Beyond e-mail, there are ever more ways to connect and communicate: text messages, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, IM and, for the old fashioned, phone calls. Help! How many connections can one person manage? How do people decide what is the best way to keep in touch?

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Making ends meet on food stamps has never been easy for Cassandra Johnson, but since food prices began their steep climb earlier this year, she has had to develop new survival strategies.

She hunts for items that are on the shelf beyond their expiration dates because their prices are often reduced, a practice she once avoided.

Ms. Johnson, 44, who works in customer service for a medical firm, knows that buying food this way is not healthy, but she sees no other choice if she wants to feed herself and her 1-year-old niece Ammni Harris and 2-year-old nephew Tramier Harris, who live with her.

“I live paycheck to paycheck,” said Ms. Johnson, as she walked out of a market near her home in Hackensack, N.J., pushing both Ammni and the week’s groceries in a shopping cart. “And we’re not coping.”

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The UN atomic watchdog chief warned on Saturday that an attack on Iran over its controversial nuclear programme would turn the region into a fireball, as Tehran rejected an Israeli strike as “impossible.”
Mohamed ElBaradei also warned that he would not be able to continue in his role as International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general should the Islamic republic be attacked.

His stark comments came as Iran stressed yet again that it will not negotiate with world powers over its nuclear programme if it is required to suspend its controversial uranium enrichment.

“A military strike (against Iran) would in my opinion be worse than anything else … It would transform the Middle East region into a ball of fire,” ElBaradei said in an interview with Al-Arabiya television.

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Here’s my quick thought on the subject: I tend to agree that fear of religious belief as such (as opposed to of specific religious beliefs) is probably unjustified, for the factual reasons Hills mentions.

But I take it that many irreligious people who are bewildered by others’ religious beliefs aren’t afraid of the beliefs so much as they find them factually unfounded ”” much like they would find beliefs in astrology, ghosts, werewolves, or for that matter the Greco-Roman pantheon to be factually unfounded. For that matter, I take it that even many Christian academics would disapprove, on empiricist rather than theological grounds, of those who say they believe in Zeus, Xenu, the Zodiac, or vampires. Why should we be surprised that irreligious academics would take the same view, but as to factual claims of the existence of God as well as to the other factual claims? (Note that there were some very interesting responses to these arguments in the comments to this post of ours from late 2005.)

This is especially so as to beliefs “in the existence and beneficence of an omniscient and omnipotent God.” So perhaps what Prof. Hills is seeing is more disapproval of those who are seen as unduly willing to believe in what the disapproving person sees as fairy tales, rather than disapproval of those who are seen as morally or practically threatening.

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The Cubs rally from 4-1 down to go up 9-4 against the White Sox. They have a seriously good offense this year.

Update: the Cubs went on to win 11-7.

The starting point for inshallah is faith, but just like the increasing popularity of the head scarf and the prayer bump, its new off-the-rack status reflects the rising tide of religion around the region. Observance, if not necessarily piety, is on the rise, as Islam becomes for many the cornerstone of identity. That has put the symbols of Islam at the center of culture, and routine.

“Over the past three decades, the role of religion has been expanded in everything in our lives,”’ said Ghada Shahbendar, a political activist who studied linguistics at American University in Cairo.

Deference to the divine has become a communal reflex, a compulsive habit, like the incessant honking of Egyptian cabdrivers ”” even when there are no other cars on the street.

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“I’m not hearing anything about breaking up the Anglican Communion, or anything of the sort,” Bishop Martyn Minns told The Living Church. Bishop Minns, formerly rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Va., is the founding Missionary Bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), an outreach of the Anglican Church of Nigeria.

“We are not focusing all of our attention on human sexuality,” he added. “The workshops are designed to get us moving forward with emphasis on evangelism, church planting, the Bible, family and marriage, and also on developing a better understanding of our Anglican identity.”

