have been especially challenged in recent weeks to satisfy the growing need.

Rising food prices have forced people to make hard choices and even forgo essentials, such as health care or child care in favor of food, several service providers said. Rising fuel prices have exacerbated the problem.

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From here:

The Catholic Group in General Synod and Forward in Faith warmly welcome the publication of the Report of the Legislative Drafting Group. We are most grateful to the Bishop of Manchester, to the members of the Group (particularly Fr Jonathan Baker SSC and Sister Anne Williams CA, members of both the Catholic Group and Forward in Faith) and to the Officers and staff of the General Synod for the very great care with which they have clearly approached this mammoth undertaking.

We are pleased to note that the Report appears to have addressed most, if not all, of the issues which we raised with the Group and that it seems, among the several possible ways forward described, to include proposals which those unable to receive the ordination of women as bishops could in good conscience embrace. However, we shall naturally need time fully to digest and reflect upon the Report before commenting further.

The world economy has run into a brick wall. Despite countless warnings in recent years about the need to address a looming hunger crisis in poor countries and a looming energy crisis worldwide, world leaders failed to think ahead. The result is a global food crisis. Wheat, corn and rice prices have more than doubled in the past two years, and oil prices have more than tripled since the start of 2004. These food-price increases combined with soaring energy costs will slow if not stop economic growth in many parts of the world and will even undermine political stability, as evidenced by the protest riots that have erupted in places like Haiti, Bangladesh and Burkina Faso. Practical solutions to these growing woes do exist, but we’ll have to start thinking ahead and acting globally.

The crisis has its roots in four interlinked trends. The first is the chronically low productivity of farmers in the poorest countries, caused by their inability to pay for seeds, fertilizers and irrigation. The second is the misguided policy in the U.S. and Europe of subsidizing the diversion of food crops to produce biofuels like corn-based ethanol. The third is climate change; take the recent droughts in Australia and Europe, which cut the global production of grain in 2005 and ’06. The fourth is the growing global demand for food and feed grains brought on by swelling populations and incomes. In short, rising demand has hit a limited supply, with the poor taking the hardest blow.

So, what should be done? Here are three steps to ease the current crisis and avert the potential for a global disaster.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1734834,00.html

We don’t hear a great deal about education in the presidential campaign. It’s much too serious a topic to compete with such fun stuff as Hillary tossing back a shot of whiskey, or Barack rolling a gutter ball.

The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can wait. At the moment, no one seems to have the will to engage any of the most serious challenges facing the U.S.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life ”” and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

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Iran demanded Sunday that Azerbaijan deliver a Russian shipment of nuclear equipment blocked at its border with Iran for the past three weeks.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said in his weekly briefing that his country has asked the Azerbaijani ambassador in Iran to get his government “to deliver the shipment as soon as possible.”

The blocked nuclear equipment “is in the framework of Iran-Russia cooperation” and there should be “no ban on it,” he said about the shipment destined for a Russian-built nuclear reactor in the southern Iranian port city of Bushehr.

Azerbaijan has said it was seeking more information about the shipment due to fears that it might violate any of the three sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions imposed on Iran over its failure to halt uranium enrichment.

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The three approaches set out by the Legislative Drafting Group are:

Ӣ The simplest national statutory approach with no binding national arrangements;

Ӣ Legislation that would provide some basis for special arrangements for those unable to receive the ministry of women bishops, such arrangements to be made within the present structures of the Church of England;

Ӣ Legislation that would create new structures within the Church of England for those unable to receive the ministry of women bishops.

The Group does not offer a recommendation of its own but analyses the pros and cons of each approach, identifying, where relevant, various sub options.

Read the whole summary and download and read the whole report.

The Episcopal Diocese of Central New York has filed a lawsuit seeking the property of a Binghamton congregation that opposes the denomination’s policy on homosexuality.

It’s the second such lawsuit filed by the diocese and among dozens of similar cases across the country as the Episcopal Church faces ongoing opposition from congregations that disapprove of the 2003 consecration of New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson. Robinson has publicly acknowledged being in a committed gay relationship.

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For two weeks starting Monday, Hyatt’s new Andaz Liverpool Street in London will host the hotel world’s first “Reader in Residence.”

Writer Damian Barr, 31, will read to guests or talk literature with them. “Most people haven’t been read to since they were children, and they don’t bring a lot of books to hotels,” he says. “I always pack a selection, because you get tired of being in the CNN world.”

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But there was more to this speech than one big quotation. While the pope’s address challenged the bishops to keep wrestling with the sexual-abuse scandal, he also put these evil acts in a wider framework — an era of revolt against the church’s moral teachings. And who is in charge of defending these doctrines, while finding ways to strengthen marriages and families?

That would be the church’s bishops, said Benedict. Thus, he urged them to address the sin of abuse within the “wider context of sexual mores,” thus setting an example for society as a whole. This crisis, he said, calls “for a determined, collective response,” a response led by the bishops.

“Children deserve to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality and its proper place in human relationships,” he said. “They should be spared the degrading manifestations and the crude manipulation of sexuality so prevalent today. … What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?

