Gene Robinson, the first openly-gay Bishop in the Anglican Communion, has slammed the Anglican Diocese of Sydney.

Speaking about the diocese with Sydney’s weekly gay magazine “SX News”, he said: “It is ironic that the Sydney Diocese, taking in one of the great gay cities of the world, is also among the most bigoted.”

Robinson claimed that the Anglican Church had “abused” gay people and said, “God and the church aren’t the same thing. The church has gotten this and many other things wrong. God hasn’t gotten it wrong.”

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

In a new report out Thursday, the U.S. Census Bureau projects the nation will become much more diverse by midcentury, with minorities forecast to become the majority population by 2042, experts said.

The growing national diversity is also a trend seen locally, particularly among Hispanics, experts said.

“It’s already happening on Long Island,” said Lee Koppelman, director of Stony Brook University’s Center for Regional Policy Studies, citing the influx of Hispanics. Recently released census data estimate that Hispanic residents constitute 12.4 percent of Nassau County’s population in 2007, up from 10 percent in 2000; and 13.3 percent of Suffolk County’s in 2007, up from 10.5 percent in 2000.

“Hispanics are primarily drawn here by economic opportunity,” Koppelman continued. “If the economy remains robust on Long Island, this population will continue to expand.”

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Courage…is the indispensable requisite of any true ministry…. If you are afraid of men and a slave to their opinion, go and do something else. Go make shoes to fit them. Go even and paint pictures you know are bad but will suit their bad taste. But do not keep on all of your life preaching sermons which shall not say what God sent you to declare, but what they hire you to say. Be courageous. Be independent.

–Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching, the 1877 Yale Lectures (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1969), p. 59, and also quoted by yours truly in this past Sunday’s sermon

GEORGE KENNAN, the dean of American diplomats, called “The Gulag Archipelago”, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of Stalin’s terror, “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times”. By bearing witness, Solzhenitsyn certainly did as much as any artist could to bring down the Soviet system, a monstrosity that crushed millions of lives. His courage earned him imprisonment and exile. But his death on August 3rd…prompts a question. Who today speaks truth to power””not only in authoritarian or semi-free countries such as Russia and China but in the West as well?

The answer in the case of Russia itself is depressing. Russia’s contemporary intelligentsia””the should-be followers of the example of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the other dissident intellectuals of the Soviet period””is not just supine but in some ways craven (see article). Instead of defending the freedoms perilously acquired after the end of communism, many of Russia’s intellectuals have connived in Vladimir Putin’s project to neuter democracy and put a puppet-show in its place. Some may genuinely admire Mr Putin’s resurrection of a “strong” Russia (as, alas, did the elderly Solzhenitsyn himself)….

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The vast majority of chief executives are gloomier about U.S. economic prospects than a year earlier, and top company officials have become more downbeat than the public at large, according to a survey released on Wednesday.

Some 90 percent of chief executives described U.S. economic conditions as fair or poor, up from 16 percent a year earlier, according to NYSE Euronext’s (NYX.N)(NYX.PA) fourth annual CEO survey, “Managing During Economic Turbulence.”

The survey was conducted in March, when housing and credit conditions were better than they are now. Just 83 percent of U.S. adults polled at that time felt the economy wasn’t in good shape.

The survey included 184 CEOs from the United States and 70 from other countries. Sixty percent of respondents run companies with market values of $1 billion or more.

Americans in general soured on the economy sooner than many corporate chiefs. Last year, 63 percent of adults thought conditions were fair or poor, compared with 16 percent of CEOs.

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“We’re going to do an assessment of what happened at Lambeth and [the Global Anglican Fellowship Conference] to see what might be possible,” Bishop [Peter] Beckwith said when reached by a reporter for The Living Church. “This is not a decision-making meeting, although I would not oppose a decision if a consensus is reached.”

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The upshot of Lambeth is that the Americans are going to continue ordaining homosexuals and celebrating same-sex blessings and the conservative foreign Anglican prelates will continue trespassing into American Episcopal dioceses on behalf of beleagured conservatives. Nothing really changed.

And I didn’t think I could persuade my bosses here to dump tons of money into sending me overseas for three weeks just to find that out.

