So what’s the problem for the Obama campaign?

The problem is the dog that isn’t barking.

Talk for more than a few minutes with an Obama supporter in a white middle-class or working-class area and you’ll hear about a friend or relative or co-worker who has a real problem with the candidate. When Jack Davis’s wife, Joan, who also plans to vote for Senator Obama, was asked about Democrats that she knew who would not vote for him, she replied:

“My mother! She’s 85 years old. I’m sorry to say, but she will not vote for him.”

Joseph Costigan, a regional political director for the union, Unite Here, spoke candidly about the tension between the economic distress of working men and women and the persistent, though hard-to-quantify, resistance to Barack Obama’s candidacy.

“We’ve been talking with staff in different parts of the Midwest,” he said, “and we’re all struggling to some extent with the problem of white workers who will not vote for Obama because of his color. There is no question about it. It’s a very powerful thing to get over for some folks.”

Mr. Costigan believes ”” and hopes ”” that the number of people holding such views is relatively small, and that Mr. Obama, now with the help of Senator Biden, can surmount that obstacle.

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The Rev. Susan J. Latimer knows in her heart God brought her from Maine to West Virginia to serve as the new rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Charleston.

“It was an amazing process,” she said. “I was not looking to make a move. I got a letter from the parish. They found me in a national database for clergy. I read about the parish. It just spoke to my heart.”

She was struck by the church’s commitment to community and social justice.

“There is inclusion of all people whether gay or straight or black or white,” she said. “They have wonderful music and liturgy. The whole setting is what I think the church should be.”

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Brian McLaren, a leader in the “emergent church” movement, says the three Abrahamic religions ”” Christianity, Judaism and Islam ”” are very dangerous.

“Christians, Muslims and Jews are, in some ways, the most dangerous people on the planet, and probably Christians being the most dangerous because their fingers are closer to the most nuclear weapons,” he told an audience here at Baker Book House.

But a new series of books on ancient religious traditions ”” including an introductory tome by McLaren ”” seeks to find unity in the ancient practices these religions share.

“If (Muslims, Christians and Jews) can find points of contact, maybe it will help us avoid pressing these buttons,” he said.

McLaren, a pastor, speaker and activist, spoke last week about some of his books, including his latest, Finding Our Way Again, which explores a return to ancient practices held in common by these three religions, such as fixed hours for prayer and observance of the Sabbath.

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Second, on the controversial issue of the day regarding human sexuality, there was a very widely-held conviction that premature or unilateral local change was risky and divisive, in spite of the diversity of opinion expressed on specific questions. There was no appetite for revising Resolution 1.10 of Lambeth 1998, though there was also a clear commitment to continue theological and pastoral discussion of the questions involved. In addition to a widespread support for moratoria in the areas already mentioned, there was much support for the idea of a ‘Pastoral Forum’ as a means of addressing present and future tensions, and as a clearing house for proposals concerning the care of groups at odds with dominant views within their Provinces, so as to avoid the confusing situation of violations of provincial boundaries and competing jurisdictions.

Importantly, it was recognized that all these matters involved serious reflection on the Christian doctrine of human nature and a continuing deepening of our understanding of Christian marriage. A joint session with bishops and spouses also reminded us that broader moral issues about power and violence in relations between men and women needed attention if we were to speak credibly to the tensions and sufferings of those we serve.

Third, there was a general desire to find better ways of managing our business as a Communion. Many participants believed that the indaba method, while not designed to achieve final decisions, was such a necessary aspect of understanding what the questions might be that they expressed the desire to see the method used more widely ”“ and to continue among themselves the conversations begun in Canterbury. This is an important steer for the meetings of the Primates and the ACC which will be taking place in the first half of next year, and I shall be seeking to identify the resources we shall need in order to take forward some of the proposals about our structures and methods.

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Heading into the final week of August 2005, the Rev. Louis Adams had a verse from Nehemiah much in mind. In the passage, the prophet described Jerusalem in ruins, its gates burned by invaders. Then he declared, “Come, let us build up the wall of Jerusalem, that we be no more a reproach.” Mr. Adams and his congregants in the Holy Ground Baptist Church here had spent three years and $125,000 buying and rebuilding a dilapidated church in the Lower Ninth Ward. Once their labors were done, they would no longer have to worship as weekend tenants of the Care Bear Daycare Center. They would no longer be sojourners.

