In actual fact, a funeral service is not for the deceased. It is primarily for the family and friends; and while a Christian minister may be called upon to conduct the service, he must not be guilty of suggesting that the unredeemed will inherit eternal life. To do so is to be disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.

If a pastor is true to the Word of God, he cannot change or minimize the Bible’s warning that the consequence of unbelief is condemnation (John 3:18).

To suggest or hint that someone who has never been saved is somehow headed for heaven does nothing but confuse the mourners and give the false impression that one can go to heaven without trusting in Christ who is the only way to God (John 14:6).

The carefully-crafted remarks of a Christian minister can convey the Gospel message of hope and certainty to those who need it most.

Read it all.

Loughlin clearly sees matter as the primary reality here, at least for creatures. Substance for him is extended matter. In fact, he does not seem to have any other category. Sex difference for him is real, and so in his limited, modern/post-modern categories, sex difference must be something arising from the flesh alone. This is inevitable without the category of relation, especially in this case, sex difference being a relational category which conditions the relational person (see this metathread for a short primer on these ideas).

Loughlin is not the only RO theologian with these views. Rowan Williams promotes similar thinking in his essay, “The Body’s Grace.” This essay was published in a collection of pro-SSAD articles entitled, Christian Our Selves, Our Souls and Bodies: Sexuality and the Household of God [ed. Charles C. Hefling (Boston: Cowley Press, 1996)]. Hankey (see the previous post) shows that Williams was an original member of the Radical Orthodoxy movement. Hierothee pointed me to a recent article online that shows that Williams’s unfortunately soft thinking in this regard is not at all unlike that of Loughlin.

In conclusion, I would note that it is not so much that Louglin’s and Williams’s distortions/perversions of Christian truth stem from a misunderstanding of classical theology. Rather, the problem begins with their pre-commitment to said perverted notions. Their articulation of an incoherent metaphysics is simply a rationalization for their subversive depravity. Indeed, with the likes of Loughlin and Williams as guides to the movement, one could rightly claim that Radical Orthodoxy is purely and simply an expression of radical depravity.

Read it all.

Pakistan’s government is finalising a “charge-sheet” against Pervez Musharraf as battle lines are drawn in the bitter struggle over the President’s future.

Several allies of Mr Musharraf began to distance themselves from him, saying he should stand down for the good of the country, but the former general again insisted he would fight the impeachment charges being prepared by his opponents. Meanwhile, the process to oust Mr Musharraf gathered additional pace as a crucial regional assembly overwhelmingly passed a vote of no confidence against him, saying he was “unfit” to rule.

Aftab Sherpao, a formerinterior minister in Mr Musharraf’s government and leader of a small regional party, said he was considering joining those seeking to force out the President. “[Mr Musharraf] is going to fight these charges on a moral ground to try to disprove them… But when it comes to the numbers, I think he’s lost it,” he said.

Read it all.

Divisive social issues will be on the ballot in several states in November, including constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in Arizona, California and Florida, and limitations on abortion in California, Colorado and South Dakota.

Although research indicates that ballot measures do not drastically alter voter turnout, they have begun attracting the attention of both presidential campaigns.

Unlike 2004, when same-sex marriage bans were considered in 11 states, no single issue will dominate statewide ballots.

“Tax and spending issues are typically one of the main focuses of these measures, but this time that’s less true,” said Jennie Drage Bowser, a policy analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Read it all.

Ms. Sherrod has put up a document about some discussions some members of the diocese of Fort Worth are having with local Roman Catholics. A Dallas News article about this is here.

I try hard to read from various points of view, and to follow that practice I sometimes follow Katie Sherrod’s blog. It is an acquired taste to be sure since she is so very angry at the diocese of Fort Worth in general and the diocesan Bishop, Jack Iker, in particular. Unsurprising, Ms. Sherrod was not at all happy with Lambeth 2008 in a number of ways, but she was encouraged that it was so different from Lambeth 1998 which she described as “brutal.” Why brutal? Listen to her own words:

[At Lambeth 1998 the leadership sought] to push for legislative solutions to hot button issues. It was a process that left deep wounds that even a decade later were still painful for many.

Got that? She doesn’t want “legislative solutions to hot button issues.” But of course the 2003 General Convention was exactly that. And the wounds there are deep, very deep indeed. So for Ms. Sherrod and other reappraisers legislative solutions to hot button issues are great when they are ones she agrees with, but “brutal” when she does not. The double standard simply screams out for recognition in the present fractious climate of TEC which is living with the fruit of precisely the process Ms. Sherrod deplores–KSH.

