Senator Barack Obama filed divorce papers against Reverend Jeremiah Wright on the grounds of irreconcilable differences one day after his pastor of 20 years appeared at the National Press Club, even though Wright’s substance and style had not really changed.

What had changed was that the national press had become critical of the former pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, obsessing about him after the softball interview by PBS’ Bill Moyers and glowing comments by CNN’s Roland Martin following Wright’s Sunday speech at the NAACP dinner in Detroit.

Some who had once defended Wright’s Afro-centric theology as normative prophetic preaching turned on him. Bashing Wright became acceptable on cable TV news programs. Scorching and unrelenting criticism played a decisive role in forcing Obama to claim he never knew him.

More interesting than how the politicos and pundits debate the Illinois senator’s decision to severe ties with the Chicago preacher and its impact on the presidential race is what will be the reaction of the so-called Christian Left who supported Obama by justifying Wright’s liberation theology. Will they too pile on against Wright? Will they defend him? Or will they rationalize Obama’s action on the grounds of political necessity?

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A Nobel laureate scientist and a leader of the evangelical Christian movement walk into a restaurant.

It sounds like the setup for a joke, a scenario that is screaming for a punch line that plays off the seemingly endless disagreements between faith and science.

But this is a true story, and Dr. Eric Chivian and the Rev. Richard Cizik have come up with a zinger no one could expect. They went to lunch together to agree on something – the need to curb negative human impact on the Earth. And the partnership they formed that afternoon in 2005 has led this odd couple of the environmental movement to be named, today, to Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

“I must admit I approached that meeting with some anxiety,” said Chivian (pronounced chih-vee-an), director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, “I’m involved in evolutionary biology. I support stem cell research. I have gay friends who are married. I felt I had positions that would be at odds with his.”

Cizik (pronounced sigh-zik), vice president for governmental affairs for the 45,000-church National Association of Evangelicals in Washington, D.C,, had similar reservations. But, as they point out, they were not there to discuss their differences. What brought them together is what Chivian calls “a deep, fundamental commitment to life on earth.”

Together, they formed the Scientists and Evangelicals Initiative, which aims to unite the two communities to help bring an environmental message into the large and powerful evangelical movement.

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Three events in the recent past have posed a serious question. Does the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church (TEC) know what she is doing? The possible answers to this question have raised even greater concern than the question itself. For, I have concluded, if, on the one hand, she does not know what she is doing then TEC is without effective leadership at perhaps the most crucial time in its history. If, on the other hand, she does know what she is doing, she is leading TEC in directions for which she has no warrant.

To be specific, her decline of an invitation to greet the Pope on his present visit calls into question her understanding of the office of Presiding Bishop. The canonical irregularities surrounding the specially called convention in the Diocese of San Joaquin and the actions to depose Bishops Cox, Schofield and Duncan raise questions about the way in which she understands and deploys the Constitution and Canons of TEC. Finally, her Easter Message to TEC raises a question about the adequacy of her grasp of the Christian Gospel.

Read it carefully and read it all.

This memorandum evaluates whether the Presiding Bishop has violated the constitution and canons of The Episcopal Church and what procedures would be applicable for charging her with a presentable offense. This memorandum identifies at least eleven violations of TEC’s constitution and canons by the Presiding Bishop in her dealings with Bishops Cox, Schofield and Duncan and the Diocese of San Joaquin. Taken together, these actions demonstrate willful violation of the canons, an intention to repeat the violations and a pattern of concealment and lack of candor. In the case of DSJ, the fundamental polity of TEC as a “fellowship of duly constituted dioceses” under the ecclesiastical authority of the diocesan bishop has been subverted. The memorandum then addresses the procedural requirements for filing charges against the Presiding Bishop.

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In an interview with me while he was in Canada, Archbishop Gregory Venables explained why he will be attending both the Global Anglican Future Conference next month in Jordan and Israel, and the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, Kent in July.

The Archbishop of the Southern Cone said: ‘I will be at Gafcon and also I am going to be at Lambeth. I think that is pretty important from the point of view of you guys [meaning the Press. rg].

