The recent death from untreated diabetes of an 11-year-old Wisconsin girl has invigorated opposition to obscure laws in many states that let parents rely on prayer, rather than medicine, to heal sick children.

Dale and Leilani Neumann of Weston, Wis., are facing charges of second-degree reckless homicide after their child, Madeline Kara Neumann, died on Easter after slipping into a coma. The death, likely preventable with insulin, has renewed calls for Wisconsin and dozens of other states to strike laws that protect parents who choose prayer alone in lieu of medical treatment.

The case also has frustrated the Church of Christ, Scientist, the main promoter of prayer as therapy, which says a few tragic cases have unfairly tarred a practice that can restore health. The Neumanns, a Christian couple who run a prayer group out of their coffee shop, are not Christian Scientists. The National Center for Health Statistics, a federal agency, estimated in 2004 that more than 2% of the population uses prayer rituals.

Read it all.

Executive Council members meeting in Albuquerque June 13-15 will receive an introduction to the public-narrative process that will be used as a leadership tool at General Convention next year. A portion of the council will be part of a group of about 65 people that will receive further training in the public-narrative process at the conclusion of the council meeting on June 16.

The project is being conducted in response to Resolution D043 from the 75th General Convention in 2006, which called for “a participatory, vision-focused dialogue on the mission of the church” at the 76th General Convention.

“The Episcopal Church isn’t good at stating its own identity,” Bonnie Anderson, president of the House of Deputies, told Episcopal News Service. “The people in The Episcopal Church don’t have a common language to talk about who we are in The Episcopal Church and what we are called to do because of who we are.”

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After 11 innings–rah!

I have lost count of the number of people who have commiserated with me because I am going to the Lambeth Conference. They either assume it will be an ecclesiastical punch-up or imagine the company of over six hundred bishops must be a foretaste of everlasting punishment.

An overload of episcopal fellowship will be bearable because of the cultural and theological diversity among the bishops, let alone their varied personalities. My real regret is that the diversity will be diminished compared with the last two Lambeth Conferences, because there have been so many refusals of the Archbishops invitation. While I wouldn’t relish any sort of ecclesiastical punch-up, I will be disappointed if we don’t discuss the issues which are currently so divisive. We need to do so in ways less oppressive than some of the plenary sessions last time, but it is difficult to have a debate if some of the main contenders are not represented.

Those bishops who refuse to come stand in a longer tradition than they may realize. Archbishop Longley invited 151 bishops to the first Lambeth Conference in 1867. (He even included all retired bishops: we would need an extra university campus if that was tried again.) In the event 76 bishops turned up, almost exactly half those who were invited. This time the proportion will be a good deal higher.
Bishops will stay away from this year’s Lambeth Conference for the opposite reason given by the original refuseniks. They think the Lambeth Conference has too little authority. They also believe its standing has been fatally weakened by the way in which Resolution 1.10 from the last conference has not been obeyed in some parts of the Anglican Communion. There seems to be less concern over the failure of the Communion to implement and obey many other resolutions over the years. But they ask, not unreasonably, what is the point in passing Resolutions if nothing is resolved? Doesn’t this simply reveal a vacuum of authority at the heart of Anglicanism?

It is intriguing that the Lambeth bishops have, from the beginning, produced a stream of resolutions, reports and pastoral letters. The Colenso affair (the hot topic at the first conference), evolution, birth control, the South India scheme or the ordination of women: there has always been some Communion-breaking issue which has tested episcopal unity and also spawned lengthy pronouncements. The current convulsion over sexuality doesn’t seem at first sight so very different.

But it has introduced a new, if not entirely unprecedented, factor. The Dean of Sydney, the Very Reverend Phillip Jensen, was recently reported as saying that the problem with the Lambeth Conference was the attendance of bishops who had consecrated Bishop Gene Robinson (who has not received an invitation himself). Those who consecrated him, argued Dean Jensen, were ‘false teachers who have acted in a way which makes fellowship with them impossible’. So it seems you cannot even confer, let alone worship, with those whom you believe have led the Church into error.