Although the communist government still tries to choose church leaders and keep believers in line, Christianity is growing in China because freedom is growing in China.

The Chinese Communist Party remains an atheist ideology that views faith with suspicion. But the Chinese government’s success in delivering a better material life has left a growing number of Chinese wanting to fill a spiritual vacuum where Chinese communism has little left to offer.

President Bush and Dallas Theological Seminary President Mark Bailey worshipped at a Beijing Protestant church Sunday to encourage religious freedom. Dr. Bailey and Dallas Theological are making a contribution with Web-based instruction for Chinese seminarians.

Outside the Kuanjie Protestant Church, English teacher Ann Wilson of Maryville, Tenn., stood in the rain, discussing Mr. Bush’s visit, faith and politics with neighbors.

“For almost 60 years they’ve heard the story that you do not need religion because the party will fill all your needs. That’s not there anymore,” Mrs. Wilson said. “The Chinese are turning to religion because there’s an emptiness inside.”

Read it all.

Type “buttermilk pancakes” into Google, and among the top three or four search results you will find a link to a detailed recipe complete with a photo of a scrumptious stack from a site called Knol, which is owned by Google.

Google envisions Knol as a place where experts can share their knowledge on a variety of topics. It hopes to create a sort of online encyclopedia built from the contributions of scores of individuals. But while Wikipedia is collectively edited and ad-free, Knol contributors sign their articles and retain editing control over the content. They can choose to place ads, sold by Google, on their pages.

While Knol is only three weeks old and still relatively obscure, it has already rekindled fears among some media companies that Google is increasingly becoming a competitor. They foresee Google’s becoming a powerful rival that not only owns a growing number of content properties, including YouTube, the top online video site, and Blogger, a leading blogging service, but also holds the keys to directing users around the Web.

“If in fact a Google property is taking money away from Google’s partners, that is a real problem,” said Wenda Harris Millard, the co-chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Read it all.

Instrumental in providing that vital helping hand was the then Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, who was, Canon Tuckwell says, the “final straw”. He then laughs. “No, that would give the wrong impression, Bishop Nichols was the opposite; he was the catalyst. We had an ecumenical service in my church and the local Catholic parish priest, Canon Frank Hegarty, a very good friend of mine and my sponsor in the Church, had spoken to Bishop Nichols.

“We spoke after the service, at the end of which he said: ‘Give me a call if I can be of any help.’ I phoned him a week later and he was very kind, arranged an interview, and that was it.

“I was fortunate enough to be here in Westminster and between them Cardinal Hume and Bishop Nichols were very generous and very encouraging. They really put themselves out to assist us in coming into the Church. I can’t say it was the experience with some of my colleagues in other dioceses, some of whom received a less than warm welcome.

“I think a popular misconception was we were all ultra-conservative and were going to put the clock back – whatever that meant – and we would be an unsettling force within English Catholicism. Some bishops were very friendly and welcoming, some less so. I don’t think it was politics, more a matter of preference or prejudice.”

Read it all.

In “The Way We’ll Be,” the man whose organization has been uncommonly accurate in its predictions does not press his luck with political fortune-telling. Senators John McCain and Barack Obama are mentioned only three times each, since this book aspires to predicting more than short-term election trends. Mr. [John] Zogby instead concentrates on what he sees as tectonic shifts in American attitudes and argues that the importance of these changes has not been adequately understood.

The truly prescient political or marketing team, he argues, would be paying more attention to granular micro-precincts (i.e. “sports fans, pet owners, international travelers, early risers”); shopping destinations (Wal-Mart vs. Target); and secular spiritual attitudes than to the categories that mattered in the past. The historian charting the evolution of American values would pay more attention to Hurricane Katrina than to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

If the bad news is that Americans have lost faith in institutions they once trusted, like the government that so grievously failed Katrina victims, Mr. Zogby sees good news in the resilience of the young. He suggests that tomorrow’s American majority will be less materialistic, less tolerant of baloney, more practical and more closely linked to the rest of the world. “At long last, cynicism bottoms out,” he predicts in one wildly optimistic moment.

Read it all.

The Vatican has expressed “surprise” and “concern” at a plan by the Diocese of Shrewsbury to close one of its churches and arrange to have the parish Mass in a local Anglican church instead.