The pews, the altar, the baptismal pool were already installed in their new home. The kitchen and the social hall were complete. All that was left was to lay the cedar planks of the floor, then tack down the carpet. On the third Sunday of September, Holy Ground’s members would march into a sanctuary of their own.

Before then, of course, Hurricane Katrina struck and Holy Ground sat deep in floodwater. A house across the street, which had been swept off its foundation, had smashed into one corner of the church.

And so began a story of destruction and dispossession, of natural disaster and human failure, that has yet to end, even as the third anniversary of the disaster approaches.

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What does articulate doctrine for the Episcopal Church? Quite simply, the Book of Common Prayer. General Convention can approve a prayer book after a lengthy trial period and with two consecutive conventions voting affirmatively. The current Book of Common Prayer, approved in 1979, contains all the historic formularies usually recognized in the Anglican Communion: the three creeds, the Thirty-nine Articles, the Outline of the Faith (called the Catechism), and, of course, the liturgy.

Finally, Anglican Christians have always understood that the real spiritual authority of the Church is Jesus, of course, who is the actual Head of the Church. It is not really St. Peter who will determine who will enter heaven or not but the blood of Jesus Christ. Those congregations who place themselves squarely under the authority of Jesus have nothing ultimately to fear either from powers and principalities nor from unfaithful bishops. Over the centuries, there have unfortunately always been unworthy shepherds; sometimes the Church has been in great suffering because of their unfaithfulness. Yet Jesus the Head always has brought his Church back to the Truth by the power of his Holy Spirit, raising up obedient shepherds and leaders for his people. “May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.” (1 Thessalonians 5: 23-24)

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The press asked who was running the conference. The Archbishop of Canterbury gave five retreat addresses, three presidential addresses, chaired the five evening plenary presentations from guest speakers, and preached the final sermon. The press were told he was the common figure in meetings of the Design Team, the Anglican Communion Office and Lambeth Palace Staff meetings.
He did not consult the primates before indicating at the final press conference that the future agenda was the moratoria and the pastoral forum. Some bishops noted that the pope always speaks with his bishops rather than to his bishops. There was much speaking of people’s respect, loyalty and affection for Archbishop Williams. If people say that of a primate in Africa, this is regarded as fawning on an autocratic tribal chief. The Lambeth Conference Network in the Anglican Communion seems to have have been overtaken by celebrity culture. Is this style a reaction to criticism of lack of leadership?

The Culture of Lambeth was of Inclusive Church. The opening service was on the theme of diversity in unity. Most self-select sessions were from the liberal perspective. The market place was dominated by gay organisations.

The Archbishop said in his second presidential address: ”And the answer, I hope, is that we speak from the centre. We should try to speak from the heart of our identity as Anglicans; and ultimately from that deepest centre which is our awareness of living in and as the Body of Christ.”

What is the centre which is the heart of our identity as Anglicans? Is it defined by the faith, or is it defined by inclusion?
Traditional Anglican liberalism was founded on core Christian truths and commitments. Secular liberalism denies that truth is possible and urges the equality of every person and their views. Therefore all views can contribute and must be at the table.

Secular liberalism places the value of inclusion over against faithfulness and faith. The claim to speak from the centre must face the challenge of whether the faith that defines the centre is the centre of faith, or the centre of the secular vision of inclusion?

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It is true that the Conference passed no Resolutions, offered no Teaching Statements, and took no votes ”“ on anything. But, on the final afternoon, in his Third Presidential Address, Archbishop Rowan Williams (in the words of one of the senior English Bishops) “decisively tipped the balance for the first time in the Conference.”