“We need to reassess urgently the values underpinning society, so that a sound moral formation can be offered to young people and adults alike.”

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“I will work on educating the church specifically about General Convention, our bicameral system, and our theology of governance,” …[Bonnie Anderson] said in an address to the annual Episcopal Communicators’ Conference in Seattle recently. “The circular model of ministry ”“ clergy, laity, bishops working together, using their gifts to be the ministers of the church that attracted me to The Episcopal Church over 35 years ago ”“ has somewhat morphed itself into a pyramidal structure with the largest order, the laity, being at the bottom of a top-down approach to ministry.”

Mrs. Anderson, who is also chairwoman of the 17-member Joint Standing Committee on Planning and Arrangements, said the theme of the 76th General Convention will be Ubuntu, a Zulu word that describes humaneness encompassing a sense of caring, sharing and being in harmony with all of creation, according to an article in Episcopal Life, which noted that finding an exact translation for the word in English is difficult.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told Episcopal Life that she suggested Ubuntu as the convention theme for a variety of reasons.

“Because it is unfamiliar, it may be able to invite us into a larger and more expansive way of understanding identity in community,” she said.

In comments to Episcopal Life, Mrs. Anderson said Episcopalians often struggle to describe the identity of The Episcopal Church and relationships within it. She and other planners envision a deeper understanding of the church’s identity and relationships by having convention engage in a process known as public narrative.

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Watch it all from Anglican TV.

The costs finally became too much for Walter Tucker.

Three weeks ago, he swallowed his pride and took a place in the soup kitchen line at Our Lady of Mercy Church on Charleston’s East Side so he could extend his already stretched food dollar with a free meal.

Prices are up so much that many people are forced to make a choice, “either a gallon of gas or a loaf of bread,” he says.

“It was hard to come to a soup kitchen,” Tucker says. “You feel a little hesitant at first, like you may be seen as a bum.” But a choice has to be made, he says. “Come in to get something to eat, or don’t eat.”

Sister Pat Keating, who directs this Sisters of Charity soup kitchen on America Street, says the soup kitchen normally feeds fewer than 100 for lunch at the beginning of the month when people tend to have more money on hand. Now, she says, Our Lady of Mercy often finds 150 or more in the food line.

“They’re running out of money because food is expensive. We’re seeing people we have not seen before.”

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A spokesman for Archbishop Williams told The Living Church the internet video presentation was “not related” to his forthcoming letter to the bishops of the Communion. In that letter, the archbishop is reported to ask that they predicate their attendance at the Lambeth Conference upon their willingness to accept the Windsor Report and Anglican Covenant processes.

The video presentation, titled “Better bishops for the sake of a better church,” was a pastoral didactic tool, the spokesman. The presentation broadcast on the internet video service, outlines the archbishop’s hopes for the conference.

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Food for thought.

Olan Horne, 48, a survivor of clerical sex abuse, believes that Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States marks a turning point in the way victims of sexual abuse are treated in the Catholic Church.

“I saw it in his face, heard his voice. He understands,” said Horne, one of six survivors who met Thursday with the pope. He spoke with the St. Louis Beacon from his Massachusetts university food service office.

Benedict himself brought the shameful issue up last week at three masses at Washington Nationals and Yankee stadiums and at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, at a New York seminary campus and at a press conference aboard his plane Shepherd One. He also discussed the issue with the bishops in Washington.

“Benedict told the bishops to meet with survivors as he had; this pope gets it,” said Horne. “I like to say that I’m from Missouri and you are going to have to Show Me. Benedict showed me.”

Horne has no connection with Missouri, but for years he has embraced the state motto as his own. Horne repeatedly has demanded that the Catholic Church “show me” how it has taken the issue of sex abuse of minors seriously in a public way.

“I never gave up, I always had hope. I didn’t have much faith, but I always had hope,” said Horne who has not attended Mass in years and baptized his children but never took them to church or allowed them to make their First Communion.

Bernie McDaid, 52, another Boston survivor who is a painting contractor in Boston, tried to tell his story to Pope John Paul II in 2003. He traveled to Rome but saw only Vatican officials, he told the Beacon from a Boston construction site. This time was different.

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I am wary of experts who are quick to offer advice. I have been warned that the devil often appears as an angel of light. I also know that the way of Jesus is under perpetual attack but that the attack rarely looks or feels like an attack. There is a good deal of slieght of hand involved. As Amos Wilder wisely comments, “The Spirit is not to be quenched, yet the spirits should be resisted.”

–Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way (Eerdmans, 2007), p.272

Mr. [PETER] STEINFELS: I think that his talks will be pored over by leaders of the Church, but I don’t think they will have the wide impact on ordinary believers. This is a pope who stresses ideas, theology, worship, prayer. He seems to believe that if you get those things right, the rest will fall in line. Other people may take a different approach. They say we need some institutional and organizational changes.