‘Someone’s got to be there to talk to you about what is going on.’ [Too right, and initial impressions indicate we’re going to have even less access than last time. It’s nice to know that at least one Bishop is prepared to sup with us sinners, the few there are left. rg]

AB Greg continued: ”That was one of the reasons why I eventually made a final decision to go, which was only recently.

‘I think someone has got to go and show their face and speak to the situation.’

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Delegates to the 2008 General Conference on April 30 rejected changes to the United Methodist Social Principles that would have acknowledged that church members disagree on homosexuality.

Delegates instead adopted a minority report that retained language in the denomination’s 2004 Book of Discipline describing homosexual practice as “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

The adopted wording in Paragraph 161G also states that “all persons are individuals of sacred worth, created in the image of God,” and that United Methodists are to be “welcoming, forgiving and loving one another, as Christ has loved and accepted us.”

Delegates also approved a new resolution to oppose homophobia and heterosexism, saying the church opposes “all forms of violence or discrimination based on gender, gender identity, sexual practice or sexual orientation.”

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I have said before, that by this consolation all sorrow which we might conceive, because of Christ’s absence, is mitigated, yea, utterly taken away, when as we hear that lie shall return again. And also the end for which he shall come again is to be noted; namely, that he shall come as a Redeemer, and shall gather us with him into blessed immortality.

–John Calvin, commenting on Christ’s Ascension in the Book of Acts

Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God,
that we who believe
Thine only-begotten Son our Redeemer,
to have ascended this day into heaven,
may ourselves dwell in spirit amid heavenly things.

But there is another even stronger reason to abolish the death penalty, wonderfully exemplified in the case of Billy Moore. On Death Row he discovered the names and addresses of the family of the man he killed and wrote to them to say sorry. Not only did they write back to say they forgave him but they continued to write to him encouraging him to turn his life round and use his experience as an incentive to help other people: and that’s what he did, starting a Bible Study Group in prison, and saying to his fellow inmates “Its bad enough us being in here with the state trying to kill us, but while we are waiting to die, we can treat each other right”.

When Billy Moore had lost all his last appeal and was faced with his final execution date the Georgia appeals board heard his case. Five members of his victim’s family were there to petition for his death sentence to be commuted. He was released, is now ordained as a Pentecostal Minister, and has been campaigning ever since. In short, people can change. One of the most moving stories in the New Testament concerns the criminal crucified beside Jesus who said “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” and who hears the words. “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” However battered and brutalized by life a person may be the Christian faith does not allow us to give up on them.

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Delegates at the United Methodist Church’s General Conference voted Wednesday to adhere to the church’s position that marriage should not include same-sex unions and that homosexual acts are not compatible with Christian teaching.

Those guidelines are included in church’s Social Principles, which do not have the force of church law but are to instruct the denomination’s 11 million members. The nearly 1,000 delegates at the international conference at the Fort Worth Convention Center are struggling with social issues at the conference that ends Friday.

While affirming the existing guidelines about sexuality, delegates also approved a resolution Wednesday opposing homophobia.

Numerous delegates at the crowded session spoke into microphones placed around the convention center floor. One man from Africa said that “we love homosexuals, but we detest what they do.”

Others said condemnation of homosexual behavior conflicts with Jesus’ message of love and acceptance.

The church must guard against “denying companionship and intimacy in loving relationships just because there are differences of understanding,” a Texas pastor said.

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Check it out.

Important ethical questions raised here–watch it all.

Australian bishops are educating the faithful about the possibilities and dangers of the Internet, and doing so with their own Internet ventures.

A pastoral letter called “Internet Safety” marks World Communications Sunday, celebrated in Australia this Sunday. And the letter has a unique element — a video introduction featuring Bishop Peter Ingham on YouTube.

Bishop Ingham, the Australian bishops conference’s delegate for media issues, said the video is a way to get the message out.

“That’s where we have to be, if we’re going to be talking to people, especially to young people about navigating the Net safely,” he said. “If only a few people see this video message and think over the points raised, it will be most worthwhile.”

Read it all and Check this out also.

Sufficient legal grounds exist for presenting Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori for ecclesiastical trial on 11 counts of violating the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church, according to a legal memorandum that has begun circulating among members of the House of Bishops.