Another of the Bishops put it this way, “The Bible Studies and the Indaba groups provided the backdrop for the Archbishop to speak on behalf of the whole Conference. And he did so with remarkable clarity and forcefulness.” Unequivocally, he:

*

Affirmed the uniqueness of Christ as “the Way, the Truth and the Life” (not “my way,” or “a way”!);
*

Reaffirmed Resolution 1:10 (from the 1998 Conference)1 as the teaching of the Anglican Communion regarding sexual behavior;
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Reiterated the Primates’ call in the 2007 Communique from Dar es Salam for moratoria on the blessing of same-sex relationships, the consecration of priests in same-sex relationships, and the crossing of diocesan borders by Bishops of other jurisdictions; 2
*

Endorsed once again the development of an Anglican Covenant as “the way forward”….

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Take a look (pdf).

The latest update includes two days of interviewing following Obama’s selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate, and neither day showed an improved performance for Obama. Thus, Obama does not appear to have gotten the same type of immediate “vice presidential bounce” as have presidential candidates in recent years. That could reflect a somewhat muted national response to the Biden selection, or competition for the nation’s attention with the Olympics. (The candidates who got vice presidential bounces in 1996, 2000, and 2004 announced their choices before or after the Olympics took place in those years.)

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In January of this year, King College in Bristol, Tennessee hosted the inauguration of the Buechner Institute, a faith-and-culture center directed by Dale Brown. Frederick Buechner himself was present, and when he addressed the audience, there was an expectant hush.

The guest of honor, without much preamble, told his listeners that for about ten years he had been unable to complete any substantial writing project. A very quiet auditorium became quieter still. Buechner went on to say that each day he goes out to his “Magic Kingdom,” the separate place””set apart from the house””where for decades he has done his writing. There he is surrounded by his magnificent collection of first editions and assorted objects of significance to him. He writes, yet nothing comes to fruition.

Recently, he said, he had sorted through the accumulated fragments of the last few years and found some bits that seemed to stand up on their own, enough to make up a small volume, a miscellany, to be published under the title The Yellow Leaves. He quoted the relevant lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

He then proposed to read a couple of the pieces he had salvaged, and did so, to great applause. And now, six months later, as promised, the book has been published by Westminster John Knox Press. “I can still write sentences and paragraphs,” Buechner says in the half-page introduction, “but for five or six years now [or ten, perhaps], I haven’t been able to write books. Maybe after more than thirty of them the well has at last run dry. Maybe, age eighty, I no longer have the right kind of energy. Maybe the time has simply come to stop. Whatever the reason, at least for the moment the sweet birds no longer sing.”

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Yes, there is such a thing as common sense ”” and thank goodness for that.

At least that’s this reader’s reaction to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s “Nudge,” an engaging and insightful tour through the evidence that most human beings don’t make decisions in the way often characterized (some would say caricatured) in elementary economics textbooks, along with a rich array of suggestions for enabling many of us to make better choices, both for ourselves and for society.

Few people will be surprised to learn that the setting in which individuals make decisions often influences the choices they make. How much we eat depends on what’s served on our plate, what foods we pick from the cafeteria line depends on whether the salads or the desserts are placed at eye level, and what magazines we buy depends on which ones are on display at the supermarket checkout line. But the same tendency also affects decisions with more significant consequences: how much families save and how they invest; what kind of mortgage they take out; which medical insurance they choose; what cars they drive. Behavioral economics, a new area of research combining economics and psychology, has repeatedly documented how our apparently free choices are affected by the way options are presented to us.

The main insight from which Thaler and Sunstein proceed is that no decision setting is “neutral.” Whether it’s a restaurant laying out food or a business offering its employees a list of mutual funds in its 401(k) plan or the government presenting different Medicare options, whoever presents choices must frame them in some way. And the framing will affect the decisions. Even “small and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on people’s behavior,” the authors write. Some ways of presenting the choices may give a gentler “nudge” than others, and we may think some settings are neutral only because we’re so used to them. But whoever is presenting the choices will inevitably bias decisions, in one direction or another.

As a result, Thaler and Sunstein argue, many of the familiar arguments for why people should simply be left to make choices on their own, and especially for why government should stay strictly out of the way, have little practical force. In many important areas of choice that matter both to the individual and to the rest of us (for example, when overuse of medical care drives up our insurance premiums and our taxes), the operative question is not whether to bias people’s decisions, but in which direction.