A letter from Mgr Giovanni Carrù, the under-secretary of the Congregation for the Clergy, said the plan to close the Church of Ss Peter and Paul, on the Wirral coast, “appears to stand in direct contrast to the recent indication that there are no plans to close the church… which were communicated to this Dicastery by His Lordship [the Bishop of Shrewsbury]”.

The Diocese of Shrewsbury has said in response that all Canon Law requirements for the closure of the church had been fulfilled and that the Congregation had approved this.

Read it all.

(ACNS) The Board of Governors of the Church Commissioners, and the Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England have both met within the past few days to discuss an approach from the Lambeth Conference Company* for financial help. The Board met this morning (August 11th) and the Council on Thursday August 7th.

The Company has assured the Board and the Council that it is continuing to make further approaches throughout the Anglican Communion to meet the full cost of this year’s Conference. It cannot, however, be confident that these will generate funds sufficiently quickly for it to meet all of its obligations as they fall due over the coming weeks and months.

The Board of Governors of the Church Commissioners and the Archbishops’ Council have therefore each agreed to make available to the Company up to £600k as required to enable the Company to honour its commitments while fundraising efforts continue. At this stage both bodies regard these amounts as interest free loan facilities.

They will be considering these matters again at their September meetings when they expect a further report from the Company about the progress of its fundraising efforts.

Read it all.

Notwithstanding Archbishop Rowan’s magnificent final Address, I continue to see a negotiated “orderly separation” as the best and most fruitful way forward for the Anglican Communion. The experience of this Lambeth Conference, underlined by that final Address, has again convinced me that the Anglican Communion cannot hold in tension convictions and practices that are incompatible, and so not patent of “reconciliation”, without continuing seriously to damage the life and witness of Anglican Churches as much in “the Global South” as in North America and in other provinces that have followed the lead of TEC. The experience of this Conference cannot have encouraged any participant to imagine that the latter are about to turn their backs on a generation or more of development in directions foreign to the life and convictions of the vast majority of Anglicans, let alone of other Christians, across the world. I cannot see that the members of an “international family of Churches” can thrive and grow and offer a clear witness to Jesus Christ as Lord while offering contradictory teaching, on a matter as central as the character of the Holy Life, in different parts of a world knit together by instantaneous e-communications.

I am not imagining that such an “orderly separation” could prove either straightforward or painless. Archbishop Rowan said two years ago that if partings came, they would be as unmanageable, and as unpredictable in their effects, as the splintering of panes of glass; and I realise that there could be especially difficult implications for the Church of England, as there continue to be for the Churches of North America. But I recognise as quite fair the summary of my and others’ views offered by the Guardian newspaper’s Editorial on August 4th: they “feel that the avoidance of confrontation this past fortnight has merely set up a worse confrontation in the future”.

If this may be the future under God of the Anglican Communion – a large “orthodox” majority continuing to look to its historic roots (I pray and hope) in the See of Canterbury yet maintaining some defined relationship with a “separated” and more “liberal” Communion of Churches centred on TEC ”“ much now depends on the GAFCON Primates and the rest of the “Global South” quickly mending the relationships between them that have been put at risk, and on all of them together reacting positively to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s stated intention to call a meeting of the Primates of the Communion early in 2009.

By then they, and the rest of us, may have a clear sense of how TEC and others are going to respond to Archbishop Rowan’s calls in his final Address on August 3rd; and the Archbishop may himself be in a position to judge whether there is a will for the Anglican Communion to go forward together in Our Lord’s service ”“ or whether he faces the terrifyingly difficult decision between initiating negotiations that may make for “an orderly separation”, or watching a still more destructive separation take place around him.

Read it all.

Yet, according to some, avoiding taking a stand doesn’t mean nothing will happen.

Reverend Peter Frank, spokesman for Anglican Communion Network, an evangelical renewal movement, said that by design, the Lambeth Conference was structured to forestall any decision-making.

“It was depressing for those who hoped the Anglican Communion would return to mainstream Christianity,” said Frank.

Further, because of the moratorium on decisions concerning ordination of gays and same-sex unions, Frank foresees a widening in the present divisions between liberal and conservative factions.

“Nether side will wait for another 10 years to act,” said Frank. “The moratorium will empower the innovative to be freer to act because they know that nothing on the radar will happen to them. However, it (the lack of any official decisions) will empower the defenders of the faith to be realistic, not count on the leadership, and organize within the structure. And they are in the majority.”