I am glad the same stance was not taken by the vast majority of English Anglicans when the decision was made to ordain women to the priesthood. The Act of Synod on episcopal ministry, as well as the provisions within the Measure itself, were grounded in a desire on both sides of that issue to remain in fellowship with each other despite profound differences. If things had been different, then I don’t suppose I would even be writing this article. If progress is slow on the ordination of women to the episcopate, it is the desire to remain in fellowship and with as much sacramental unity as possible which makes the task of devising legislation exacting.

Perhaps in these matters we need to renew our acquaintance with the Donatists. The parallels are inexact, though Dean Jensen’s words do carry some echoes of those fourth-century schismatics who thought they were more faithful to the Gospel than anyone else. The origins of the Donatist controversy centred on the consecration of Caecilian as Bishop of Carthage around 311. The claim, especially of bishops in Numidia, was that the consecrators included those who had betrayed the Christian faith in the Diocletian persecution and so were false teachers.

As time went on, the Donatists exploited economic unrest in North Africa, and consequent resentment of Rome as an imperial power and ecclesiastical authority, to add fervour to their cause. More locally, Numidia had no fondness for Carthage. In the current controversies within our own Anglican Communion, resentment of American hegemony and Western cultural imperialism is frequently exploited too.

St Augustine cut the branch on which the Donatists sat by stressing that the unworthiness of the minister did not effect the validity of the sacrament, a theological position so central to Anglicanism that it found its way into the Thirty-Nine Articles. But the long-lasting nature of the Donatist controversy weakened severely the North African Church. The Donatists only disappeared when almost the whole of the North African church was wiped out by Muslim conquest in the seventh century. If parallel it is, it is a grim one.

Back in the 1860s, Archbishop Longley recognized the imperfections of Anglican ecclesiology but placed considerable faith in the determination of this developing worldwide Communion to remain in fellowship. He believed that conferring with one another was a way to unity. In his day, St Augustine challenged the Donatists to public debate about that theological imperative derived from Christ himself – the unity of the Church. They were not responsive. I fear that those who have refused the Archbishop’s invitation to this Lambeth Conference will damage the unity of the church and the mission of Christ in our own time more than they seem to know.

–This article appears in the May 2008 edition of New Directions magazine

Listen to it all (about 17 3/4 minutes).

A report commissioned by the Church of England says that the UK’s Labour Government is moral, but it doesn’t have a moral compass. The report, released on Monday 9 June, also says that the Government discriminates against the Christian Churches in favour of other faiths, and is guilty of deep religious illiteracy.

Roger spoke to one of the report’s authors, Francis Davis from the Von Hugel Institute at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. He was also joined by the Bishop who commissioned the report, Stephen Lowe, and by the Communities and Local Government Secretary Hazel Blears.

Listen to it all from the BBC.

Now that we live in the years after “9-11”, religion is the stuff not only of pews but increasingly of public conversation: Is there a clash of civilisations? Are they all fundamentalists? Or, as we have discovered in the case of the UK government, “why would we bother even attempting to find anything out about the largest faith communities in our land?” After a year’s research involving upwards of 300 interviews with parliamentarians, civil servants, voluntary sector leaders, bishops and community activists we have established that the government’s “faith-based agenda” is incoherent. This is not a judgement on the government as a whole, but when it comes to very particular parts of social policy, the state is planning blind ”“ moral, but with no compass.

Such a discovery should only matter if the Church of England, the focus of our study, were judged to have anything to offer the country. In many of our interviews with local and national civil servants this seemed to be a possibility that only met with derision. “Churches,” said one county council equalities officer, “are bad for the country”. “Churches are dying” said a senior civil servant. Meanwhile, the view in parts of Whitehall seemed to be that even where religions were strong they were only grassroots-based, were likely to compete aggressively for funds and so were consequently at risk of reducing social cohesion in society.

The social reality we unearthed, though, challenges these stereotypes and makes it clear that the Church of England is this country’s largest voluntary organisation ”“ even before it gets round to any of its other unique contributions.

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Episcopal Bishop Charles Bennison, of Pennsylvania, took the witness stand yesterday in his ecclesiastical trial and asserted he did not initially know that his brother, a priest, had sex with a minor.