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Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

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China has resorted to stealth intervention in the currency markets to amass US dollars, using indirect means to hold down the yuan and ease the pain for its struggling exporters as the global slowdown engulfs the economy.

A study by HSBC’s currency team in Asia has concluded that China’s central bank is in effect forcing commercial banks to build up large dollar reserves, using them as arms-length proxies in a renewed campaign of exchange rate intervention….

“China has used the pretext of reserve requirement hikes to help slow yuan appreciation. We estimate that the PBOC [central bank] intervened by about $49.6bn in June,” said Daniel Hui, the bank’s Asia strategist.

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The elaborate closing ceremony that ended the Olympic Games on Sunday also ended nearly a decade in which the ruling Communist Party had made the Games an organizing principle in national life. Almost nothing has superseded the Olympics as a political priority in China.

For Chinese leaders, all that effort paid off. The Games were seen as an unparalleled success by most Chinese ”” a record medal count inspired nationwide excitement, and Beijing impressed foreign visitors with its hospitality and efficiency. And while the government’s uncompromising suppression of dissent drew criticism, China also demonstrated to a global audience that it is a rising economic and political power.

But a new, post-Olympic era has begun. The question now is whether a deepening self-confidence arising from the Olympic experience will lead China to further its engagement with the world and pursue deeper political reform, or whether the success of the Games and the muted Western response to repression will convince leaders that their current model is working.

“China was eager to present something that shows it is a new power that has its own might,” said Shen Dingli, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. “It has problems, but it is able to manage them. It has weaknesses in its institutions, but also strengths in those same institutions.”

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Early on a late September morning, if all goes according to plan, 1 million Mormons, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, evangelical Christians, Sikhs and Hindus will open their doors, march down their front walks and plant “Yes on Proposition 8” signs in their yards to show they support repealing same-sex marriage in California.

It is a bold idea, one that may be difficult to pull off. But whether or not 1 million lawn signs are planted in unison, the plan underscores what some observers say is one of the most ambitious interfaith political organizing efforts ever attempted in the state. Moreover, political analysts say, the alliances across religious boundaries could herald new ways of building coalitions around political issues in California.

“Pan-religious, faith-based political action strategies . . . I think we are going to see a lot more of [this] in the future,” said Gaston Espinosa, a professor of religious studies at Claremont McKenna College.

The greatest involvement in the campaign has come from Mormons, Catholics and evangelical Christians, who say they are working together much more closely than they did eight years ago when a similar measure, Proposition 22, was on the ballot.

Mark Jansson, a Mormon who is a member of the Protect Marriage Coalition, said members of his group are also reaching out to Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus.

Organizers say the groups turned to each other because of the California Supreme Court’s ruling in May allowing same-sex marriages to be performed in the state. Thousands of gay couples have wed in the state since June 17, the first day same-sex marriages became legal.

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A tradition of about 140 years ends next Sunday when the Trinity Episcopal Church of Trinidad officially closes its doors and disbands its congregation due to rising operating costs and declining attendance.

Trinity Church is currently located at 119 Colorado Ave., a space it has occupied for more than 120 years.

A statement put out by the church read, “Due to the decrease in the number of worshippers attending services, and the steadily increasing expense of operating and maintaining the building, the congregation and the Dioceses of Colorado have agreed that the Episcopal presence in Colorado must come to an end.”

Vicar Janet Rawlins estimated that the congregation had dwindled to less than 10 regularly attending members. “There’s no cut-off point,” Rawlins said. “No one is shutting us down. It’s just the circumstances as they are make it necessary to end over 120 years of the Episcopal presence in Trinidad.

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But we can create healthy families and raise tomorrow’s leaders ”“ if we focus on our marriages instead of our children.

In my pastoral counseling as an Episcopal minister, I share people’s joy at their weddings and baptisms, as well as the agony of their divorces. Today I see more kids acting out, more parents turning to medication, and more single parents in serious financial difficulty.

