[Anne] Hjelle was taken by helicopter to Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo. After surgery, Hjelle felt helpless as the attack replayed in her mind in an endless loop.

“It was like watching a horror movie,” she said. “Except it really happened to me.”

Her pastor, Phil Munsey of Life Church of Mission Viejo, arrived the next morning and felt the urge to pray for her emotional health, worried that she would be plagued by flashbacks and nightmares.

“As a pastor,” Munsey said. “I prayed for a miracle and received one.”

Her pastor gave her a New Testament verse from 2 Timothy 4:17 to inspire her: “… the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength … And I was delivered from the lion’s mouth.”

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The brief policy statement on embryonic stem-cell research that is to come before the U.S. bishops at their June 12-14 meeting in Orlando, Fla., is designed to set the stage for a later, more pastoral document explaining why the Catholic Church opposes some reproductive technologies.

“While human life is threatened in many ways in our society, the destruction of human embryos for stem-cell research confronts us with an issue of respect for life in a stark new way,” says the statement drawn up by the Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Although the topic of embryonic stem-cell research has been raised in several broader USCCB documents and has been the subject of testimony and many letters to Congress, there has never been a formal statement on the issue from the full body of bishops, said Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, chairman of the pro-life committee, in an introduction to the draft document.

“The issue of stem-cell research does not force us to choose between science and ethics, much less between science and religion,” the document says. “It presents a choice as to how our society will pursue scientific and medical progress.”

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On a brisk day last fall in Prineville, Ore., Raymond and Deanna Donaca faced the unthinkable: They were losing their home to foreclosure and had days to move out.

For more than two decades, the couple had lived in their three-level house, where the elms outside blazed with yellow shades of fall and their four golden retrievers slept in the yard. The town had always been home, with a lazy river and rolling hills dotted by gnarled juniper trees.

Yet just before lunch on Oct. 23, the Donacas closed all their home’s doors except the one to the garage and left their 1981 Cadillac Eldorado running. Toxic fumes filled the home. When sheriff’s deputies arrived at about 1 p.m., they found the body of Raymond, 71, on the second floor along with three dead dogs. The body of Deanna, 69, was in an upstairs bedroom, close to another dead retriever.

“It is believed that the Donacas committed suicide after attempts to save their home following a foreclosure notice left them believing they had few options,” the Crook County Sheriff’s Office said in a report.

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Out on the sun-drenched plains east of San Luis Obispo, a Palo Alto-based startup, Ausra Inc., plans to build an enormous array of high-tech mirrors spread over 640 acres. Focusing solar rays on miles of water-filled pipes, the installation will heat enough steam to power turbine generators capable of serving the electricity needs of 60,000 homes, at prices that will soon be competitive with traditional forms of energy.

Ausra is only one of several solar pioneers that Pacific Gas and Electric Company and other utilities are supporting with long-term power contracts. Backed in many cases by Silicon Valley venture investors, they reflect the same spirit of innovation that made California a world leader in electronics and information technology.

Along with equally innovative developers of wind, geothermal, and other forms of renewable power, they are on the forefront of finding solutions to the greatest challenge of our times: reducing greenhouse gas emissions to prevent runaway global warming.

But their entrepreneurial efforts may be stillborn if Congress fails to extend vital production and investment tax credits that have nurtured the renewable power industry as it works to implement emerging technology and achieve scale economies.

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His picture is here; listen to the whole interview there.

I am an Episcopalian by personal choice and through the grace of God. My family of origin, as well as my husband’s family, are all Roman Catholic; I can’t emphasize enough the deep respect and gratitude I have for my Catholic upbringing and the ways it has shaped me. Still, for a myriad of reasons I won’t enumerate here, I chose a different path.

So for me personally, why Anglicanism? Being the only Episcopalian on this blog, I feel the need to make the usual disclaimers about speaking only for myself. My entries are just one person’s current, contingent take on what it means to me to be Anglican, so I highly recommend that if your curiosity is piqued you jump in and read more widely.