Bishop Minns said a booklet titled “The Way, The Truth and the Life: Theological Resources for a Pilgrimage to a Global Anglican Future,” released by GAFCON organizers at a press conference June 19, has been mischaracterized in some reports as conference planners’ declaration of independence from the Anglican Communion. He noted that the booklet is a historical summary of the recent past, and does not contain specific recommendations for the future.

“The purpose of the conference is not to call people away from either the Lambeth Conference or the Anglican Communion,” he said. “Certain things of monumental importance have changed about Anglicanism within the past 10 years. Those things have irreversibly reshaped the landscape. We must get together and work out what to do about our future in light of the facts that have occurred.”

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We’re looked forward to this immensely. Already the gathering of the initial team has been an extraordinary, bracing occasion and one which we have enjoyed thoroughly. I am looking forward to an extraordinarily interesting and rather exciting conference I have to say and you may be interested to know that I personally, speaking for myself now, personally wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury just a couple of weeks ago to assure him of my prayers for Lambeth and for the successful outcome of the Lambeth conference and he has now written to me and assured me of his prayers for us and his prayers for a successful outcome of this conference as well. So I think that’s worth knowing when we talk a great deal about things like schism and so forth.

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More than one thousand Anglicans from 25 nations, including 300 bishops are on their way to Jerusalem to attend the Global Anglican Future Conference. The meeting, which will be held June 22 ”“ 29, includes daily addresses from key Anglican pastors, teachers and leaders.

The Most Rev. Peter Akinola, primate Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) will formally welcome pilgrims to GAFCON on June 22. There are over 22 million Anglicans in church every Sunday, making the Church of Nigeria the largest church of the Anglican Communion.

After a pilgrimage to the Mount of Olives and Gethsemane on Monday morning, the Most Rev. Henry Orombi, primate of the Anglican Church of the Province of Uganda, will deliver the keynote address, “Jesus Christ as Lord” on Monday afternoon.

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The Episcopal Diocese of San Diego took another step toward the full acceptance of gays with the ordination of its first openly gay deacon.

During a month in which thousands of same-sex couples were able to marry in California, Thomas Wilson was ordained to the transitional diaconate by San Diego Bishop James Mathes at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral. Wilson, who moved to San Diego eight years ago with his partner of 20 years, is expected to serve as a deacon for six months to a year before becoming a priest, Mathes said.

Yet the bishop downplayed the significance of Wilson’s sexual orientation.Mathes said he was not aware that a press release had been sent by the diocese with the headline: “Openly Gay, Partnered Deacon Ordained! First One in This Diocese Ever!”

“The Episcopal Diocese of San Diego calls and ordains gifted people,” Mathes said. “That’s all this is.”

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Holy books ”” sacred scripture ”” always need interpreters. This is true of the Jewish commentaries and expositions. It is true of Christian commentaries, sermons and reflections. To say that the Bible is the Church’s book is to say that it reflects the common faith of the Church. It is that common faith and tradition which are embodied in the teaching of the Church; just as the scriptures are normative for testing new teaching both doctrinal and ethical.

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The schism long forecast for the Anglican Communion over the church’s liberal stand on homosexuality may be getting closer. A document released by a group of conservative churchmen called the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFcon) made it clear that the more than 250 bishops who belong to the group intend to transform the 77-million-member global Communion, the world’s third-largest affiliation of churches, because of their differences over the church’s stance on gay priests and other issues.

Just days before the group’s conference is set to begin in Jerusalem, GAFcon’s leader, Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, declared in a 94-page theological statement: “There is no longer any hope, therefore, for a unified Communion … Now we confront a moment of decision … We want unity, but not at the cost of relegating Christ to the position of another wise teacher, who can be obeyed or disobeyed. We earnestly desire the healing of our beloved Communion, but not at the cost of rewriting the Bible to accommodate the latest cultural trend. We have arrived at a crossroads; it is, for us, the moment of truth.”

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[Archbishop Henry] Orombi wonders how the archbishop can rein in the other churches when things like [the recent “marriage” ceremony in London of two men] happen under his own nose.