The intact family is an endangered species. The odds a marriage will eventually end in divorce, according to studies at the John Gottman Institute, are cause for concern. For example, a couple married in 1950 had only a 30 percent chance of divorce, and couples married in 1970 had about a 50 percent chance of splitting. But a 1990 marriage has a 67 percent likelihood of ending, and the divorce rate continues to climb. People are losing faith in love.

As I visit so many households full of misery, I see good, committed couples with the best of intentions end up either fighting or fleeing each other, like wild animals. That flight-response seems to control much more of our behavior than we realize.

There are many subtle ways we avoid our spouses every day. Our distancing behaviors may include staying at work late, or switching on the TV, or making our children the center of our universe.

Most of us would never dream that putting our children before our marriage could be a flight response. We often believe we just don’t have time for our spouse.

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At the recent Lambeth Conference I had a couple of conversations with so-called ”˜conservative’ Americans, both amongst the press and the bishops. I was even able to give the Bishop of Springfield (no relation to ”˜The Simpsons’) some pointers on the rules of cricket as we snatched five minutes in the bar to watch England being clinically defeated by South Africa.

Their depressing and urgent situation in The Episcopal Church becomes ever clearer over time, despite all of the efforts of their liberal church leaders to try and persuade the rest of the Anglican Communion that really we’re just like you. Close watchers of the US, and readers of this newspaper, will be more aware than most of the state of that Church. Heterodoxy is never punished, whereas orthodox impatience is the subject of lawsuits all over the country. And the amount of heterodoxy uttered in The Episcopal Church is truly astonishing. Even leaving aside the virtual atheism of Bishop Spong’s ”˜Twelve Theses’, we’ve had bishops claim that the church can ”˜re-write the Bible’, others make sweeping apologies for Christian mission to those of other faiths, while the Presiding Bishop views Jesus as just one way among many.

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Was [CEO Noel] Biderman angry his billboard got taken down? His response: “Disappointed but not deterred.” He’s also quick to point out, “There’s absolutely nothing illegal in what we do. We offer freedom of choice.” Of course, Ashley Madison’s critics, who feel the site flaunts and romanticizes cheating, would call that “freedom” an encouragement of immorality. But Biderman has a point: “I don’t think a billboard is going to convince you to commit adultery. It just makes you aware of our service. People come to us because we offer them a lack of judgment. Step back and look at marriage and divorce rates. Monogamy is obviously up for debate.”

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Religious themes have been more likely to take center stage at recent Republican National Conventions than at Democratic gatherings. But politics and religion will be mingling all this week when Democrats convene in Denver to choose Barack Obama as their presidential nominee.

Spurred by a presidential candidate who freely talks about his religious beliefs, Democrats will go to great lengths to display their own religious fervor. Obama’s selection of Joe Biden as his running mate probably enhances the theme. Biden made a point of talking about his Irish-Catholic roots in Saturday’s joint appearance with Obama.

For the first time ever, Democrats have planned “faith caucus meetings” led by an array of religious and spiritual leaders, including Christians, Muslims and Jews. Democrats want to convince voters that they are putting their faith in action ”” and show that Republicans haven’t cornered the market on family values or faith.

“Everybody woke up after the last election and realized the Democratic Party had not done well dealing with religious voters,” says Steven Waldman, founder of the online spiritual center beliefnet.com.

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What kind of god would be plausible in this postmodern age? Taken by itself, that question represents the great divide between those who believe in the God of the Bible and those who see the need to reinvent a deity more acceptable to the modern mind.

After all, the answer to that question would reveal a great deal about the postmodern mind, and nothing about God himself. Unless, that is, you believe that God is merely a philosophical concept, and not the self-existent, self-defining God of the Bible.

That distinction is apparent in A Plausible God by Mitchell Silver, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The book’s subtitle is “Secular Reflections on Liberal Jewish Theology,” and Silver’s work is an attempt to construct a concept of God that modern secular people will find plausible. The book is directed to a Jewish readership, but the issues Silver raises and the arguments he proposes are precisely those found among many liberal Protestant theologians. Most, however, are less candid and clear-minded as Professor Silver.

