Overwhelming support in the nation’s least populated counties was key to Republican victories in the last two presidential elections. But a new bipartisan survey indicates rural voters are not so reliably Republican in 2008.

The poll indicates that Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, cannot count on rural voters to provide him a winning margin in the November presidential election. Double-digit margins in places beyond cities and suburbs are credited with giving President George W. Bush his margins of victory in 2000 and 2004.

In head-to-head match-ups, the rural voters surveyed split evenly between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican McCain. Each garnered 46 percent of the rural vote in the poll.

That’s a stunning reversal for Clinton, who rated as unpopular as “illegal aliens” in a similar rural survey done just last year.

Read or listen to it all.

…the political sharpies keep telling me that people don’t care about the weak dollar, or at least that it doesn’t have any legs as a political issue. I think they are dead wrong.

Read it all.

On a recent Sunday morning, Leanne Staeger, dressed in faded jeans and sneakers, was giving out curt, military-style orders to her four-person crew.

Their eyes were locked on a bank of monitors that showed a middle-age priest in white vestments delivering a sermon in the church across the street. Then, he did something that made everyone in the room burst out with laughter.

He jumped. Then he jumped some more.

“This is going to be known as ‘the jumping sermon,’ ” said the 40-year-old Staeger. “They’re going to love it online!”

Recent polls have shown Americans are losing confidence in religious institutions, but at the same time, an interest in spirituality has been on the rise. In search of new alternatives to houses of worship, a growing number are moving from pews to Internet portals to find God in cyberspace.

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A lovely story–watch it all.

APRIL was a cruel and bloody month in Chicago. “We want futures, not funerals!” students shouted at a rally on April 1st. But more funerals followed. The most violent weekend, April 18th-20th, saw no few than 36 shootings””15 of them gang-related””and nine deaths. As Chicago prepares for the summer, when violence usually tends to rise, two questions linger: what has caused this outburst, and what can be done about it?

Some believe the shootings were sparked by warmer weather; others blame mounting economic hardship. But searching for a precise reason is pointless. In many neighbourhoods across America, the threat of violence hangs in the air like humidity, sometimes bursting into a deluge. Overall crime rates are far lower than in the early 1990s. But America had 37% more gang-related murders in 2006 than in 2000, according to FBI reports. Half of Chicago’s murders in 2006 were linked to gangs.

The more important question is whether cities have learned how to prevent further outbursts….

Read the entire article.

When it was over, the grump Saran-wrapped my torso and told me how to take care of my new tattoo. I was barely listening, and I left with a spring in my step. I was happy because the pain had stopped, and because I thought I had somehow outwitted my own sinful nature. I’d made a promise to myself that I could not break without the help of a very skilled dermatologist and as many hours of pain as it took to put it there in the first place.

But the spring was fading by the time I got to 110th street, to the friend’s apartment where I was staying. And the next morning, when I woke and discovered that I had made a large and permanent dragon imprint upon his very fancy sheets, the whole thing already seemed like folly. Questions occurred to me like: Why did I get it on my back, where I won’t even see it? Why did it have to be so big? And why can’t I just look at the sun and the clouds and remember that someone wanted me to be good, or that someone thought I could be?

The great regret lasted no longer than the euphoria, and what settled in me was a combination of the two. But the experience made me more distrustful of making such a covenant with myself. A covenant is about security, but if I am good it is probably because I am spiritually insecure. Maybe instead of trying to quiet my unease, I should learn to live creatively with the fact that I am almost never sure about the right thing to do.

Read the whole article.

THE fierce battle over the future of America’s immigration system is spilling from Capitol Hill onto the airwaves, as conservatives accuse Democrats, human rights groups and even some labor unions of trying to stymie Republican efforts to stem the tide of illegal immigration.

But in recent weeks, some commentators and prominent Republicans have turned their swords against another formidable foe in their battle to tighten the borders: the Roman Catholic Church.

Immigration has long caused friction between the church, with its advocacy for migrants, and conservatives, who want to slow illegal crossings over the Mexican border. But as Congress wrestles with the fate of the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants, that tension has escalated into a sharp war of words, highlighting the divide among some Republicans and Catholics who have fought side by side on other issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.

In December, after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a tough border security bill that, among other things, would make it a crime to assist illegal immigrants, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops assailed it as extremely punitive and called on its flock to oppose it. Church officials have sent lobbyists to Congress and this month parishes sent members to rallies in Chicago and Washington to push for legislation that would legalize undocumented immigrants and put them on the path to citizenship.

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In 40 years as a highly regarded cancer surgeon, Dr. Tapas K. Das Gupta had never made a mistake like this.