A copy of the April 21 document seen by a reporter representing The Living Church states Bishop Jefferts Schori demonstrated a “willful violation of the canons, an intention to repeat the violations, and a pattern of concealment and lack of candor” in her handling of the cases of bishops Robert W. Duncan, John-David Schofield and William Cox, and that she “subverted” the “fundamental polity” of The Episcopal Church in the matter of the Diocese of San Joaquin.

Prepared by an attorney on behalf of a consortium of bishops and church leaders seeking legal counsel over the canonical implications of the Presiding Bishop’s recent actions, it is unclear whether a critical mass of support will form behind the report’s recommendations for any action to be taken, persumably as a violation of the Presiding Bishop’s ordination vows.

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How about those Cubs?.

Anglican Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi and Catholic Cardinal John Njue of Kenya have welcomed a joint visit by President Mwai Kibaki and his former political opponent, Raila Odinga, now prime minister, to camps for those displaced by recent post-election conflict. But they are also calling for compensation and a speedy resettlement of those who were forced from their abodes.

“This was a very important visit. We praise the leaders for that,” Nzimbi told Ecumenical News International in Nairobi. “It shows the leaders are concerned about the plight of these people.”

Nearly 300,000 people were forced to take refuge in camps following ethnic violence that erupted after the country’s electoral commission announced Kibaki as the winner of general elections held in December. Odinga said the election had been rigged. The conflict ended with the signing of a national peace accord in February. This in turn resulted in the formation of a coalition government between Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement.

“It is painful to see innocent people turned into refugees in their own country,” said Njue in Embu in eastern Kenya on April 27, while urging the government to create a suitable environment for a speedy resettlement.

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Lovely stuff–watch it all.

[We will now discuss]…the decision by Griffith University in Queensland to accept $100,000 from the government of Saudi Arabia for its Islamic Studies Centre.

Griffith University describes itself as ‘The Australian university of choice for Saudis’, and in the past Week District Court Judge Clive Wall, who is also Deputy Judge Advocate General in the Australian Defence Force, has compared the university with a Pakistani madrasa and accused its administration of naiveté over its decision to accept funding from the home of hardline Wahhabist Islam.

It has also revealed that the university had previously lied when it said it had not solicited the funding. Documents obtained by The Australian newspaper show the university asked for $1.35-million from the Saudis. Even worse, the university offered to keep the source of the donation secret.

Then last week in an opinion piece published in The Australian, the Vice Chancellor of Griffith University, Professor Ian O’Connor, described the official religion of Saudi Arabia as ‘Unitarianism’ and suggested that the reason the Saudi government was financing Islamic Studies Centres in foreign universities was because it was keen to promote progressive Islam. It was later revealed that Ian O’Connor had lifted his material on Wahhabism from Wikipedia, substituting the innocuous term ‘Unitarianism’ for ‘Wahhabi’ on the way through.

Professor O’Connor has since released a statement in which he says the material used in his newspaper article was provided by senior staff, and a small number of sentences were not directly attributed, but that this was unintentional.

Read it all from The Religion Report Down Under

For months, beleaguered American consumers have defied expert forecasts that they would soon succumb to the pressures of falling home prices, fewer jobs and shrinking paychecks. Now, they appear to have given in.

On Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported that the economy continued to stagnate during the first three months of the year, with a sharp pullback in consumer spending the primary factor at play.

Pressures on households in which cash is tight appeared to weigh significantly in the calculations of the Federal Reserve as it rolled back interest rates Wednesday for the seventh time since September ”” this time by one-fourth of a percentage point ”” in a bid to prevent a further falloff in the economy.

The Fed made clear, though, that investors and borrowers should not expect another drop in interest rates anytime soon. In the statement accompanying their action, policy makers said they believed that with the short-term rate at 2 percent, they had already unleashed enough economic stimulus to “help promote moderate growth.”

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Success will be a tall order in a school district where 85 percent of some 32,000 students are a year and a half to two years below their grade level. In a typical district, the figure would be around 15 percent, said Paul G. Vallas, the new superintendent here.

Worse, a third of the students here are some four years below grade level, a challenge that Mr. Vallas, a veteran of the Chicago and Philadelphia schools, calls “extreme.”