Bp. Bennison’s trial will determine whether he can remain as the presiding clergyman in the five-county region. It concerns whether he violated the canons of the church by failing to report alleged knowledge of his brother John’s adulterous affair with an underage female parishioner at St. Mark’s Church in Upland, Calif., in the early 1970s.

Charles was rector of St. Mark’s at the time, and he hired his younger brother, a seminary student, to train Sunday school teachers and head the parish youth group. In 1971, the 24-year-old seminarian began his sexual advances toward Martha Alexis, a 14-year-old high school student, and intercourse eventually became frequent. She succeeded in ending the relationship after strenuous effort in 1974, before leaving Upland for college in Los Angeles.

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Dr. Peter Whitehouse gives his elderly patients with memory loss an unexpected prescription: Stay socially active. Some of his favorite advice is to perform volunteer work, and he has even created a school where they can do just that.

Whitehouse and his wife, Cathy, founded an inner-city charter school in Cleveland called The Intergenerational School eight years ago. It’s common to see the school’s young students working with older volunteers, including many who have Alzheimer’s disease.

Research has already shown that volunteering conveys benefits for older people who do not have dementia. One study of older individuals who did regular volunteer work in schools through a program called Experience Corps suggested that the volunteers increased their physical strength and were less likely to use a cane or fall down. The study also found that volunteering increased social activity, which may ward off depression and isolation. Volunteers also reported increases in cognitive activity, saying they read more books and watched less television.

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I’ve seen the effects of such lifelong training in the face of our family member who suffers from Alzheimer’s. As she daily loses ground her soul appears, almost visibly, like a thing with feathers half-perched on her frail, diminutive body. “It will be a wedding,” she said, when we told her she would soon be coming to live near us. Smiling knowingly at our 12-year-old, she told him why he could expect to turn 13 at the end of May: “It’s only because people like you. That’s why good things like this happen.” Odd as these statements are, I’ve never heard a more convincing reason for the hope that lies within: the reason for hope is love. Habitual exercise of a loving disposition has left her with one clear thought to express, and that thought is love.

A wise nun recently told me of a prioress who urged her novices to start practicing in their 20s to be nice old ladies. It’s the only way to be sure of being a nice old lady when the time comes.

Pace Tolkien, Christian hope is not always eucatastrophic. A milder, more quotidian kind of hopefulness is schooled by every small chance we take to find in others and be for others an “other Christ.”

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Pilgrims to the mount of olives late this month may be startled to see a couple of hundred Anglican divines kitted out in purple toiling up the slope. Most of the faces will be black. Back home these men are princes of the church; their followers run into tens of millions. But somewhere among the bishops, dressed incongruously in civvies, will be the humble, smiling face of Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney.

What’s afoot in Jerusalem is the destruction of the Anglican Communion, the worldwide church loosely aligned to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It spread with the empire and has so far survived, despite all its contradictions, for about 450 years, guided by the tart good sense of its founding monarch, Elizabeth I: “There is only one Jesus Christ and all the rest is a dispute over trifles.”

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Don’t expect relief from stratospheric gasoline prices any time soon, the Energy Department said Wednesday.

Gas prices will likely hover around $4 a gallon through next year, as oil prices continue above $100 a barrel before moderating in 2010, Guy Caruso, administrator of the Energy Information Administration (EIA), told a House hearing.

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Barack Obama discussed Darfur, the Iraq war, gay rights, abortion and other issues Tuesday with Christian leaders, including a conservative who has been criticized for praising the Democratic presidential candidate.

Bishop T.D. Jakes, a prominent black clergyman who heads a Dallas megachurch, said Obama took questions, listened to participants and discussed his “personal journey of faith.”

The discussion “went absolutely everywhere,” Jakes told The Associated Press, and “just about every Christian stripe was represented in that room.”

Jakes, who does not endorse candidates and said he also hopes to meet with Republican presidential candidate John McCain, said some participants clearly have political differences with Obama. His support for abortion rights and gay rights, among other issues, draws opposition from religious conservatives. Some conservatives have criticized Jakes for praising Obama.