As with any doctor, there had been occasional errors in diagnosis or judgment. But never, he said, had he opened up a patient and removed the wrong sliver of tissue, in this case a segment of the eighth rib instead of the ninth.

Once an X-ray provided proof in black and white, Dr. Das Gupta, the 74-year-old chairman of surgical oncology at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago, did something that normally would make hospital lawyers cringe: he acknowledged his mistake to his patient’s face, and told her he was deeply sorry.

“After all these years, I cannot give you any excuse whatsoever,” Dr. Das Gupta, now 76, said he told the woman and her husband. “It is just one of those things that occurred. I have to some extent harmed you.”

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In the Eye of the Storm touches on some aspects of Robinson’s ministry that have nothing to do with sexuality. Yet sexuality is his main subject and the one on which his views are the most provocative. This raises a question of perspective.

Robinson makes two statements in his introduction. First, he says that in the same way that Jesus reached out to prostitutes, tax collectors and other marginalized people, God called upon one of his gay children to be a bishop. But then he complains that the press, the public and the Anglican Communion see him as “a single-issue, one-dimensional person.”

Had he written an actual memoir in which he put his elevation to bishop in the larger context of his life and ministry, he might well have broadened the public’s perception of him. Instead, he has used his position, and written this book, to advance the cause of gay rights and to make a case for healthier attitudes toward sexual orientation, gender differences and sexuality itself.

Many readers will applaud these aims, but Robinson turned a wide-open field into a narrow one. A reader of his book might easily conclude that the way the press and the public see him is the way he sees himself.

As much as part of him would like to be the parish priest he once was, those days are gone. In the Eye of the Storm includes vestiges of the old Gene Robinson, but the book’s clear aim is to make his case as the first openly gay Episcopal bishop.

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Edmonton’s new Anglican bishop won’t be bending the rules in the local diocese for gay couples wishing to exchange marital vows in church.

“Basically, I’m a play-by-the-rules girl,” the Rt. Rev. Jane Alexander said.

“At the present time the national church has said we’re going to talk about this and we will vote again and look at this in 2010. And so that’s what we’ll do.”

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Bishop N.T. Wright of Durham, England, said in a recent visit to Nashville that tensions among Anglicans must be resolved soon.

“We cannot afford to have again the same sort of five years we have just had,” he said. “It has been hugely costly ”” financially, humanly and in terms of our witness.”

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church believes the Anglican Communion will not find peace and unity until feuding members set aside their theological differences and focus on something more important ”” like saving the world.

“There is communion and unity when people are focused in the needs of others,” said Jefferts Schori during a visit to Middle Tennessee last week. “When they are focused on their own doctrinal differences, that is when life is more challenging.”

Read the whole article.

Meanwhile, some Episcopal churches and one diocese have voted to leave the denomination and align with foreign provinces — despite longstanding tradition in which bishops respect each others’ boundaries — and are now fighting in court over the use of their property. New parishes in Elizabethtown and Louisville have formed under the leadership of the bishop of Bolivia but are not involved in property disputes.

Jefferts Schori maintained that the denomination has a “fiduciary as well as moral responsibility” to make sure church property is used for the purposes that donors intended. “We don’t have a right to give it away to a group that says they don’t want to be part of the Episcopal Church,” she said.

When a questioner pressed her on the issue, she said that ideally the church should find a way to settle rather than go through messy, expensive litigation, “but we haven’t found it yet.”

One questioner at the St. Matthew’s Episcopal gathering asked about her own conversion experience and whether she shared the traditional Christian doctrine that Jesus was the only way to salvation.

She said her own conversion culminated a period of spiritual searching following the tragic death of a longtime friend as well as her readings of scientists who spoke of the mystery of the universe.

That prompted her conversion and eventual career switch from oceanographer to priest, a path that led to her 2006 election as presiding bishop of the denomination.

She said she feels called to “share the good news I know in Jesus,” while being cautious not to judge others. “I look around me and see evidence that God is at work in traditions that don’t call themselves Christian,” she said.

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The House of Commons will vote this week on the government’s human embryology bill. It will also be voting on how far the state should regulate family life, how far MPs rather than government and arm’s-length agencies should decide on ethics and whether an MP’s “conscience” should override the liberties of ordinary citizens. The Commons will have a chance to stamp the medieval demand of the Catholic Church that MPs obey its edicts rather than their judgments.

In other words it is quite a week in parliamentary history – even without considering the merits of the legislation itself.