Read it all.

In a year in which one state or another could tip the election, every demographic can play the spoiler, and the religious center is no exception.

Candidates have already seen the danger of being associated with the religious fringe. Obama has famously rejected his far-left former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and he’s veering right while courting evangelicals, the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to dare go there. Meanwhile, McCain has distanced himself from far-right televangelist John Hagee, who had endorsed him. He’s also moving ahead without the blessing of James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family and an influential leader of the religious right.

So why the shift away from the poles? I raised this issue with my parishioner George Barker, a Virginia state senator and Presbyterian elder. He told me that “while many voters want a candidate with religious convictions and core values, most Americans do not want leaders whose absolutist beliefs diminish openness to others’ views.”

He’s right. Indeed, Americans want to hear religious talk from their candidates, because faith provides a window on personal values and integrity. But voters don’t want someone with an extreme religious position. After all, the American president has to represent people of all faiths ”” or of no faith.

Read it all.

Anglicans, with all Christians, should be chiefly concerned with projecting biblical faith into the community — not with projecting the community’s values into the faith.

Alas, such rich debates among Anglicans are fast falling into irrelevance.

Via media — the Anglican motto, meaning by way of the middle — has disintegrated into infighting, and it’s taking the Anglican Communion with it.

But we must remember that for a time, the Church of England, even with all her contradiction, vulnerability to error and organizational shortcomings, was sufficient. Glorious, even.

For she stood, above all else, for the freedom of the English people and the supremacy of the Sovereign.

She was an expression of England’s identity, a bulwark of national independence and, at her best, an endeavour to fuse Enlightenment with Revelation.

And so we’re left with the hard questions.

Is Anglicanism itself an anachronism? A vestige of empire? Destined to succumb to the pulsating rush of liturgical, spiritual and cultural change?

Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973 oil shock and how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic.

“I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income ”” so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy.”

Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas ”” Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine company ”” told me that he simply can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America.

Why should you care?

“We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.”

Read it all.

A number of bishops expressed frustration with the conference’s design, comparing it to “Bible school for bishops,” with endless talk but little action. “I don’t think we’ve done anything to resolve the crisis,” said conservative bishop Keith Ackerman of Quincy, Illinois, despite Williams’s suggestion that “the pieces are on the board” to resolve some problems.

In a presidential address, Williams said he would be bringing forward proposals within two months for a pastoral forum to deal with conflict situations in the Anglican Communion. The forum could also offer recommendations on what to do if any of the three moratoria were broken, said a paper presented to the conference.

Liberal Episcopalians such as Dean Wolfe, a bishop from Kansas, said the succession of meetings after Lambeth “is a dance that will go on for some time.” Wolfe added: “We don’t see this as a permanent marginalization.”

Read it all.

Would Michael Phelps’s bid for eight gold medals in the Beijing Games dissolve in a pool at the Water Cube on Monday? The answer was a resounding No.

Not over Jason Lezak’s 32-year-old body.

Lezak, swimming the anchor leg of the United States’ 4×100-meter freestyle relay, hit the water a half-second after Alain Bernard of France, who came into the race as the world-record holder in the 100-meter freestyle.

“I knew I was going to have to swim out of my mind,” Lezak said, adding, “I had more adrenaline going than I’ve ever had in my life.”

Dragging off Bernard, who was hugging the lane line that separated them, Lezak made up ground, but with 25 meters remaining it appeared as if he would run out of pool. Trailing Bernard by half a body length, Lezak put his head down and surged to the wall.

I caught the whole thing live this morning, and I honestly was not sure who won, even after I watched the first replay–incredible! Read it all.

Update: There is a lot more here also.

I live in a culture that is used to exercising its freedom. We live in cultural context where those conversations can be had.

When you talk with people in other parts of the world, they are dealing with life and death issues. The conversations about human sexuality, they often don’t have time to deal with it, and when it comes up they are dealing with a context in which homosexuality is criminalized.

What did you bring to the table in terms of explaining the American experience?

They were able to hear from me and other bishops from the U.S. about the possibility of the holiness of life of GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) people.

We’re accused of not embracing the authority of Scripture. I was able to explain to them I do embrace the authority of Scripture, but I understand some parts of Scripture differently because of my cultural context.

Read it all.

At a meeting with Sen. Barack Obama recently, the Rev. Franklin Graham asked the presidential hopeful a burning question: Did he think Jesus was the way, or merely a way?