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ANY HOPE of the Catholic Church recognising Anglican religious orders have been dashed by the consecration of women bishops, the head of the Vatican’s office for relations with other Christians told Anglican bishops attending the 10-yearly Lambeth Conference.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said he wanted to be “clear about the new situation in our ecumenical relations”, and said: “The ordination of women to the episcopate effectively and definitively blocks a possible recognition of Anglican orders by the Catholic Church.” The Anglican bishops were unsurprised by the cardinal’s words and acknowledged in their final document that other Churches were “bewildered by apparent Anglican inconsistency”. Disappointed by the fruits of formal dialogue with Rome, the bishops suggested in their document of reflections from the conference that “the future of ecumenism should be from the bottom up, not the top down. However, whatever we do at local level must accord with dialogue at the top.”

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(ACNS) The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams has praised the generosity of contributors to the ”˜Back-a-Book’ scheme, which encourages members of the public to sponsor the repair of books in Lambeth Palace Library, the principal library and record office for the history of the Church of England.

The Archbishop said: “Lambeth Palace Library has an unrivalled collection of books relating to the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. The Library greatly appreciates the generosity people are showing by participating in ”˜Back-a-Book’ to ensure that these books can be preserved for future generations”.

In 1996, 30,000 books from the recently closed Sion College Theological Library were moved to Lambeth Palace Library, almost 90% of which required essential repair from bomb and flood damage.

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Jane Little talks to the BBC Robert Piggott about the deficit left as a result of Lambeth 2008 (starts about one minute in and goes a little over three minutes).

Catholics who keep up with Anglicanism may have observed that the whole thing seems to be visibly coming apart.

On the one hand, at June’s rally of the world’s conservative Anglicans in Jerusalem — the Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON) — over a thousand conservative leaders declared their willingness to work outside the official structure and indeed to intervene in the errant Western Anglican churches in defense of their marginalized and oppressed conservatives.

On the other, over 200 conservative bishops, mostly from Africa, simply refused to attend late July’s Lambeth Conference, the decennial meeting of the world’s Anglican bishops, because the bishops of the Episcopal Church — who, by ordaining an openly fornicating homosexual bishop, had thumbed their noses at the rest of the world’s Anglicans, and the Christian moral tradition to boot — were seated with full voice and vote.

Of particular interest will be the fate of the small Anglo-Catholic party, the wing closest to Catholicism in doctrine and devotion, now found almost entirely in England and the English-speaking former colonies. It was once, in the 1920s and early 1930s, the most creative and effective party in Anglicanism, but has kept declining since.

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It was only last February that Brandy Brady met Ricky Huggins at a Mardi Gras ball here. By April, they had decided to marry.

Ms. Brady says she loves Mr. Huggins, but she worries they are moving too fast. She questions how well they really know each other, and wants to better understand his mood swings.

But Ms. Brady, 38, also finds much to admire in Mr. Huggins, who is three years older. He strikes her as trustworthy and caring. He has a stable job as a plumber and a two-bedroom house. And perhaps above all, said Ms. Brady, who received a kidney transplant last year, “He’s got great insurance.”

More than romance, the couple readily acknowledge, it is Mr. Huggins’s Blue Cross/Blue Shield HMO policy that is driving their rush to the altar.

In a country where insurance is out of reach for many, it is not uncommon for couples to marry, or even to divorce, at least partly so one spouse can obtain or maintain health coverage.

There is no way to know how often it happens, but lawyers and patient advocacy groups say they see cases regularly.

In a poll conducted this spring by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy research group, 7 percent of adults said someone in their household had married in the past year to gain access to insurance. The foundation cautions that the number should not be taken literally, but rather as an intriguing indicator that some Americans “are making major life decisions on the basis of health care concerns.”

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National Guard and Reserve combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to develop drinking problems than active-duty U.S. soldiers, a new military study suggests.

The authors speculate that inadequate preparation for the stress of combat and reduced access to support services at home may be to blame.

The study, appearing in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to compare Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ alcohol problems before and after deployment.

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Some 82 per cent of the population are members of the Georgian Orthodox Church, with the next largest tranche of faith being the 10 per cent who count themselves Muslim.

Such a devout populace might have expected a unified condemnation of an attack on such a solid and venerable household of faith.

Pope Benedict XVI managed, from his holiday in the Italian Alps, to call for an “immediate” end to hostilities in South Ossetia and urged negotiations between Russia and Georgia over the contested province.

But it sounded like a rebuke to two squabbling children, not a plea for an end to a bloodbath, and carefully made no reference to the wider incursion into Georgia.