As a start, one of the clearest definitions of Anglicanism I have read can be found in An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church (Don S. Armentrout and Robert Boak Slocum, editors). It makes plain some of the traits I so love about our church: its sense of balance and compromise, its ability to respect tradition while celebrating cultural difference, its emphasis on practice and worship over doctrine, its humble recognition that while God is unchanging and perfect the church is not. In addition, we are a church that embraces sacrament, liturgy, adherence to apostolic succession, and the centrality of the historic creeds, and you’ve got a pretty potent mix.

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Senior clergy who have signed the letter include Canon Lucy Winkett, precentor at St Paul’s and Canon Jane Hedges, steward at Westminster Abbey. Both are women likely to be considered for the episcopate once it becomes possible to consecrate them.

More than 700 women priests have signed it, indicating they are backing the stance.

Canon Winkett told The Times: “We are saying that to consecrate women bishops is right, both in principle and in its timing. We believe now is the time to do it. But the way that it happens is important.

“The Church at large misjudges women if it really believes that we would support the consecration of women bishops at any price. We would regret very much a delay, but regretfully we would rather wait than see discriminatory legislation passed.”

When women were ordained to the priesthood over a decade ago, the Church of England passed an Act of Synod which created “flying bishops” to care for traditionalist parishes. Under that legislation, which will be repealed when women are ordained bishops, parishes can still opt to be cared for by a bishop other than their own diocesan, and to make their churches into “no-go areas” for women priests.

Read it all and a copy of the letter itself is here.

But how does the Church change its mind? How does it square inspiration with democracy?

I think it happens over time. And the first person, or the first few people, who articulate a new understanding never meet with particularly positive reactions. It takes time for any kind of consensus to build.

You go back to Acts, and you have Gamaliel talking about the disciples’ teaching in the marketplace, saying: “You know, we ought to give this some time. If it’s not of God, it will go away. And if it is of God, do we want to be opposing it?” I think we’re in the middle of that now. All of us want it to be over, but the fact of the matter is that it’s going to take us some time to settle this.

But didn’t Rowan Williams say to you that the proper way of doing this was to pose the question, take soundings, and convince people before doing the deed?

What I said to Rowan in that meeting was “Yes, wouldn’t that be wonderful? It sounds so orderly, and neat and tidy, when in fact it rarely happens that way.” We find someone taking action and then we think our way backwards to it.

I pointed out to him that in our own country we had 11 women who were uncanonically ordained to the priesthood before we had sanctioned the ordination of women. I wonder how many years it would have taken us (rather than the two years it took us to the next General Convention to approve that) to ordain women had we gone about that in an orderly process. We might still not be ordaining women.

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I would like to reflect on a particular aspect of the Holy Spirit, on the intertwining of multiplicity and unity. The second reading speaks about this, treating of the harmony of the different charisms in the communion of the same Spirit. But already in the passage from Acts that we have listened to, this intertwining reveals itself with extraordinary evidence. In the event of Pentecost it is made clear that multiple languages and different cultures belong to the Church; they can understand and make each other fruitful. St. Luke clearly wants to convey a fundamental idea, namely, in the act itself of her birth the Church is already “catholic,” universal. She speaks all languages from the very beginning, because the Gospel that is entrusted to her is destined for all peoples, according to the will and the mandate of the risen Christ (cf. Matthew 28:19). The Church that is born at Pentecost is not above all a particular community — the Church of Jerusalem — but the universal Church, that speaks the language of all peoples. From her, other communities in every corner of the world will be born, particular Churches that are all and always actualizations of the one and only Church of Christ. The Catholic Church is therefore not a federation of churches, but a single reality: The universal Church has ontological priority. A community that is not catholic in this sense would not even be a Church.

In this regard it is necessary to add another aspect: that of the theological vision of the Acts of the Apostles in respect of the journey of the Church from Jerusalem to Rome. Luke notes that among the peoples represented in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost there are also “foreigners from Rome” (Acts 2:10). At that time Rome was still distant, “foreign” for the nascent Church: It was a symbol of the pagan world in general. But the power of the Holy Spirit will guide the steps of the witnesses “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), to Rome. The Acts of the Apostles ends precisely when Paul, by providential design, arrives at the empire’s capital and proclaims the Gospel there (cf. Acts 28:30-31). Thus the journey of God’s Word, begun in Jerusalem, arrives at its goal, because Rome represents the whole world and thus incarnates the Lucan idea of catholicity. The universal Church is realized, the catholic Church, which is the continuation of the chosen people and makes its history and mission her own.