For Graham, — president of the Billy Graham Evangelic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, both based in North Carolina — the answer was critical. Through the ages, Christian evangelicals have affirmed that eternal life is available only through belief in Jesus. This is why they send missionaries around the globe and translate the New Testament into every known language.

For many evangelicals, the exclusivity of Jesus is the linchpin of their faith.

“Anyone who claims to be an evangelical and who says it’s possible to go to heaven other than through faith in Jesus Christ is not an evangelical,” said Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest.

But according to accounts of those who were there, Obama’s response to Graham may be more in line with where evangelicals are today.

“Jesus is the only way for me,” Obama said. “I’m not in a position to judge other people.”

Read it all.

Russia and Georgia clashed on land and at sea Sunday despite a Georgian cease-fire offer and claim of withdrawal from the separatist province of South Ossetia, officials from both countries said.

Georgian officials said Russian planes bombed an area near the Georgian capital’s airport and Russian tanks moved from South Ossetia into Georgian territory, heading toward a strategic city before being turned back.

A Russian general said Georgian forces directed heavy fire at positions around Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, early Monday, even though Georgia had claimed to be withdrawing from the shattered city and called for a cease-fire.

“Active fighting has been going on in several zones,” the Interfax news agency quoted Maj. Gen. Marat Kulakhmetov as saying. He is commander of the Russian peacekeeping contingent that has been in South Ossetia since 1992.

Russia also claimed to have sunk a Georgian boat that tried to attack Russian vessels in the Black Sea.

Read it all.

Some food for thought.

Heather Rosema of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is precisely the kind of Christian voter that Senator Barack Obama covets.

Rosema, 41, chose George W. Bush in 2000, when she put greater emphasis on issues like abortion and gay marriage. This year, she intends to vote for Obama.

Rosema, a member of Roosevelt Park Community Christian Reformed Church, sees a true man of faith in the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. “He talks about God very easily,” said Rosema. “I think that I hear that from him. They seem to be a Christian family.”

Mike Langerak, meanwhile, remains unimpressed.

“Obama has got a good line. He presents himself well. But his walk does not follow his talk,” says Langerak, a 50-year-old roofing contractor from suburban Hudsonville who also attends a Christian Reformed church.

Read it all.

Former civil rights activist Cox, 87, the oldest man in the history of the American House of Bishops, was one of two bishops ceremonially ”˜deposed’ ”“ or stripped of office ”“ three months ago, despite his age and the fact that his wife has Alzheimer’s.

His faithful congregations were thrown out of their churches, and he suffered financially.

Worse, according to Turley, is that Jefferts Schori in her deposition speech to the House of Bishops asked the bishops assembled ”˜to continue to reach out’ in pastoral care to both the Rt Rev John-David Schofield and Cox.

“Abandoning the Communion of this Church does not mean we abandon a person as a member of the Body of Christ,” Jefferts Schori said.

Cox told British-based Lapido Media that there has been no single contact, or even telephone call, to confirm his welfare.

“As a matter of fact I haven’t heard anything from her or any of her friends. Nonetheless, I have not had any kind of disparaging conversation about her with anybody. I have not even spoken ill against the two bishops who brought charges against me. I have just let it go because I know where my faith is and I have stated that.”

Cox was ”˜deposed’ on March 12 this year for crossing diocesan lines in ordaining two priests and a deacon in Kansas at the request of the Bishop of Uganda, Henry Orombi.

Read it all.

Phaedra Taylor abstained from sex until marriage. But she began researching birth control methods before she was even engaged, and by the time she married David Taylor, she was already charting her fertility.

Taylor, a fresh-faced 28-year-old who would blend in easily with South Austin bohemians, ruled out taking birth control pills after reading a book that claimed the pill could, in some cases, make the uterus uninhabitable after conception occurred. She viewed that as abortion, which she opposes.

“I just wasn’t willing to risk it,” she said.

Taylor wanted her faith to guide her sexual and reproductive decisions after marriage. Natural family planning felt like the best way to honor God, she said.

Read it all.

“We have 700 men here. Do you think any of them beat their wives? Chances are they do,” argued Roskam, in The Lambeth Witness, a daily newsletter for gay-rights supporters in the 77 million-member Anglican Communion.

“The most devout Christians beat their wives. … Many of our bishops come from places where it is culturally accepted to beat your wife. In that regard, it makes conversation quite difficult.”