Elsewhere, there has been a resounding chorus of silence in the cloisters. Nothing from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the latter vociferous in his condemnation of Robert Mugabe’s aggressions in Zimbabwe.

Nothing from the Anglican Communion, so keen of late to re-engage on the international stage with its march through London in solidarity with the world’s poor.

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Read it all and note that Get Religion has chimed in on this story also.

Watch it all (approximately 9 minutes).

Earlier we noted a blog entry from the Bishop of Lichfield about Lambeth 2008 in which he said:

We are told that in the lawsuits in America between parishes and their dioceses it is the dioceses who are the defendants and the conservative parishes who are the accusers.

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This led one of our blog readers to write the bishop to correct this misinformation. As A. S. Haley has shown comprehensively, the facts are entirely the opposite of this assertion cited by the Bishop of Lichfield.

We now know from conversations with bishops at Lambeth that this was not something isolated to the Bishop of Lichfield, but that other bishops at Lambeth were given this misinformation as well. This raises disturbing questions, namely, who were the TEC bishops giving out this misinformation? And perhaps more important: can we look for reappraising blogs and leaders who claim to care about justice to denounce the injustice of spreading untruths like this at a once a decade bishops meeting? Who were the bishops providing this misinformation and why were they doing so? Can we look for them to come clean and apologize?

And perhaps most importantly, can we look for a denunciation from the national leadership of this unchristian practice at a Christian meeting? TEC often prides itself on its “prophetic” witness, but a close reading of the prophets shows that almost nothing concerns them more than dishonesty and lack of truth–KSH.

Amy Laura Hall’s Conceiving Parenthood (4 stars) might well be seen as science fiction in reverse.

Her journey into the cultural history of reproductive biotechnology reads like an eerie voyage into the future. Yet rather than pushing readers to the outer limits of human progress, Hall urges us to find joy in the inner limits of creatureliness.

Hall’s wide-ranging work looks at Protestant families and the germ-free home; childhood progress and the production of infant food; the eugenics movement and associating heritage with salvation; and finally, the relationship between the orderly domestic family and atomic progress. She examines these themes as they appear in such popular magazines as Parents, Ladies’ Home Journal, National Geographic, and the Methodist journal Together, and thus reminds readers that today’s biotechnological developments grow out of distorted ideals of childhood, family, gender, race, and normalcy.

Read it all.

“Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even when everyone is for it.”

–William Penn (1644-1718), also quoted by yours truly in this past Sunday’s sermon

Mohler: Where do you see this leaving the Episcopal Church, U.S.?

Conger: I see it in the law courts over the next 10 years, frankly, as Evangelical parishes or Anglo-Catholic parishes who are the traditionally-minded members of the Episcopal Church either pull out and join new denominations, or take shelter and refuge under the leadership of bishops from overseas churches.

This is going to spark litigations over property, and who gets to call themselves an Episcopalian, who’s an Anglican. It’s a mess, and there is no short-term solution that I see to fix this problem save for one side giving up and going away.

Mohler: Now you are affiliated with and a priest of the Diocese of Central Florida, that’s known as more of the conservative of the regions of the Episcopal Church. I would compare that to San Francisco, or Washington, or Los Angeles. In what sense are you really part of one church at this point?

Conger: We’re not part of one church in the sense that I could not function”¦ A priest from, say, San Francisco who was a gay man or had been divorced and remarried, for example, could not come to where I am near Orlando and function as an Episcopal Priest. I could not get a job or license because of my theological views in many parts of the Episcopal Church. There is no interchangeability of clergy. It’s become Balkanized along doctrinal and theological views.

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Among women caring for their parents, none face the rock-and-a-hard-place choices of those in the so-called sandwich generation. Now, a new analysis estimates that there are 20 million Americans ”” the vast majority of them mothers ”” who are juggling responsibilities for their own children and their aging parents at the same time.

The analysis, commissioned by two companies, Christian Companion Senior Care and Presto Services Inc., both selling services to this group, found that 53 percent of those in the sandwich generation feel forced to choose ”” at least once a week ”” between being there for their children or being there for their ailing parents. One in five say they make that painful choice every single day.

So what’s a double-duty caregiver to do? We asked that question of Jeannie Keenan, a registered nurse and vice president at My Health Care Manager in Indianapolis. The company is one of a growing number of for-profit companies that provide case managers to families caught in this thicket. It does not employ home care aides or other care providers but, rather, hooks clients up to available services through a national network of affiliates.