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Influential and controversial televangelist John Hagee has apologized to Catholics for referring to the Roman Catholic Church as the “great whore.” Hagee is supporting Sen. John McCain for president, which has led some Catholic leaders to criticize McCain.

Listen to it all from NPR.

With the economy down and needs up for the homeless, the hungry and the elderly, donations to South Florida churches and other religious institutions are straining to keep up with soaring needs, leaders say.

At the Miami Archdiocese, collection-plate revenues are steady, but assessments that individual parishes pay are slow in coming or are down, and needs are up sharply, resulting in the layoff of 49 of the 182 staff members at its Pastoral Center on Biscayne Boulevard, said spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta.

In a letter to parishioners, Archbishop John C. Favalora said: “Each year, a greater number of parishes and programs are seeking our financial help, and, therefore, we must prioritize. We can only work with what we have.”

South Florida’s Jewish, Methodist, Episcopal and other faithful face similar problems.

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More U.S. homeowners fell behind on mortgage payments last month, driving the number of homes facing foreclosure up 65 percent versus the same month last year and contributing to a deepening slide in home values, a research company said Tuesday.

Nationwide, 243,353 homes received at least one foreclosure-related filing in April, up 65 percent from 147,708 in the same month last year and up 4 percent since March, RealtyTrac Inc. said.

Nevada, Arizona, California and Florida were among the hardest hit states, with metropolitan areas in California and Florida accounting for nine of the top 10 areas with the highest rate of foreclosure, the company said.

Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac monitors default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions.

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Google’s dominance in search, and therefore in search-based advertising, has been based on offering the best product. That can change, and has done so in the past. Who now trembles at the mention of AltaVista, Lycos or even Yahoo?

Still, regulators must watch Google’s current practices. Even a short-lived monopoly can exploit its customers if it so chooses. Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, has been reported as claiming that the company cannot affect pricing because it sells advertising by auction. That is nonsense. Google could restrict supply, forcing auction prices up.

Yet the bigger risk is that Google parlays fleeting excellence into entrenched power. While it lacks Microsoft’s networked dominance, it has the financial clout to buy out rivals, especially fledgling competitors in online search. Google is also hoping to thrive both in advertising on mobiles and in the growing world of online video. That is a legitimate aim, but regulators must be vigilant. More importantly, Google’s rivals had better start offering a credible alternative.

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Hillary Rodham Clinton crushed Barack Obama by more than 2-1 in the West Virginia primary Tuesday ”” a victory that was surely personally satisfying but came as the Democratic presidential nomination is nearly in the grasp of her rival.

“There are some who have wanted to cut this race short,” Clinton told raucous, cheering supporters in Charleston, but she left no doubt she plans to stay in the race through the final contests.

“I am more determined than ever to carry on this campaign until everyone has had a chance to make their voices heard,” she said, calling herself a stronger candidate in a general election and a better-prepared president.

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One danger of such charisma, however, is that it can evoke unrealistic hopes of what a candidate could actually accomplish in office regardless of his own personal abilities. Case in point is the oft-made claim that an Obama presidency would be welcomed by the Muslim world.

This idea often goes hand in hand with the altogether more plausible argument that Mr. Obama’s election would raise America’s esteem in Africa ”” indeed, he already arouses much enthusiasm in his father’s native Kenya and to a degree elsewhere on the continent.

But it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

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Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana’s primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.

Here’s the worst: In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into “a horrible response,” as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.

“The first person I encountered was like, ‘I’ll never vote for a black person,’ ” recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. “People just weren’t receptive.”

For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark….

Read it all from yesterday’s Washington Post.

There are photographs hanging on the walls of my dressing room in the Staatsoper Berlin, photographs that remind me of what I see when I look out the windows of my house in Jerusalem. They are slightly faded, and here and there the paper is crumbling, but one can easily recognize the views. The Old City, the Dome of the Rock with its shining cupola, the walls, the gates.