“I think the truth has come out,” he says. “The mother church has been ”” is already in the same problem. Now, which way is the communion going? We are asking ourselves that, and saying, that [same-sex ceremony] is a reflection of how far from biblical teaching and understanding even the Church of England is going.”

Orombi says it’s just one more reason he is boycotting the Lambeth Conference. And it’s not just he and his bishops who are doing so; bishops of Nigeria, Kenya and Rwanda are also staying away. Together they represent some two-thirds of the practicing Anglicans in the world.

Leaders from this group of the Anglican Communion see meeting with their Western colleagues as a waste of time.

“We’ve talked and talked and talked over the past decade,” says Archbishop Greg Venables, who oversees most of South America. “We’ve made it clear what the majority of Anglicans believe and how they feel about this, and nothing has happened.”

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…the resolutions passed at our Episcopal Diocesan Convention concern appropriate clergy behavior. The Episcopal Diocese of Albany does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in allowing men or women into the ordination process. But that does not mean, for example, that a man of heterosexual orientation would be a suitable candidate for ordination if his behavior included adultery. He is to be an example to the flock.

If he or she is single, he or she is called to be celibate by the church as an example to the faithful and to the youth. The diocese does not discriminate on the basis of orientation but only on the basis of actual behavior.

This accords with both the teaching and canon law of the whole Episcopal Church, not simply the Diocese of Albany.

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“What I and others on the conserving side of the Episcopal church represent is this clear vision that the church can never be anything other than under God’s Word and can never be anything other than submitted to the Lordship of Jesus Christ,” [Bishop Robert Duncan] says.

The last straw for many came with the ordination of openly gay bishop Gene Robinson in 2003. Since then, the splinter churches have sought refuge in the worldwide Anglican church. They’re now under the authority of churches in Africa and South America. These Third World congregations are also theologically orthodox. And they’re growing. Today more than 43 million Anglicans attend church in Africa alone — that’s more than half of all Anglicans worldwide.

“Isn’t it staggering” says Duncan, “that God would lift up the church in Southeast Asia instead of the church in Britain — or the church in Uganda instead of the church in America?”

The phenomenal growth and the split are rocking the Anglican church worldwide. This summer, the church’s “Lambeth” conference, held only once every 10 years, will be boycotted by many Third World Anglicans. They’ll attend a rival event, The Global Anglican Futures Conference or GAFCON in Jerusalem. Duncan says this represents the shift between two eras.

“Some thing is about a world that once was and one thing is about a world that is emerging,” he said.

[Theologian Edith] Humphrey predicts, “I think the real business of the church is going to go on at GAFCON because there we have an opportunity to move on without impediments.”

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Divisive as it all may sound, conference organizers are quick to reject the charge that they are trying to upstage the upcoming Lambeth Conference, the official meeting of Communion bishops held in England every 10 years under the auspices of the archbishop of Canterbury, now the Most Rev. and Right Hon. Rowan Williams.

But many attending the Jerusalem meeting, including the Most Rev. Peter Akinola of Nigeria, have said that they will not attend the Lambeth gathering in mid-July. And GAFCON attendees admit they have lost patience with Anglican and Episcopal church leaders, who conservatives say have refused to take clear or decisive stands on such issues as gay marriage and openly gay clergy.

“The traditional power brokers of the Communion are being challenged,” says the Rt. Rev. Martyn Minns, missionary bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a group of about 60 American congregations that have cut ties with the U. S. Episcopal Church and are now incorporated under Archbishop Akinola’s Nigerian province. Minns charges that the Communion’s leadership in the global north continues to ignore demographic and theological reality: that the church in the global south is not only the largest part of the Communion (with more than 40 million of the 70 million Anglicans and Episcopalians) but also the most committed to orthodox Christian teaching.

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In an attempt to try to lower the rhetoric, Archbishop Williams has left a few names off the list of invitees, notably Bishop Robinson (who plans to go anyway to speak to the media) and three or four conservative bishops who had been visiting other dioceses without local permission. Also, the bishops of Uganda and Rwanda disclosed that they will boycott the sessions to protest what they see as the Anglican Church’s liberal “drift.”