[KIM] LAWTON: At several points in his trip, Benedict reached outside the Catholic Church as well. In addition to an interfaith meeting in Washington, he met with Jewish leaders at a synagogue in New York on the eve of Passover celebrations — the first time a pope has ever visited a synagogue in the U.S. He also met with leaders of other Christian denominations urging them to “hold fast” to sound teaching.

Mr. STEINFELS: For him, it’s also a reminder that this dialogue between faiths is ultimately not just a meeting of different abstract principles or beliefs, but it’s really a relationship of people.

LAWTON: Benedict showed a surprising connection with young people, generating a level of excitement that Catholic leaders would like to see continue as they struggle to address problems from declining church membership to a severe shortage of priests.

Catholics account for nearly one-quarter of U.S adults. But according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, no other major religion has suffered greater net losses in recent decades. About one-third of those who were raised Catholic have now left the Church. Church officials hope events like this will help reinvigorate the faith.

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Now to the future and what needs to be done.

I grew up by the sea. As we landed at Vancouver airport., looked as though we would land where my house was, by the sea.

I read the life of a great sea captain. This man never set off on a voyage without going into his cabin without removing a book from a black box in a big chest. He would read, close his eyes and put the book back. No one asked what this was about. On his death at sea, after his burial, his 2 i/c looked at the book. It had a single entry, “starboard is on the right, port is on the left.”

Let us remember in these days of clever people that there are truths which we must observe. These are not secrets for certain people. They are clear directions for all people. “Starboard is on the right, port is on the left.”

The words Jesus is giving to us. As Jesus faced the multitude, hungry and seeking and in great need. He turned to his disciples and said, you give them something to eat. Jesus and his disciples faced a great multitude with a great need. There are many people in need physically and spiritually. There were very few resources. There was a handful of disciples. None of them would have been approved by the diocesan board of ordination. There were very few resources and a handful of loaves and fishes. But Jesus was there.

But God. That is the point at which everything changes. We all have to get to the end of ourselves. You re right you have no where else to go but God.

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Received Via Email:

To the clergy and parishioners of San Joaquin –

We recognize that the news of a lawsuit from the Presiding Bishop and the representatives of Remain Episcopal in Stockton, may be unsettling.
However, please be assured that we have been expecting this litigation and the contents contain no surprises. Please know that our legal team has been at work for some time. They are optimistic and remain unperturbed by The Episcopal Church’s most recent action. What our legal counsel has accomplished on our behalf is already proving most helpful in defense of property and assets despite the fact that this preparatory work had to be done without the benefit of seeing what the Episcopal Church intended to do.

Furthermore, I want to remind you that in spite of the claims by The Episcopal Church, nothing in their current Constitution and Canons prohibits a diocese from leaving one province and moving to another.

Also, just as we stood together for the sake of our witness to the Gospel at our Convention in December, so now will we continue to stand together for that same witness. I will continue to respond to those who disagree with us in a Christian and charitable manner and I trust that you will, as well.

Thank you for the trust that you have placed in me as your bishop and senior pastor, and know that I will continue to honor that trust with God’s help.

Faithfully, yours in Christ,

+John-David

In the Boca Raton interview, Dana echoed other Catholics who praise Benedict’s sharp mind, his gentle manner and his willingness to listen. She met him as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 2004, when he congratulated her for becoming the first woman to win the pro-family San Benedetto Award in Italy.

“He has a huge intellect, yet he’s a humble man,” she said. “It’s a beautiful combination. It compels people to listen.

“He is conservative, yet radical. He’s pushing us onward to realign ourselves with new responsibilities.”

She cited an example: In March, an official in Benedict’s Vatican decried new kinds of mortal sins ”” not just the usual abortion, but also pollution, pedophilia, drug dealing, environmental damage and extreme wealth.

“John Paul brought Christ to the world, shoring up values,” Dana said. “Benedict is building on those, stretching and interpreting for our day and time.”

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Over in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama was saying of Hillary Clinton, “She seems to have a habit of saying whatever it is that folks want to hear.” And Mrs. Clinton was saying of Mr. Obama, “He has sent out mailers, he has run ads, misrepresenting what I have proposed.”

Meanwhile, in New York City, at Yankee Stadium, Pope Benedict XVI was saying things such as, “The Gospel teaches us that true freedom, the freedom of the children of God, is found only in the self-surrender which is part of the mystery of love.”

In which attribute ”” love, I mean ”” the political profession can’t exactly be said to abound. The nature of politics, after all, is the capture of power by one group of humans and the denial of that same power to other groups of humans. By force, by the ballot ”” it all comes ultimately to the same thing, which is that the last thing politics is about is love.

The same goes for a large number of other things you’ve heard about, such as peace, contentment, joy and fulfillment. Politics isn’t about these commodities either. Politics is a wrestling match, with ample components of eye-gouging and head-butting. Whoever ends up sitting on top, by talent or trickery, is the winner.

The timing of the papal visit, coincidental as that timing certainly was, makes a little clearer the debased state of democratic government in the 21st century. As if the almost unendurable length of the presidential campaign, and the squalor of the dialogue, such as it is, hadn’t made that plain enough already.

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