Ms. Keenan said that the biggest mistake adult children make in this situation is trying to segregate their dual responsibilities.

Read it all.

Very interesting material–click on any number in the list (on the right) and you can read about it.

What emerged through the listening and reflective process could not have been predicted at the outset of the Conference. In spite of the absence of approximately 200 Gafcon Bishops the centre of gravity of the conference settled in a ”˜traditionalist’ position with regard to interpretation of Scripture and a desire to find a covenantal expression of Anglicanism. This was also the quiet and consistent lead given by the Archbishop.

What this means is:

1. The communion retains Lambeth 1:10 in its entirety with a call to do more effective listening to the different positions with regard to human sexuality.
2. We shall press ahead with improving the St Andrew’s Draft of the Anglican Covenant.
3. ”˜There is widespread support’ for the three moratoria of the Windsor Process.
4. ”˜There is a clear majority support for a pastoral forum along the lines advocated by the Windsor continuation group and a desire to see it in place speedily’

Read it all.

Bishop [Sue] Moxley liked blogging so much she’s considering keeping one up full-time. “It was a good experience,” she said. “It meant that I had that time to reflect on what went on in that day.” During the busy conference schedule this meant blogging late at night, after others had gone to bed and before morning prayer at 6:30 a.m.

But what to blog about? Most bishops were writing to keep in touch with their dioceses and the details of the jam-packed conference were enough to keep them busy, including stories from the Eucharists, encounters with Archbishop Williams, and the best place to get a latte in Canterbury.

Some topics were more sensitive to blog about, however: not only the current tensions over homosexuality within the Anglican Communion, but personal details that bishops shared in discussion, including stories of persecution in their home countries.

“There was an agreement in my Bible study and indaba [mid-sized discussion] group that people would not share stories that people said could not be shared,” said Bishop Moxley. She also said she trod carefully around more volatile topics: “My strategy was to have [my blog audience] get a sense of what the day was like and the kind of topics we were dealing with, rather than give my own viewpoint on what should and should not have been said.”

Read it all.

I am aware of a meeting that four priests of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth have had with Bishop Kevin Vann of the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth on June 16, 2008. After a year of studying various agreed statements that have come out of ecumenical dialogues between Anglicans and Roman Catholics on the national and international level, these clergy expressed an interest in having a dialogue on the local level and asked my permission to make an appointment to talk with Bishop Vann. The stated goal of these official Anglican/Roman Catholic dialogues (which have been going on for over 40 years) has been full, visible unity between the two communions.

The priests who participated in this meeting with Bishop Vann have my trust and pastoral support. However, in their written and verbal reports, they have spoken only on their own behalf and out of their own concerns and perspective. They have not claimed to act or speak, nor have they been authorized to do so, either on behalf of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth or on my own behalf as their Bishop.

Their discussion with Bishop Vann has no bearing upon matters coming before our Diocesan Convention in November, where a second vote will be taken on constitutional changes concerning our relationship with the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. There is no proposal under consideration, either publicly or privately, for the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth to become part of the Roman Catholic Church. Our only plan of action remains as it has been for the past year, as affirmed by our Diocesan Convention in November 2007. The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth intends to realign with an orthodox Province as a constituent member of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

By God’s grace, we will continue to work and pray for the unity of the one holy catholic and apostolic church.

The Rt. Rev. Jack Leo Iker
Bishop of Fort Worth
August 12, 2008

Archbishop Philip Freier says he will return to Melbourne from the Lambeth Conference with a far greater sense of the vitality of the Anglican Communion worldwide, which he describes as a “blessing to the world”.

“This has been an opportunity for sharing concerns about mission and evangelism, and reconsidering the needs of a hurting world,” he said at the conclusion of the ten yearly gathering of bishops from around the world. “This is the irony”, he said “that there is so much good to speak about but the focus is so often on the unresolved tensions in the Communion.”

Dr Freier observed that the ”˜Reflections Document’ from the Lambeth Conference represented the spectrum of opinions that had been raised but cautioned against looking at this document as the Church’s authoritative teaching. He thought that the three presidential addresses by the Archbishop of Canterbury were more indicative of where the communion stood on the matters that threatened to divide it. He says he will strongly urge the Anglican Church in Australia to commit itself to the Covenant process.