I was for five years a member of the relevant agency, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Not a day passed without some mind-crunching clash of human emotions passing its desk. The authority was set up under the original 1990 act licensing in vitro fertilisation, which offered hope of pregnancy to thousands of childless couples. I doubt if any modern act has been the architect of so much happiness.

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For decades, Boston University sociologist Peter Berger says, American intellectuals have looked down on evangelicals.

Educated people have the notion that evangelicals are “barefoot people of Tobacco Road who, I don’t know, sleep with their sisters or something,” Berger says.

It’s time that attitude changed, he says.

“That was probably never correct, but it’s totally false now and I think the image should be corrected,” Berger said in a recent interview.

Now, his university’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs is leading a two-year project that explores an “evangelical intelligentsia” which Berger says is growing and needs to be better understood, given the large numbers of evangelicals and their influence.

“It’s not good if a prejudiced view of this community prevails in the elite circles of society,” said Berger, a self-described liberal Lutheran. “It’s bad for democracy and it’s wrong.”

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“Catholic teaching maintains that marriage is a faithful, exclusive and lifelong union between one man and one woman joined in an intimate partnership of life and love””a union instituted by God for the mutual fulfillment of the husband and wife as well as for the procreation and education of children.

“Partnerships of committed same-sex individuals are already legal in California. Our state has also granted domestic partners spousal-type rights and responsibilities which facilitate their relationships with each other and any children they bring to the partnership. Every person involved in the family of domestic partners is a child of God and deserves respect in the eyes of the law and their community. However, those partnerships are not marriage””and can never be marriage””as it has been understood since the founding of the United States. Today’s decision of California’s high court opens the door for policymakers to deconstruct traditional marriage and create another institution under the guise of equal protection.

Read it carefully and read it all.

In regard to this decision of the court, the Catholic Bishops of California have said that “Catholic teaching maintains that marriage is a faithful, exclusive and lifelong union between one man and one woman joined in an intimate partnership of life and love-a union instituted by God for the mutual fulfillment of the husband and wife as well as for the procreation and education of children.”

This teaching of the Church follows forth from the teaching of Jesus Christ: “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19: 4-5)

At a moment in our society when we need to reinforce the strength of marriage and family this decision of the Supreme Court takes California in the opposite
direction. This action challenges those in society who believe in the importance of the traditional understanding of marriage to deepen their witness to the unique and essential role that marriage between a man and a woman has in the life of society.

The California Supreme Court ruled today that in California all people have the constitutional right to marry and raise a family, regardless of sexual orientation. Below is the text of a statement from Bishop Marc in response to the ruling: I welcome the ruling of the California Supreme Court affirming the fundamental right of all people to marry and establish a family. All children of God should be afforded the same rights under the law, and this decision recognizes that all Californians, regardless of sexual orientation, have equal access to one of our fundamental human institutions. This decision gives our church another opportunity to partner with our state to ensure that all families have the support they need to build relationships that strengthen our communities, state and country. Jesus tried to free his disciples from a narrow definition of what it means to be his follower. In Matthew 10:42, Jesus says “whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple””truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.” God affirms the good in the world outside the boundaries of religious creeds and dogmas. In this spirit, we also affirm and rejoice in this decision by the California Supreme Court precisely because we are Christians. Clearly, this momentous decision will have ecclesial implications for the Episcopal Diocese of California. I intend to be in prayerful consultation with the people of our diocese to see how we can use this decision to strengthen our support of our lesbian and gay sisters and brothers, and our witness to God’s inclusive love. The Diocese of California will issue an appropriate statement in due course.

–The Rt. Rev. Marc Handley Andrus is Bishop of California

In the cloistered world of Episcopal seminaries, time sometimes seems to stand still as clergy-in-training gather in stone chapels to pray in ways familiar to their forebears centuries earlier.

But the semblance of timelessness can be deceiving.

Some of the 11 seminaries affiliated with the Episcopal Church are slashing core programs, while others report rapid growth in enrollment. Still others are reexamining conventional wisdom about what it takes — and how much it costs — to shape a faithful priest.

The Episcopal method of training clergy “is a very expensive way to do theological education,” said Daniel Aleshire, executive director of the Pittsburgh-based Association of Theological Schools. “There is significant financial stress in the Episcopal seminary system.”

Centrist and liberal seminaries are facing especially hard times….

Read it all.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a report today on a conflict between solving crimes and protecting privacy. It’s called “familial searching.” Police can now take DNA from a crime scene and compare it to millions of DNA samples in a government database. If there is even a partial match, that could lead to the criminal by way of his or her family members if their DNA is in the database. And they could be completely innocent. Should that practice be legal? Lucky Severson reports.