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We the undersigned contributors to Covenant-Communion.com believe that “a word in time” is now needed in order to assist the Communion to move forward in a constructive manner following the Lambeth Conference. We would like to speak such a word by specifically addressing the points Bishop Bob Duncan raises in his email to Bishop Gary Lillibridge, which has now been made public with Bp. Duncan’s permission. Our reflections are offered with all due respect for Bishop Duncan as a dear friend to some of us, and one whom those of us who know him personally admire as a stalwart in the faith. Bishop Duncan’s words are quoted in italics with our reflections following.

1. The first difficulty is the moral equivalence implied between the three moratoria, a notion specifically rejected in the original Windsor Report and at Dromantine.

Actually, it is largely American and Canadian liberals that have implied a moral equivalency between the two. We think most people are clear that the crisis in our Communion was precipitated by specific American and Canadian actions. In any event, someone has to be the first to give up their “rights” (either Bishop Duncan and the GAFCON folks by agreeing to moratorium #3 in clear terms, or the American and Canadian leadership by agreeing to moratoria #1 and #2, as well as an immediate cessation of the lawsuits and ecclesiastical trials). Who will be the first to display an act of Christian charity and self-giving on behalf of the Communion at this critical turning point in the life of the Communion?

Our understanding of the comments from the Windsor Continuation Group hearings at the Lambeth Conference is that no one really expects the jurisdictional crossings to cease without the concomitant cessation of blessing same sex unions and assurances of refusal to consent to the consecration of a bishop in a same sex relationship.

2. This process cannot be stopped – constitutions require an automatic second vote, and to recommend against passage without guarantees from the other side would be suicidal.

We recognize the canonical difficulties this presents. A constitutional change requires a second vote in the following year or the proposed constitutional change fails for lack of a second reading. Not even the Archbishop of Canterbury can change this requirement. Further, we understand that these dioceses are fearful of further legal repercussions that a delay would entail.

We suggest this is such a crucial issue that Dr. Williams convene a meeting, preferably in person, by September 30th, to work through an agreement on the assurances of the moratoria as well as the “safe haven” for those in the American and Canadian churches who feel the need for protection.

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Where do you go to get your vision corrected, your crystal ball polished? I figured August offered one last chance to check the instruments before the campaign homestretch. And in an election year haunted by all kinds of ghosts, I thought I’d check in with the people who talk to the dead all the time–just to get a different feel for the spirits that move us.

A hundred years ago, the New York Times described the Lily Dale Assembly, a gated compound in far western New York State, as “the most famous and aristocratic spiritualistic camp in America.” Freethinking, forward-leaning, this was a place for prophets of all kinds. Susan B. Anthony visited half a dozen times; Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt came, and Harry Houdini and Mae West, and seekers from around the world looking to explore the continuity between life and what locals refer to as “so-called death.”

A company town of old oaks and Victorian gingerbread, Lily Dale specializes in building bridges to the Beyond. You can’t buy a house here unless you are a practicing spiritualist. But anyone can stay in the Maplewood Hotel, which might be the perfect place for political junkies to detox. There are no TVs, no phones in the rooms. A sign is posted in the lobby: NO READINGS, HEALINGS, CIRCLES OR SÉANCES IN THIS AREA, PLEASE. This is the place to come if you’re sick of the mainstream mediums.

“There are no strangers here,” residents will tell you, just friendly souls who missed you the first time around. Days are filled with classes and lectures exploring the far corners of the otherworldly: Spoon Bending, Mask Making (in the past seven elections, the candidate with the best-selling Halloween mask has won), Past-Life Regression, Alien Abduction Case Histories. I missed the Astrology Roundtable, which explored how the transit of Pluto into Capricorn–occurring once every 248 years–affects me, the nation and the world.

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On inauguration day, a new U.S. president is a demigod, the embodiment of aspirations as vast as they are varied. Over the course of the years that follow, the president inevitably fails to fulfill those lofty hopes. So the cycle begins anew, and Americans look to the next occupant of the Oval Office to undo his predecessor’s mistakes and usher in an era of lasting peace and sustained prosperity.