Read the whole article.

(In case you missed it, the blog discussion of the original article is here–KSH).

Here is one:

To the Editor:

It isn’t often that I agree with David Brooks, but “The Great Seduction” (column, June 10) was at least the beginning of a conversation in which America desperately needs to engage.

His litany of responsibility for our culture’s chronic indebtedness, however, barely hints at the extent to which the commodification of everything inhabits our lives in this free-market paradise.

Our entire economy is founded on mindless and infinite consumption ”” the more mindless the better. It’s the American credo: I consume, therefore I am. Why else do TV and radio (and, increasingly, the Internet) exist except to sell us more of anything and everything?

What does Mr. Brooks think will happen to this economy if Americans suddenly decide to embrace Ben Franklin’s virtues of hard work, temperance and particularly frugality, and stop roaming the malls? One thing for sure, with the way the free-market purists have turned everything from political representation to health care to spiritual redemption into mere vendibles, they won’t be pleased with him for pushing this particular line of inquiry.

Mr. Brooks could be expelled from Club Neocapitalism if he doesn’t watch out, and it will cost him a pretty penny to buy his way back in.

Stephen Lehman

Read them all.

A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States did not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Under Canadian law, there is a serious argument that the article contained hate speech and that its publisher, Maclean’s magazine, the nation’s leading newsweekly, should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self respect.”

In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minority groups and religions – even false, provocative or hateful things – without legal consequence.

The Maclean’s article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called “America Alone.” The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions in Vancouver last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up animosity toward Muslims.

As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.

“It’s hate speech!” yelled one man.

“It’s free speech!” yelled another.

Read it all.

The celebrated writer-physician Sherwin B. Nuland ”” a clinical professor of surgery at Yale, the author of nine previous books, the winner of the National Book Award ”” is a believer in miracles. Not the parting-of-the-Red-Sea kind of miracles that suspend physical laws, but phenomena and events that can’t be explained by current scientific knowledge, and perhaps never will be.

In “The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a Life in Medicine,” a delightful, companionable collection of occasional articles almost all of which appeared in The American Scholar magazine, Dr. Nuland feels free to follow his interests where they lead him ”” into medical history, etymology, even art criticism. He writes about the joy of exercising, the grief of 9/11, the satisfaction of authorship, the pain of losing a cherished friend. But the most engaging and thought-provoking articles deal with subjects that are mysterious, unsettling.

These pieces can be enjoyed for the simple sci-fi pleasure of encountering the inexplicable. Dr. Nuland, however, has a larger purpose in mind: to undermine smug certainties about modern science. By emphasizing the extraordinary he seeks to challenge his profession’s often unreflective reliance on technology and restore the doctor-patient relationship, the touchy-feely human connection, to the center of medical practice.

Doctors, he insists, have to be more than technicians. They should be, first of all, humanists, intuitionists, appreciative of each patient’s individuality and particular situation, practitioners of a quirky, unpredictable, uncertain art. True healers understand this. “To become comfortable with uncertainty,” Dr. Nuland writes, “is one of the primary goals in the training of a physician.”

Do ponder that last quote. This looks like a possible candidate for the summer reading list–if anyone has read it I would love to hear from you. In the meantime, read it all.

The “senior” Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church now automatically succeeds to the office of Presiding Bishop upon the death of the former tenant of the office. But in 1925 the office will become elective””so that its duties shall not always fall to an old man.

Read the whole article.

This year’s rapid run-up in crude oil prices might have prompted silly legislation at any time — but the fact that it has happened in an election year has fostered a sort of wrongheadedness renaissance. Lawmakers from both parties are scrambling to dust off failed strategies from years past and tout them as new and improved ways of halting oil’s meteoric rise. None of them will work, of course, nor are they intended to; they serve only to mislead the public into thinking that Washington is looking out for consumers.

Exhibit A in the case against congressional Democrats as wise stewards of the energy economy is which failed to advance Tuesday after it got too few votes to head off a filibuster. It would have imposed a windfall-profits tax on oil companies and allowed the U.S. attorney general to sue OPEC on antitrust grounds, among other things.