The key, she added, is that “Violence against women, and violence against children for that matter, is violence against the defenseless. With women, it goes hand-in-hand with misogyny.”

The New York bishop’s accusations rocked the conference, which was already tense due to the absence of about 280 conservative bishops – many from Nigeria and Uganda – who declined to attend due to the presence of U.S. leaders who backed the 2003 consecration of the openly gay and noncelibate Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. Only 617 Anglican bishops pre-registered and some of those failed to attend, according to a report in The Living Church magazine. Thus, nearly a quarter of the bishops in attendance came from the small, but wealthy, U.S. Episcopal Church.

Read it all but also make sure to read Bishop Roskam’s own comments about this (entry #9 for July 31,2008):

So it was on this day that I was one of the press briefers for the Episcopal Church. And no, I did not say that clergy in the Third World beat their wives! In fact I said nothing about violence in the developing world per se. All my comments were made in the context of the pervasive nature of vioence against women all around the world. The only area I singled out was our own context, siting the recent spate of murders in the New York area of women, and sometimes their children also, by husbands or boyfriends. But of course, those comments were not quoted.

3. From this covenantal form of common following, the already called-for “moratoria” take force ”“ no consecration of sexually active gay bishops, no same-sex blessings, and no cross-jurisdictional oversight. Obviously, these are already standing requests made by the Windsor Report, the ACC, and the Primates in various guises. But now, in a way that goes far beyond the Windsor Report’s general notion of communion order, the moratoria appear as concrete aspects of faithfulness and obedience to and “in” the Lord.

Furthermore, in restating the authority of the 1998 Lambeth Resolution I.10, the Archbishop made clear the weight of accountability that the moratoria embody. There is “no supermarket of choices” given to the Christian church from which to choose possible paths of discipleship, even while legitimate and free theological discussion takes place concerning important matters of Christian teaching and witness; but “the practice and public language of the Church acts always as a reminder that the onus of proof is on those who seek a new understanding” and that this burden has not been met most recently by North American churches is abundantly borne out by the turbulence innovation has set loose.

The issue of boundary crossing is within the same “framework”, the Archbishop added, not because such violations of received order and unrestrained innovation are equivalent acts, but because a covenantal and consensual following takes place in walking together after the one Master with and over us, and not through asserting vying claims of differing Masters ”“ that is, Anglicanism’s scandal is not just in teaching and practice, but in proposing to the world a vision of “confusion” among the Lord’s followers, now appearing as a house divided. Here is where “charity’s power as an ensign to the nations is severely undermined, and the Archbishop’s later discussion of Zimbabwe’s Anglican witness as bound to the Communion’s life was, in this respect, far more than a passing example: permit and even further confusion, and the calling of the Gospel is ripped from the hands of the little ones for whom the Kingdom is given. It is not possible to separate the calling of such common mission ”“ something else, less controversial, that was nonetheless reiterated by the bishops with force ”“ from the calling of “true Christian unity” in its covenanted and discipled form.

Read it all.

…the price of a barrel of crude has been falling: from a peak of $145 in early July, it came down to $117 and was trading yesterday at $120. That’s almost a 20 per cent drop in little more than three weeks.

If the trend continues into September at anything like the same rate of descent, most of the inflationary spike of the past 12 months will miraculously have been sliced away. This is a dramatic reversal, and it is worth trying to work out why it is happening and what it means.

Just possibly, it means that what investors refer to in shorthand as the great “oil up” story has finally revealed itself not as the fundamental reflection of scarce supply that its adherents liked to claim, but as a simple, speculative bubble that was always going to burst.

Read it all.

What was the tenor of the meeting?

There was a real sense of gained understanding across the board that we’re all in this together. The church needs to use the moral authority it has to bring attention to those things because people across the globe are suffering in ways that they don’t need to be.

What was the archbishop of Canterbury’s message to the bishops?

He spoke about a generosity of spirit toward each other. He didn’t scold, but he was very clear in his language that what one province (of the church) does (has) an impact on another province. We need to be judicious and cautious in our own autonomous determinations.

What’s your message for the Diocese of Southwest Florida?

I took away from Lambeth a gladness of heart to be who I am as bishop of the Diocese of Southwest Florida. What we do here has the great potential to be global in effect, and an individual participating in the life of the local Episcopal congregation can be of assistance in terms of prayer and resources to people they’ll never meet but who desperately need their relationship.

Read it all.