Sometimes I sit in this room before a performance, looking at these pictures and thinking of Jerusalem, of Israel, my home. Before 1989, this room was supposedly a refuge of the East German Stasi, the state police; if I happened to be a sentimental person, that fact would surely help me to become unsentimental, but I am not a sentimental person. The situation in the Middle East is much too close to me, much too personal to be able to be sentimental about it.

Since 1952 I have owned an Israeli passport. Since I was 15 years old, I have traveled the world as a musician. I have lived in London and in Paris and I commuted for years between Chicago and Berlin. Before I had an Israeli passport, I had an Argentinean one; later I acquired a Spanish one. And in 2007, I became the only Israeli in the world who can also show a Palestinian passport at an Israeli border crossing.

I am, so to speak, living evidence of the fact that only a pragmatic two-state solution (or better yet, absurd as it sounds, a federation of three states: Israel, Palestine and Jordan) can bring peace to the region.

Read the whole article.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is one of the nation’s most powerful Catholics, but this year the only commencement address she gave was at one of the eight campuses of Miami Dade College.

Senator John F. Kerry is headlining three commencements this year – the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, UMass Lowell, and Wheelock College – but it’s been nine years since he’s done one at a Catholic institution, Boston College Law School.

As for the scion of the nation’s most famous Catholic family, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, his major commencement address this year is at Wesleyan University, founded by Methodists.

After repeatedly getting criticized by conservative Catholics, and after years of pressure from the Vatican and some American bishops, Catholic colleges and universities are now shying away from politicians – especially those who, like Kennedy, Kerry, and Pelosi, support abortion rights – as commencement speakers and honorary degree recipients.

Instead, the schools are scrutinizing the public records of potential honorees for evidence of open dissent from key church teachings, especially on abortion, and they are choosing noncontroversial church insiders or nonpolitical figures for their most prominent honors. “I think there’s a concerted effort to use the moment of naming people who reinforce the Catholic identity of our institutions, and I’m pleased by that,” Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston said in an interview.

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Now, one congregation’s plan to place a 16-foot cross on a new building at the town’s oldest interfaith center in Wilde Lake Village has stirred an anxious response. Some guardians of local tradition see the cross as a challenge to the core values of Columbia.

“I think it’s just wrong,” said Robert Tennenbaum, a planner and architect who helped design Wilde Lake. “This is Columbia — you are talking about a special place.”

Since the Wilde Lake Interfaith Center opened in 1970 with a feast of bread and honey, St. John United Church and St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church have shared the discreet low building, which has no outer markings to distinguish it as a house of worship. But after several years of planning and fundraising, St. John United, a congregation that melds Methodist and Presbyterian traditions, is expanding to provide more room for its flock.

The Rev. R. Whitfield “Whitty” Bass, pastor of St. John United, said he doesn’t see why anyone would be offended by a cross on the exterior of a building. “The cross is a symbol of freedom,” he said.

But others feel just as strongly that the cross will be an offense to the idea of interfaith centers as sanctuaries of inclusion.

“A number of people are really disturbed about it,” said Rhoda Toback, a village resident and former member of the Wilde Lake Village Board.

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1. The .. experience [in the Episcopal Church] was primarily one of inward-looking mediation and reconcilliation attempts from day one, and all along Lipscomb was less and less able to be at peace about what he was doing. First, ECUSA continually took positions which refuted sound moral theology. Secondly, the ‘gifts’ of catholicity that Lipscomb had hoped to infuse into ECUSA were simply not wanted. And, he was just so tired of the jargon which carefully differentiated ‘Anglicanism’ from ECUSA, and shopped for bishops; to have such a misguided sense of boundaries in the Church is not ‘catholic’ at all.

2. The unity which John 17 calls for is a unity for the purpose of a united mission. This had become impossible in ECUSA. And, ECUSA’s brand of ecumenism apart from truth could never produce any sense of unity at all; added to that is the fact that the English Reformation was about rebellion from the outset, the quest for unity becomes futile. In other words, the Anglican crisis is 500 years old….

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(From the Anglican parish of Grace and Saint Stephen’s Church).