Trying to find an economist who thinks a windfall-profits tax is a good idea is like searching for a climatologist who thinks global warming is caused by trees.

Read it all.

The government of Canada formally apologized on Wednesday to Native Canadians for forcing about 150,000 native children into government-financed residential schools where many suffered physical and sexual abuse.

The system of schools, which began shutting down in the 1970s, after decades of operations, was dedicated to eradicating the languages, traditions and cultural practices of Native Canadians and has been linked to the widespread incidence of alcoholism, suicide and family violence in many native communities.

“The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history,” Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, said in a speech in the House of Commons, where a small group of former students and native leaders sat in front of him. “Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm and has no place in our country.”

An apology from the prime minister had been sought by native groups for years and was part of a broad, court-sanctioned settlement with the government and the church organizations that operated the schools. The federal government also agreed to pay 1.9 billion Canadian dollars (about $1.85 billion) to surviving students and to establish a truth and reconciliation commission to document the experiences of children who attended the schools.

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In July 2003, I was preparing to enter seminary to study for the Episcopal priesthood. That same summer, the Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire elected a man in an openly gay relationship, Gene Robinson, as bishop. I knew the sparks were going to fly at General Convention a few months later, since the convention had to approve the election. As a “closet conservative,” I was bothered by this, quietly mind you, for fear of getting kicked out of the postulancy process. I was baffled by the lack of concern about Robinson’s consecration at my local seminary, and in the wider Episcopal church. I eventually came to the conclusion that the Episcopal church really was Protestant, and willing to “go it alone” for the sake of its own view of “social justice” (heck, the word “Protestant” was in the official name of the Episcopal church up until a few years ago”¦that should have been a clue). So I decided to attend local American Anglican Council gatherings, banding together with a few other traditional-minded Episcopalians in the Southern Ohio area. I made quite a few friends during this time. However, in 2004, after concluding that the “Network” of conservative Anglicans was more talk than action, more process than result, I finally became open to the Catholic Church, and became Catholic in August of 2004. Almost five years later, it is interesting to see where everybody in our original group of orthodox Southern Ohio Episcopalians has ended up…

Read it all–another from the long list of should-have-already-been-posted material–KSH.

I am pleased to announce that Bishop Carol Gallagher has accepted my invitation to assist in providing episcopal pastoral care in the Diocese of North Dakota. She has agreed to reach out especially to congregations and clergy who feel alienated and hurt by me due to different understandings of human sexuality. I am most grateful for Bishop Gallagher’s assistance. She can be contacted at revcjg@aol.com or 201.438.1209. View her blog at www.mamabishop.blogspot.com.

We find ourselves in the midst of a discernment process, seeking the mind of Christ, about whether the Holy Spirit is leading us to new understandings of human sexuality or not. As this discernment continues through the canonical processes of The Episcopal Church and the conciliar processes of the Anglican Communion, I urge patience, kindness and respect in our dealings with one another. I also pray our energies will be focused on engaging the mission of the church as we are sent into the world to serve the poor and to share our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

.

The synod of the diocese of the Arctic, meeting in Iqaluit, Nunavut from May 27 to June 3, passed a motion criticizing decisions by four dioceses of the Anglican Church of Canada that support blessing same-sex unions.

“Synod expressed great disappointment as some diocesan synods have decided to move forward with approving the blessing of same-sex civil marriages, after General Synod 2007 (made) it clear that this would not be allowed until the Lambeth Conference had time to discuss the issues this summer,” said a press release issued by the diocese of the Arctic synod. “This then indicates that Canadians are not serious about unity elements that hold the church together.”

It also passed a motion expressing “strong support ”¦ for those in the Southern cone dioceses, recognizing them as members of the Anglican Communion.”

Read it all.