“As far as the Covenant is concerned, there is certainly more clarity required on some of the details. But I strongly believe that this is the best opportunity to build our unity and to strengthen co-operation across the communion in evangelism and works of mercy.”

Read it all

Barack Obama thinks the government should intervene on gas prices to “give families some relief,” and last week called for releasing 70 million barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. John McCain proposes an end to the ban on offshore drilling and has pushed for a gas-tax holiday because “we need it, we need it very badly.”

But both candidates and the public are evidently unaware of a basic fact: Gasoline is more affordable for American families now than it was in the days of the gas-guzzling muscle cars of the early 1960s. Prices are beginning to come down somewhat, but this was true even when the national average was at its summer peak.

Two-thirds of American voters say they think that the price of gas is “an extremely important political issue,” and many believe that it will cause them “serious” financial hardship, according to a recent survey by the Associated Press and Yahoo.

Although it’s true that the real (inflation-adjusted) and nominal (posted) prices of gasoline are higher than at any time since World War II, even at the recent peak national average of $4.11 a gallon (California’s average Friday was $4.17), gasoline is still more affordable today than it was during the Kennedy administration. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke worries that increasing fuel prices might eat up so much disposable income that it flat-lines consumer spending and tanks the economy. But it’s difficult to square that worry with what we call the “affordability index” — the ratio of the average person’s disposable income to the price of gasoline.

Read it all.

(ACNS) A series of 10 video journals featuring more than 30 bishops from around the world attending the 2008 Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion are now available for viewing at Trinity Wall Street’s website, www.trinitywallstreet.org. Produced for the Lambeth Conference by Trinity Wall Street, the video journals were shown at the outset of each conference day, introducing participants to the daily thematic focus. The journals portray the personal experiences of bishops and spouses as they relate to that day’s theme and include segments which capture the life of conference.

The videos run approximately five minutes in length and address topics ranging from evangelism, social justice and the environment to engagement in a multi-faith world and the abuse of power. Bishops in the videos include Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury; Daniel Deng Bul Yak, Archbishop of Sudan; Miguel Tamayo, Bishop of Uruguay; Edward Malecdan, Bishop of Northern Philippines; David Beetge, Bishop of Highveld, South Africa; Victoria Matthews, Bishop of Christchurch, New Zealand; Alexander John Malik, Bishop of Lahore, Pakistan; and Mark Sisk, Bishop of New York, USA.

The Anglican Communion is considered Christianity’s third largest denomination. Once every ten years, its leaders meet to discuss the state of the communion, renew their partnerships, explore their Anglican identity and invigorate their mission. This year, 650 bishops and archbishops from all over the world attended the 14th conference held July 16 – August 4.

This is the third conference where Trinity Wall Street was asked to provide the assembly with communications support.

Read it all.

What’s your response to the following: “The Lord be with you.”

If you said, “And also with you,” you’re probably a Catholic who goes to Mass on Sunday.

Not so fast. That response is about to change, along with other familiar parts of the Mass.

Overall, the language in the new English translation, just released by the bishops, is more elevated than before.

Critics of the old translation thought that the language was too conversational to be reverent. On the other side were those who thought that conversational language helped people to pray to God more naturally.

One easy place to see the change is when the priest prays a blessing over the bread and wine.

Here’s the old translation: “Let your Spirit come upon these gifts, to make them holy.”

Here’s the new one: “Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall.”

Read it all.

Retailers are typically obsessed with what to put under their roofs, not on them. Yet the nation’s biggest store chains are coming to see their immense, flat roofs as an untapped resource.

In recent months, chains including Wal-Mart Stores, Kohl’s, Safeway and Whole Foods Market have installed solar panels on roofs of their stores to generate electricity on a large scale. One reason they are racing is to beat a Dec. 31 deadline to gain tax advantages for these projects.

So far, most chains have outfitted fewer than 10 percent of their stores. Over the long run, assuming Congress renews a favorable tax provision and more states offer incentives, the chains promise a solar construction program that would ultimately put panels atop almost every big store in the country.

The trend, while not entirely new, is accelerating as the chains seize a chance to bolster their environmental credentials by cutting back on their use of electricity from coal.

“It’s very clear that green energy is now front and center in the minds of the business sector,” said Daniel M. Kammen, an energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Not only will you see panels on the roofs of your local stores, but I suspect very soon retailers will have stickers in their windows saying, ”˜This is a green energy store.’ ”

Read it all.