(Colorado Springs, Colorado) Judge Larry E. Schwartz of the El Paso County District Court issued a decision today that the property dispute between Grace Church and St. Stephen’s and the Episcopal Bishop and Diocese of Colorado cannot be resolved by summary judgment and must go to trial court. Yet, significantly and critical to Grace Church and St. Stephen’s legal argument for ownership of the property in question, Judge Swartz concluded that the parish is a valid, non-profit corporation recognized by the State of Colorado since 1973.

Judge Schwartz’s decision was in response to a hearing held on May 2, 2008 at the El Paso County Courthouse in which 18 members of Grace Church and St. Stephen’s requested that personal lawsuits brought against them by the Episcopal Bishop of Colorado be dismissed.

In May of 2007 Grace Church and St. Stephen’s voted to affiliate with the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) in a congregational election. Of the 370 votes cast, an overwhelming 342, or 93%, voted for Grace Church and St. Stephen’s, one of the oldest Episcopal Churches in Colorado, to leave the Episcopal Church over its departure from traditional Christian beliefs and practice.

Since that time the Episcopal Bishop and Diocese of Colorado have sued the corporation of Grace Church and St. Stephen’s, 18 individual members and lay-leaders of the congregation, and an affiliated elementary school, St. Stephen’s Classical School, for the 17 million dollar historic landmark church building in downtown Colorado Springs.

In today’s decision Judge Schwartz wrote that “over six volumes of affidavits, correspondence and documents have been filed over the last year in support of various issues that will ultimately need to be addressed.” As a consequence, “Neither party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law under summary judgment analysis”¦.Material facts ”¦ are clearly in dispute.”

In response to Judge Schwartz’s decision, Jon Wroblewski, senior warden of Grace Church as St. Stephen’s, said, “We are grateful for the careful and deliberate seriousness with which Judge Swartz has considered our case. Furthermore, we are pleased that the judge recognized the fact that the parish’s 1973 corporation has been doing business as a legal entity unchallenged by the Episcopal Church for 35 years, that our corporation is recognized by the Secretary of State, that this property case is very different from previous cases involving church property disputes, and that neutral principles of law prevail over and against sectarian arguments about ecclesiastical hierarchy. Sadly, I think that this case is proving to be an embarrassment to Christian witness in this community and beyond. The vicious actions of the Bishop and Diocese of Colorado to attack a congregation’s right of self-determination, to personally sue 18 upstanding members of a community in their capacity as volunteer non-profit directors, and to sue an elementary school are unconscionable. Surely there is a better way for Christian people to behave in the public eye. We hold out hope, however forlorn, that the Bishop will repent and come to some reasonable mediated settlement; but if not, justice must prevail.”

The pillar that continually returns as obviously of greatest importance to Sanneh is that of “translatability.” Some readers may wonder what more there is to say that Sanneh has not already said in his pathbreaking academic study Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Orbis, 1989) and more recently in a cheeky volume of self-interrogation, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Eerdmans, 2003). Yet this theme is so important for what Sanneh believes about the nature of God, about human cultures under God, and about Christianity as an intrinsically world religion that he continues to find new meaning in the process by which the scriptures””and then the whole of Christian faith””move from one language-culture-mental framework to another.

Sanneh writes that God exists “at the center of the universe of cultures, implying equality among cultures and the necessarily relative status of cultures vis-à-vis the truth of God.” Translatability shows why “no culture is so advanced and so superior that it can claim exclusive access or advantage to the truth of God, and none so marginal and remote that it can be excluded.” It takes flesh in “the ethical monotheism Christianity inherited from Judaism” in such a way that it “accords value to culture but rejects cultural idolatry.” And it shows why “in any language the Bible is not literal; its message affirms all languages to be worthy, though not exclusive, of divine communication.” If the faith embodied in Jesus Christ resounds in its essence “with the idioms and styles of new converts,” it was then inevitable that Christianity would become “multilingual and multicultural.” Sanneh has previously faced the question of whether one activity can bear all of this interpretive weight. This book provides his most convincing answer.

Read it all.

They say that there’s no sound if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it. Likewise, if the tree falls in a thunderstorm, perhaps there’s no noise because the air waves are already full.