Here in Rhode Island, Bishop [Geralyn] Wolf notes that she has long maintained a policy of not allowing the blessing of any same-sex relationships to take place on any Episcopal Church property. She also supports continuing the moratorium on ordaining any new homosexual bishops, arguing that the measures are important to the unity of the Anglican Communion.

Frankly, she says, she doesn’t know what will emerge from next month’s meeting. She says she is very keen on holding the Anglican Communion together.

She said she suspects that, even though no votes are to be officially taken, some sort of decision will come “through the back door.”

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U.S. Cellular Vice President and COO Jay Ellison says his ban on Friday e-mails at the Chicago-based company came after he heard complaints from employees. But it wasn’t a cakewalk.

“I got a lot of push-back from a lot of people that I was nuts they’d have to operate that way, and I pushed back on them,” Ellison said. “I respect that push-back,” he told them. “But I heard the associates; we’re going to try this.”

Ellison says the company tried it for two and a half months, and everyone loved it ”” even those who didn’t like the idea at first.

“I think people would outright just freak out if we started e-mails back up on Friday,” Ellison said. “I know the front-line leadership would scream; I’d have a mutiny on my hands.”

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GAFCON leadership team and key participants in the week long conference are on their way to Jerusalem for the final preparations for the meeting beginning Sunday. The Pre-GAFCON consultation in Jordan wound up early, and the participants move to Jerusalem today. Hotel and meeting rooms previously unavailable in Jerusalem became available at the same time GAFCON leaders learned that previously granted permission for the Jordan consultation was deemed insufficient.

GAFCON delegates have taken the alterations in their stride, the move proving no barrier to a developing sense of fellowship.

Already, there’ve been joyous scenes as GAFCON leaders greeted each other.

The Nigerian delegation was given a rousing cheer as was Archbishop and Mrs Yong Ping Chung. Archbishop Yong, of Sabah, will give a Bible study during the Gafcon week.

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Maybe he was trying to beat the heat. A Brooklyn restaurant cook is accused of stealing frozen lobster tails by stuffing them down his pants.

A group that advocates separation of church and state filed a federal lawsuit Thursday to prevent South Carolina from becoming the first state to create “I Believe” license plates.

The group contends that South Carolina’s government is endorsing Christianity by allowing the plates, which would include a cross superimposed on a stained glass window.

Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed the lawsuit on behalf of two Christian pastors, a humanist pastor and a rabbi in South Carolina, along with the Hindu American Foundation.

“I do believe these ‘I Believe’ plates will not see the light of day because the courts, I’m confident, will see through this,” said the Rev. Barry Lynn, the group’s executive director.

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he school year that just ended brought to the fore a couple of controversies over Muslim students on U.S. campuses. The University of Michigan announced in the fall that it would be spending $25,000 on footbaths for Muslim students. In the spring, Harvard’s decision to provide women-only gym hours to accommodate some members of the campus Islamic society sparked debate in the ivory tower and beyond. Yet away from the often-harsh media glare, a profound shift has begun across the country. Where dogma and conformity once defined the Muslim scene on campus, students with liberal outlooks are emerging to assert their voices on the quad. At some American colleges where the only official Muslim events used to feature gender-segregated seating, new programs are drawing diverse Muslim and non-Muslim participants to explore the complexity of the Muslim community.

Only a half-century ago, there was hardly any Muslim communal presence at American universities. In the 1960s, the Muslim World League, a Saudi charity, funded the establishment of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), initially to support foreign students studying in the U.S. and, according to the organization’s Web site, to advance Da’wah (proselytizing). The MSA established its first chapter at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and now can be found on more than 100 campuses across North America.

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It was almost inevitable that a combination of $4-a-gallon gas, public anxiety and politicians eager to win votes or repair legacies would produce political pandering on an epic scale. So it has, the latest instance being President Bush’s decision to ask Congress to end the federal ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along much of America’s continental shelf.