The difficulties today start””as they began last year””with housing and housing-related credit. Last Thursday, the Mortgage Bankers Association quarterly report showed that the percentage of mortgage borrowers behind on their payments””6.35 percent””was the highest since the MBA began tracking the number in 1979. It’s not just subprime. In the first quarter of 2008, 36 percent of all foreclosures initiated were on prime adjustable-rate mortgages in California. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, says the decline in home prices has slashed $2.5 trillion from household wealth, or about $25,000 per homeowner. The fall has also removed an important source of support for consumer spending, as Americans who grew accustomed to borrowing against rising home equity to finance car purchases or vacations now find themselves bereft. Banks are extricating themselves from the home-equity-line-of-credit business in the same way college students get themselves out of relationships gone bad: abruptly. Judi Froning, a second-grade teacher in San Diego, was surprised last week when she received a letter from Chase informing her that it was terminating her untapped HELOC. “In the light of declining home values, they said they are stopping, effective May 31, any draw on my line of credit,” she says.

Despite repeated claims that the damage has been contained, the banks that recklessly financed the housing boom””and then traded mortgage debt even more recklessly””are still cleaning up the mess. But it turns out (surprise!) the same sort of clouded judgment led banks to excesses in commercial lending, and in loans to private-equity firms. The battered financial system, which has raised tens of billions of dollars on onerous terms from new investors to shore up balance sheets, is still likely to suffer more pain from the popped credit bubble, said Bruce Wasserstein, the CEO of the investment bank Lazard, speaking at a New York breakfast. “The harm will radiate for another year.” The latest victim: Wachovia CEO G. Thompson Kennedy, cashiered after the North Carolina-based bank suffered a string of losses. Next up: write-offs for bad credit-card and commercial realestate debt. After a serene period between 2004 and ’07 in which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. went without a single bank failure, four have gone under so far this year. FDIC chairperson Sheila Bair warned of the “possibility that future failures could include institutions of greater size than we have seen in the recent past.” In preparation, the agency has brought staffers out of retirement.

Read it all.

Rowan Williams’ paper read by Fr. Goodall was extremely clear and lucid. It began with greetings to the society and a commendation of the theme of the conference, the meaning of primacy. “The subject matter could hardly be more timely.” The ABC repeatedly made the point that every church is a daughter church except the church in Jerusalem. Each church receives the Gospel from elsewhere and this dependence on that which is received is vital because it reminds each local church that it is not self-sufficient.

There followed a recommendation of the communion ecclesiology of John Zizioulas and others which emphasizes the church as local Eucharistic fellowship gathered around a bishop and which critiques institutional and bureaucratic understandings of church authority. “The church is not an organization controlled from a single point.” However, the ABC went on to say in his paper that “the pendulum has swung too far.” Communio ecclesiology is sometimes taken in a way that encourages an understanding of the church which misses the necessary interdependence of local churches and their existence in an economy of giving and receiving the Gospel. “One bishop is no bishop.” I didn’t get the exact words in my notes but the ABC said in effect that one local church is not the church, again stressing the interdependence of churches.

The paper continued with a reflection on the role of the bishop and of primacy. “The bishop sustains and nourishes his churches’ dependence on the larger church especially as the celebrant of the catholic oblation.” “Identification of primacy apart from the fellowship of all the bishops is questionable.” Primacy should be exercised in terms of sharing the gift of the Gospel and the Spirit. The exercise of the primatial office in the promulgation of a Gospel that cannot be shared outside of the context of one local church and culture is a contradiction of the office of episcopacy and primacy and this is a problem on both the left and the right in Anglicanism.

Read it all.

Nearly one in five evangelicals and Catholics are undecided about which presidential candidate to support, according to a survey released Monday.

In addition, fewer Protestants and Catholics identify themselves as Republicans than did four years ago, according to Calvin College’s Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics in Grand Rapids, Mich., which commissioned the survey.

Protestants, as well as Latino Catholics and religiously unaffiliated Americans, could be the crucial “swing vote in the electorate,” said Kevin den Dulk, a political scientist at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich.

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It isn’t even summer yet, and people in New England are already fretting about how they’ll pay to heat their homes next winter. The region relies heavily on home heating oil, and prices are well above $4 a gallon. Some families barely made it through last winter’s expensive heating season.

Listen to it all.

The surgery in the private clinic off the Champs-Élysées involved one semicircular cut, 10 self-dissolving stitches and a discounted fee of $2,900.