Unidentified Man (working in lab): Stick it right back in there. Okay, and we’ll close it up right there. And this is the same thing, these are …

LUCKY SEVERSON: Three years ago, Pearl Wilson’s son Charles died in a Maryland prison while awaiting sentencing for rape. But for his mother, her son lives on.

PEARL WILSON: My son lives in me and I in him, and his blood is my blood, and my blood was in him.

SEVERSON: Though Charles is dead his DNA still sits in a databank. By law DNA has to be gathered from all felons. Some states even take it from arrestees. The DNA profiles remain there indefinitely.

Ms. WILSON: I’m worried about them continuously holding my son’s DNA in that database.

Read the whole piece.

There were many remarkable aspects to Pope Benedict XVI’s recent trip to America. Among those not remarked upon, however, were two that stand out:

1) the degree to which Benedict’s message matched Pope John Paul II’s message in the latter’s profound 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth), and

2) the degree to which that message continues to resonate with so many Americans struggling to find and bring truth to our post-modern culture, including non-Catholic Americans.

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Of the 36 Anglican churches in the City of London, only 12 should stay open for worship with full-time clergymen, a commission under Lord Templeman recommended in 1994. The rest might be put to other ecclesiastical use or “appropriate secular purposes”.

How close we often run to disaster. The plan might easily have been implemented, leaving only four parishes in the whole City to administer the remaining dozen churches.

Worse things had already befallen City churches. Wren churches had been demolished in Victoria’s reign to improve the traffic flow: St Benet Gracechurch in 1868, St Mary Somerset the year after, St Dionis Backchurch in 1878, St Mary Magdalene, Old Fish Street in 1887, St Olave Jewry in 1888.

As it happened, Bishop David Hope of London did not implement the Templeman report, and his successor, the present Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, proved to be in favour of preserving all the City churches for active worship.

Read it all.

As gay and lesbian couples made plans to marry, activists opposed to the California Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage said on Friday they would escalate efforts for a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexuals.

An amendment to the state constitution would override Thursday’s decision, which superseded state laws from 1977 and 2000 that defined marriage as a union between a man and woman.

Californians could vote in November on an amendment cementing that definition in the state constitution.

“It’s expected that certification for the ballot will occur in early June,” said Randy Thomasson, head of Campaign for Children and Families. “The ruling should be stayed in deference to the people who have demanded the right to decide this issue on the ballot.”

Thomasson expects a backlash against the court’s decision because it is at odds with the traditional definition of marriage, approved by voters in a 2000 statewide referendum.

“People know deep in their hearts it is only for a man and woman,” Thomasson said.

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Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ Pentecost letter to the bishops of the Anglican Communion was not the anticipated communication in which he reportedly would ask bishops to predicate their attendace at the Lambeth Conference this summer upon their willingness to accept the recommendations in the Windsor Report.

A spokesman said Archbishop Williams had modified his plan to write to bishops whose stated positions ran contrary to the colleagial gathering of equals he envisions for Lambeth. Instead, Archbishop Williams has been in telephone contact with a number of bishops, asking that they honor the integrity of the meeting, the spokesman told The Church of England Newspaper.

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Campaigners are staging a demonstration outside Rochester Cathedral today against the Bishop of Rochester’s stance on gay rights.

The protest has been planned to coincide with International Day Against Homophobia (Idaho) and will see members of the county’s gay community gather at the cathedral from noon.

Ray Duff, one of the organisers, said: “Dr Michael Nazir-Ali has regularly opposed gay rights measures; for example, adoption by gay and lesbian partnerships.

“He has himself received threats because of his conversion from Islam to Christianity. Lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender (LGBT) people fully condemn such threats unreservedly.

“Thus, we, the LGBT community in Kent and the UK, will urge the bishop to now extend his support and sympathy to the LGBT community, who have suffered for centuries because of Church homophobia.”

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Inside Mifflin Hall at Fort Lee, Va., 11 students gather in a room that could pass for a pre-med class. A model skeleton stands on wheels in one corner; a partially dissected plastic torso rests on a table in the rear. The instructor, Sgt. 1st Class Alisa Karr, begins the lesson with a review of the body’s bones.

But these soldiers are not studying anatomy to become medics. They are learning to care for the dead.

When these 11 students graduate from training at the U.S. Army’s Mortuary Affairs Center, they will earn the title 92M ”” military code for mortuary affairs specialist. Some of those who have volunteered to work with the dead will serve at collection points in Iraq and Afghanistan; others will work in the port mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. They will help recover, identify and prepare the remains of fallen soldiers.