This is worse than a dumb idea. It is cruelly misleading. It will make only a modest difference, at best, to prices at the pump, and even then the benefits will be years away. It greatly exaggerates America’s leverage over world oil prices. It is based on dubious statistics. It diverts the public from the tough decisions that need to be made about conservation.

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Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Several American officials said the Israeli exercise appeared to be an effort to develop the military’s capacity to carry out long-range strikes and to demonstrate the seriousness with which Israel views Iran’s nuclear program.

More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters participated in the maneuvers, which were carried out over the eastern Mediterranean and over Greece during the first week of June, American officials said.

The exercise also included Israeli helicopters that could be used to rescue downed pilots. The helicopters and refueling tankers flew more than 900 miles, which is about the same distance between Israel and Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, American officials said.

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A report in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper referring to the book was headlined Hardline bishops declare Anglican split and went on to declare that they had “formally declared an end to the Anglican communion”.

That was firmly rejected by one of the GAFCON leaders, Sydney Archbishop Peter Jensen, who referred to the actions in North America by churches in defiance of the Lambeth decisions of 1998 on homosexuality.

“If we’re talking about schism and the break up of the communion, that’s where it starts and that’s where the responsibility is,” Archbishop Jensen says.

Earlier, Archbishop Jensen told the BBC from Amman that the actions meant that the Anglican communion had turned “from a nuclear family to an extended family”.

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THE Clearest indication yet that the forthcoming Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) will herald a formal split in the Anglican Communion came yesterday (Thursday) with the publication of The Way, the Truth and the Life.

The 94-page book will be given to everyone who attends GAFCON ”” organisers expect 1000, including 280 bishops ”” and has been produced by the 25-strong GAFCON theological resource team, chaired by the Archbishop of Bendel, in Nigeria, the Most Revd Nicolas Okoh. The group’s secretary is Canon Dr Chris Sugden, executive secretary of Anglican Mainstream, based in Oxford.

The book uses the language of the parting of the ways. “We see a parallel between contemporary events and events in England in the 16th century. Then, the Catholic Church in England was faced with the choice of aligning itself with either Rome or Geneva. But, when forced to decide its identity, it sought to distinguish itself from both the practices of the Papacy and the excesses it associated with the more radical reformers.

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Gafcon, the Global Anglican Future Conference, will work towards shaping an “Anglican future in which the Gospel is uncompromised and Christ-centred mission [is] a top priority,” Dr Jensen, the chairman of the conference’s programme committee, said. He denied charges the conference was a shadow Lambeth Conference, saying the delegates meeting at the Renaissance Hotel near Israel’s Knesset in West Jerusalem were not going to “ape” Lambeth. “This is a conference about he future and we’ve deliberately invited lay people, clergy and others” to ask what it means “to be Anglican,” he said. “How can we best serve God, how can we honour his word and how can we best make his message known? They’re the big themes we’ll be looking at,” Dr Jensen said.

However, Dr Jensen, along with bishops from amongst the largest provinces of the Communion: Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, will boycott the Lambeth Conference, attending Gafcon in its place. “We have made other plans to travel to Jerusalem [instead of Lambeth] to reflect on how best we can do the work of the Lord,” Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi of Kenya explained last week, citing conservative disquiet with its agenda and guest list.

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It is true that the forthcoming Lambeth Conference will also be a divided body, boycotted by an unprecedented numbers of bishops. But the semi-fiasco of Gafcon means that Dr Williams still has a chance of keeping the conservative Christians of, say, Uganda, in dialogue with the liberal provinces of the United States and Canada.

Whether the Anglican Communion can survive the inevitable discord of Lambeth is still unclear. But it is encouraging that some of the most vociferous critics of liberal Anglicanism have decided to join in debate and worship with their fellow bishops at their traditional gathering in England rather than declare allegiance to a rival body meeting in the Middle East.

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Watch the whole encouraging reporrt on some seeking to help those in the flooding’s path.

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