But for the patient, a 23-year-old French student of Moroccan descent from Montpellier, the 30-minute procedure represented the key to a new life: the illusion of virginity.

Like an increasing number of other Muslim women in Europe, she had a “hymenoplasty,” a restoration of her hymen, the thin vaginal membrane that normally breaks during the first act of intercourse.

“In my culture, not to be a virgin is to be dirt,” said the student, perched on a hospital bed as she awaited surgery Thursday. “Right now, virginity is more important to me than life.”

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Watch it all.

The church trial of Episcopal Bishop Charles E. Bennison, accused with concealing his brother’s abuse of a minor, resumed today in Philadelphia with further testimony by the adult victim.

Bishop Bennison, 64, is charged with failing to protect the victim when she was a teenager in his Upland, Calif., parish in the 1970s.

John Bennison, 59, was the parish’s youth minister. Charles Bennison was the rector of the parish.

Martha Alexis, 50, said that Charles Bennison took no steps to protect her from his brother after twice walking in on them while they were having sex on church property.

The church trial, called a Court for the Trial for a Bishop, is being held at the Philadelphia Marriott hotel in Center City.

Bennison has served as the bishop of the five-county Diocese of Pennsylvania for 10 years. He was suspended in October after a special church committee concluded that he had inappropriately protected his brother to further his career.

Read it all.

I, along with many others (”bewitched” or not according to Rodgers) recognize our sad failure as a Communion to make decisions about Scripture well, in the sense of carefully, communally, persuasively, and consensually. These decisions have not happened. TEC didn’t make any, the AMiA didn’t contribute to any, the Global South has not yet accomplished any in a widely persuasive manner. But why should this surprise us and why hold it against Williams in a particular way? Such careful, communal, persuasive, and consensual decisions regarding the meaning of Scripture’s direction of the Christian Church’s life is a rare gift, ever since the Jerusalem Council. Orientals and Catholics failed over centuries; Catholics and Greeks have failed; Lutherans and Roman Catholics on justification failed for years (and recent breakthroughs have not exactly changed the playing field); Anglicans and Presbyterians and Methodists have failed, and all to the rending of the Church’s integrity and subversion of her witness. And yet all these failed efforts engaged the minds, hearts, and labors of saints and theologians far greater than, I dare say, those active in most of our Anglican churches today. Still, for all this, Rodgers’ response to this is “separate!”, as if this will bring health, to anyone involved. It should be instead, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of David, have mercy on us!”

But the Scripture is clear about all the contentious topic of sexuality, Rodgers would surely say. And I agree with him there; the problem is that not all in the church are persuaded by his or my assertions and arguments. Yes, but the church has already made its decision about this, e.g. at Lambeth. Again, I agree; but she has not made a clear decision about how to deal with those who have rejected Lambeth’s teaching. Yes, but in the meantime (even before!) we must separate from those who are either not persuaded, or have not decided, or who have rejected decision, or who do not yet know how to respond to the rejecters”¦ And why is that? Because the Scriptures are clear on the matter.

In part, this regressive dynamic seems driven by the fundamental belief Rodgers has that the Scriptures need no considered reflection and consensual interpretation in order to govern the Church effectively. For it would appear that the logic of Rodgers’ reasoning leads inexorably, not just to a “church of the like-minded” ”“ that would be fine, if there were such a thing (I am not afraid of agreeing with people; indeed I long for it!) ”“ but to the reduction of “church” to the passing moments of individual certainties where in fact like-mindedness has little chance of solidly emerging. Invitation-only conferences like GAFCON can serve a useful purpose; but not a decision-making one. For there are only some Christians among the Anglican family who are currently persuaded by the claim that the “Scriptures tell us we must separate from Canterbury and split the Communion”. If this were not the case, there would be no “urgent call” and pages of accusation. By definition, Rodgers and his colleagues have not persuaded; and by definition, those they will persuade (and they will, no doubt) will not themselves “be” the Anglican church in any integral way.

Read it all (and please note the original title as for reasons of space I was not able to include it all).