In 1998, the bishops of the Anglican Communion said that we “commit ourselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons.” In recent months, the committee planning for the next meeting of Anglican bishops, set to open in July 2008, has been gathering reports on how the listening process has been going.

Amid the chaos and confusion, what can be heard? As one interested listener, what I hear first of all is the incredible diversity of the voices and the improbability that Anglicans will arrive at a common mind anytime soon.

Connecticut Episcopalians often are baffled by the attitudes of Episcopalians in Fort Worth, but at least we are all Americans and follow teams in the NBA. When we add England and Australia to the mix, we no longer have sports in common, but we do still speak English. But what do we have in common with Anglicans in Myanmar and the Congo?

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In a fascinating essay in the book Ecopsychology, Mary Gomes and Alan Kanner probe the relevance of our sense of self to the environmental crisis, focusing on the early development of the child. So far as we know, newborn babies make few if any distinctions in their experience, not even between “self” and “mother”. These develop with time, but differently in different cultures: in ours we have built up the fiercest distinction ever known between humans and the rest of the biosphere, which has simply become a resource we can exploit in any way we please. This attitude, combined with our ingenuity, has led the biosphere to the brink of the sixth great extinction – the first conscious one. The essay discusses the “separative self” – we are still dependent on our environment for each breath we take, but our actions are based on the illusion of independence.

But separation is behovely. The child’s ego must be allowed to develop. Language, even thought, depends on making distinctions; a word or concept defines something by excluding other things. The fatal flaw arises from making separation absolute. Redemption is a dialectic: we think ourselves separate, rise up on angel’s wings, then are dashed down when the reality of total interdependence calls us back to earth. Like a parent picking up a fallen toddler, life sets us back on course, hopefully a little wiser. We fall at another hurdle, learn a little more. Eventually we may learn respect for our limitations, teamwork, even love – but we can and must still strike out on our own, to fall back again into the loving arms of interdependence, learned in a new way each time.

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Widely celebrated for its coffee and long-distance runners, but notorious for its extreme poverty, Ethiopia is the only sub-Saharan nation with a Christian culture dating to the earliest days of the church ”“ a little known fact that it shares with Eritrea, its former province and northern neighbor. About 50 percent of Ethiopia’s estimated 77 million people belong to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, a dominant force that, with Ethiopia’s monarchy, had defined this ancient land and its people for more than 16 centuries.

But the entrenched church is losing ground to a burgeoning Sunni Muslim population in the country’s south and southwest ”“ who now account for almost half of the nation’s people ”“ and to successful proselytizing efforts among the Orthodox by evangelical Christians from the West.

Some 500 years ago Ethiopia’s distinctive Orthodox Christian community faced the Counter Reformation zeal of the Jesuits, who worked to restore full communion between the Roman Catholic and Ethiopian Orthodox churches. The Jesuits failed and Ethiopia slipped into civil war. Once the dust settled, hundreds of Catholic missionaries were expelled or put to death. Europeans were forbidden to enter this “African Zion,” which, more than any other factor, preserved Ethiopia’s independence during Europe’s empire-building land grab centuries later.

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Pentecost was anything but the privatization of piety. Christians who spent yesterday in a holy huddle missed the point entirely! For Pentecost was anything but that. Out of a prayer gathering sprung a radical egalitarianism. For as the inaugural sermon made it patently clear this movement was to be typified by a fundamental re-alignment of human relationships and concepts of justice. Both old and young would become visionaries; women were included in the movement. And God would pour his liberating Spirit on every culture under the sun.

Yesterday thousands of Christians relived that moment as they met for a Global Day of Prayer in Millwall football stadium joining half a billion people around the world – not just to pray for other Christians, but to celebrate and pray about the problems in our world. They prayed about war and famine and asked searching questions about their responsibility as UK citizens.

In the ecumenical service where I preached yesterday morning there was nothing incongruous about our intercession for teenager, Jimmy Mizen who became the 13th victim of knife crime in London on Saturday night. And it seemed natural to redirect our giving in response to disaster victims in Burma.

As the German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann put it: ‘no corner of this world should remain without God’s promise of a new creation through the power of the resurrection.’

Read it all.

Part one is here and part two is there. Read or listen to them both–difficult but important.