Yet nearly a year into the job, Mr. Vallas professes to be unfazed. With no politics in his way ”” he answers neither to the neutered parish school board nor to the mayor, but to the state ”” he is far freer to plan grand schemes than in the much larger cities where he made his mark…

Mr. [Curtis] Sherrod’s class has made improvements in reading since the start of the school year, but the hurdles are real nonetheless.

“Most of the kids come from broken homes,” he said. “Their parents are dead, in jail or on drugs. You can tell the kids from two-parent homes. They’re getting straight A’s, and they are respectful.”

They are a minority, though. “The kids, for most of them, it’s no more than a social dating scene,” Mr. Sherrod said. “They don’t care about the work.”

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

For to me the people of Israel are servants, they are my servants whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

–Leviticux 25:55

A final comment about the significance of the covenant and the process of its adoption is in order. For many, if not most, the covenant will be viewed simply as a means of dispute settlement. It certainly is that, and for this reason the Appendix containing procedures for dispute settlement is an essential part of the document. Failure to include such a procedure renders the covenant ineffective from the outset. However, to focus primary attention on the settlement of disputes is to miss the significance of the process and its outcome. The basic issue before the Communion as it struggles to adopt a covenant is that of the identity of the Anglican Communion as an expression of catholic Christianity. How is it that Anglicans propose to negotiate the passage of time in a way that both remains faithful to the apostolic witness and bears witness to the Christian Gospel in ways suitably adapted to time and place? The St Andrew’s Draft makes clear that the Anglican way is not that of the Roman Catholic Church with its focus on papal authority and a uniform juridical system. As articulated in the draft, the Anglican way is also not the way of the Orthodox Churches with their focus not on pervasive synodality but upon ecumenical councils (which now seem impossible to assemble). I have indicated as well that it ought not to be the way adopted by the confessional churches of the Reformation.

The way proposed by the St. Andrew’s Draft and WR is that of common belief and practice expressed in common worship, common ministry, mutual support, and open hospitality, all sustained by the practice of mutual subjection expressed by forbearance and restraint over time within a conciliar polity. This way is the way that indeed pervades the witness of the New Testament, but it is a way that cannot prevail through time unless commonly understood and commonly supported.

I have written this response in large measure to make this final point. I can only hope and pray that in the midst of the push and pull of politics and ideological difference it will not be forgotten that Anglicans are in this debate giving identity to themselves. In its “Introduction” (#4), the St Andrew’s Draft mentions a special Anglican “charism among the followers and servants of Jesus”, but does not actually say what that is. Taken as a whole, however, the draft in fact puts that charism on display and in so doing asks that we take notice of it, cherish it, and offer it to the Christian churches for testing.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Why would the busy, some might say embattled, leader of the 2.4 million-member Episcopal Church travel to Dallas for a 300-member congregation’s garden blessing service?

“Well, I was asked,” said Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first woman to lead the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Church of St. Thomas the Apostle invited Bishop Jefferts Schori for what was her first official visit to Dallas.

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The latest debacle in the Church of England – the proposed gender-apartheid between dioceses, with those who can’t abide the prospect of women bishops being catered for by men-only provinces – has those with only a passing acquaintance with their established church staring in disbelief at the institution’s capacity for chaos and meltdown.

Meanwhile, most of those inside the church do a reasonable impression of Ronaldo missing a penalty; falling to their knees and holding their heads despairingly in their hands.

It is embarrassing. How could such allegedly wise men propose a scheme that alienates and angers both traditionalists and liberals? Is it, possibly, because there are no women among them to talk sense?

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Once the epitome of Main Street U.S.A., the United Methodist Church is rapidly becoming an increasingly international family.

Put another way: The church of President Bush and Sen. Hillary Clinton is also the church of Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

And as the Liberian president stood before thousands of fellow Methodists gathered here Tuesday (April 29), she presented herself as the personification of the church’s global missions and urged a renewed effort to fight poverty in Africa.

Sirleaf, who in 2006 became Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state, pointed to Methodists’ centuries-old health and education ministries in her West African nation. Methodists built the first secondary school in Liberia, the College of West Africa, of which Sirleaf called herself a proud alumna.

“For more than 175 years, you, the Methodist Church, has stood by and with the Liberian nation,” Sirleaf said. “The church must continue to work to assist us meet the challenges for the people of Liberia.”

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