The 92Ms have cared for the majority of the more than 4,500 military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. They operate under a code of conduct that’s part scientific and part symbolic….

I happened to catch this story this week during a run via NPR’s story of the day podcast–very worthwhile I thought; see what you make of it.

Is it neat, or is it slightly odd that in this Los Angeles community — it’s called Pasadena — a suburban mix of nice restaurants and well-tended front lawns, there is a home wedged in with the other houses where the entire front yard is edible?

It’s true. At 631 Cypress Avenue, there is not one thing that cannot be eaten. Nothing. Kale, chives, pepper, pinapple, guava, Swiss chard, even edible flowers along the side of the house, and into the back yard.

It is Jules Dervaes’ fifth of an acre. His little family farm, in the midst of American suburbia, his way of breaking free without really going anywhere.

“We eat rich, I’m telling you,” said Dervaes. “And the way we live, it just seems like something you would dream of.”

The “we” he speaks of are his kids, who grew up on the farm. Three out of four of them have stayed on into their 20’s and 30’s, and they don’t have other jobs either because what they don’t eat, they sell.

Read it all or watch the video (link here).

Pope Benedict, speaking a day after a California court ruled in favour of same-sex marriage, firmly restated on Friday the Roman Catholic Church’s position that only unions between a man and a woman are moral.

Benedict made no mention of the California decision in his speech to family groups from throughout Europe, but stressed the Church’s position several times.

“The union of love, based on matrimony between a man and a woman, which makes up the family, represents a good for all society that can not be substituted by, confused with, or compared to other types of unions,” he said.

The pope also spoke of the inalienable rights of the traditional family, “founded on matrimony between a man and a woman, to be the natural cradle of human life”.

Read it all.

In the few years since Mandela has retired from official engagements, the former Archbishop of Cape Town, Nobel Peace Laureate and outspoken flayer of duplicitous politicians, has taken his place as South Africa’s moral conscience. Everyone wants to catch his eye or exchange a few words with him or prompt his famous giggle, and Tutu himself is the first to admit likes the attention.

The waitress takes our order and we both opt for grilled Cape salmon, the great cleric having changed his mind on the oxtail. At first Tutu seems pretty much unchanged since I last interviewed him a decade ago. Then, as head of the commission, he had the emotionally and physically taxing responsibility of wading through, in a series of public hearings between 1996 and 1998, the barbarities of apartheid.

He also had to make hugely sensitive decisions on granting amnesty for crimes, and on assessing the respective weight of human rights violations committed for or against such an inhumane system, a balancing act that infuriated both the African National Congress and white rightwingers. Then, towards the end of the assignment in 1997, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and yet the dynamic force of his personality helped to carry the country and himself through those difficult days, just as it had in the worst days of apartheid.

Read the whole article.

As Marcia Macy chatted with her dog walker in the driveway of her Wheaton home Thursday, a young Muslim man passed her and hooked a plastic bag containing a Quran on her doorknob.

Unlike most religious solicitors, the man didn’t try to speak with her or engage her in debate. He simply left her a 378-page paperback English translation of the holy book of Islam.

“I’d read it just to see what it says, but I believe in Jesus, not Allah,” said Macy, a longtime Christian. “They have a right to do it . . . but I feel pretty strong in my faith.”

If Macy reads the text, she will have fulfilled the goal of the Book of Signs Foundation. The Addison-based Muslim organization says that since July it has distributed more than 70,000 free English Qurans to homes in the Chicago area and another 30,000 around Houston.

Read it all.

Note: please be cautioned that this may not be appropriate for certain blog readers.

Group readings of Dolly Doctor at high school are an Australian rite of passage. Most teenagers know exactly how to flip from the cover of the magazine straight to the sex and body advice column at the back. In schoolyards across the country, girls, and sometimes boys, can be found nervously giggling at the questions but eagerly awaiting the answers. “Is my period normal?”, “What’s a wet dream?” and “Can I get pregnant the first time?”

But now it is adults who are gasping at what they read. Dolly Doctor and its counterpart in Girlfriend magazine came under scrutiny last month at the Senate’s inquiry into the sexualisation of children in the contemporary media environment. The inquiry was set up to address parents’ growing concerns about their children’s exposure to sexual material via advertising, pop culture and the internet, and the rendering of them into sexual objects.

But in focusing on these magazine Q&A columns, the inquiry has taken a strange turn. Several senators, particularly the Tasmanian Liberal Stephen Parry, argued they were not appropriate reading material for younger teens. In particular, sexual questions were cause for alarm.

Read it all.

I will consider posting comments on this article submitted first by email to Kendall’s E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.