This time around, expectations are, if anything, loftier than usual. The youthful and charismatic Sen. Barack Obama casts himself as the standard-bearer of those keenest to fix Washington, redeem America and save the world. “Yes, we can,” Obama’s anthem proclaims, inviting supporters to complete the thought by inserting their own fondest desire. Yes, we can: bring peace to the Middle East; reverse global warming; win the global war on terrorism.

Yet Sen. John McCain’s campaign has been hardly shy about fostering grandiose expectations. Speaking earlier this month, while most Americans were fretting about the cost of oil, McCain uncorked one of his patented straight-talking promises: “I’m going to lead our nation to energy independence.” As far as McCain would have us believe, you can take that to the bank.

Will the next president actually bring about Big Change? Don’t get your hopes up.

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Four years ago, Colorado — a state whose name is derived from the Spanish word for red — was true to that label on the political map. Republicans held the governor’s mansion, both U.S. Senate seats, five of seven congressional seats and both houses of the legislature. President George W. Bush comfortably carried the state by 5 points.

This year, Democrats see opportunity instead of defeat. They are banking on their presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, carrying Colorado. The party expects to pick up a Senate seat and possibly two in the House, including one in reliably Republican Larimer County, where voters haven’t sent a Democrat to Congress since 1970.

“There’s a tectonic shift in the state’s politics,” said Matt Ferrauto of the Colorado Democratic Party. State polls suggest strong showings for Democratic candidates running for offices ranging from magistrate to president; this pattern has emerged in almost two-dozen states as Democrats see the best national conditions for their party since the 1970s.

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The recent movement by some college presidents to reduce the legal drinking age to 18 is shortsighted. Trying to lower the drinking age is a superficial response to a deep issue (“College presidents want lower drinking age,” USATODAY.com, Aug. 18).

It is unlikely that the law would be changed, no matter how many college presidents join this movement. So why are they getting involved?

Know this: Not all students go to college to drink. I’ve talked to countless students across the country who long for their college experience to be different. They are developing virtues of delayed gratification, self-control and sacrifice. They are students who want to think more deeply about the goal of education and the meaning of life. Some are students who have been hurt by the effects of alcohol abuse. Many didn’t mind waiting a few years to drink legally and have learned to do so responsibly.

Developing students such as these will require college presidents with the moral clarity and courage to make strong decisions about what is acceptable behavior at their colleges.

What is needed is an atmosphere on our nation’s campuses conducive to shaping students’ character so that waiting to drink until the age of 21 wouldn’t seem like such a sacrifice.

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A conversation with a religious leader is not protected from being revealed in court unless it occurred in private and the leader was acting as a spiritual adviser, a New Jersey appeals court ruled Wednesday.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the New Jersey Appellate Division ruled that a pastor’s testimony should be allowed at a trial in which a father is facing charges of sexually molesting his two daughters.

While the conversation occurred in private, the pastor did not offer to keep it confidential. Nor did he purport to be acting in the role of a spiritual adviser, and he explicitly refused to counsel the man.

“The conversations between defendant and (the pastor) are not protected by the privilege,” wrote Judge Lorraine Parker.

Prosecutors, who had sought to have the pastor’s testimony included at an upcoming trial, said they were happy with the decision.

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We, as the Bishops and elected leaders of the Common Cause Partnership (CCP) are deeply grateful for the Jerusalem Declaration. It describes a hopeful, global Anglican future, rooted in scripture and the authentic Anglican way of faith and practice. We joyfully welcome the words of the GAFCON statement that it is now time ”˜for the federation currently known as the Common Cause Partnership to be recognized by the Primates Council.’

The intention of the CCP Executive Committee is to petition the Primates Council for recognition of the CCP as the North American Province of GAFCON on the basis of the Common Cause Partnership Articles, Theological Statement, and Covenant Declaration, and to ask that the CCP Moderator be seated in the Primates Council.

We accept the call to build the Common Cause Partnership into a truly unified body of Anglicans. We are committed to that call. Over the past months, we have worked together, increasing the number of partners and authorizing committees and task groups for Mission, Education, Governance, Prayer Book & Liturgy, the Episcopate, and Ecumenical Relations. The Executive Committee is meeting regularly to carry forward the particulars of this call. The CCP Council will meet December 1”“3, 2008.

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