On Sept. 2, as many as 750 pastors and church workers are expected to crowd into the sanctuary at Calvary Church in south Charlotte, some of them driving in from as far as 60 miles away.

They’re coming not to sing, pray or hear sermons, but to watch a movie.

“Billy: The Early Years,” the new feature film about Charlotte-born Billy Graham, won’t hit theaters until Oct. 10. But the movie’s producers, based in California and England, are hoping to build some buzz in the coming weeks by holding more than 50 such sneak peeks for evangelical “opinion makers” across the Bible Belt.

In South Carolina, advance screenings are scheduled for Columbia, Conway, Greenville and Spartanburg, according to the movie Web site www.advancefilmscreenings.com. The site states that Charleston is one of five South Carolina “opening cities” in which the movie will be shown beginning Oct. 10; the others are Greenville, Columbia, Myrtle Beach and Florence. Specific theaters are not listed.

Good reviews from critics are nice, but the thumbs-up producers of Christian films want most these days are from pastors urging their flocks to head for the theater.

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He’s the scold and scourge of lenders of all stripes ””well, almost all ”” and he’s taking his one-man financial road show to the Lowcountry today to preach a singular message: Debt is dumb; cash is king.

It’s an attitude that syndicated radio talk-show host and best-selling author Dave Ramsey honed from a deeply humbling personal experience. He and wife, Sharon, went broke twice in the 1980s, after his debt-laden real estate business suddenly crumbled. The couple vowed never again to borrow money and become what he sometimes calls “a slave to the lender.”

“I’m not going to get into a mess again. I’m not going to go there,” he said.

An estimated 5,000 people are expected to take in Ramsey’s five-hour marathon on money matters today at the North Charleston Coliseum, with many looking for ways to put their financial houses in order. He describes his live show as a mix of no-nonsense advice and stand-up comedy.

“The medicine I’m delivering is strong enough that it needs to have some humor with it,” he said.

Ramsey began his second career as a debt counselor in the early 1990s, starting at his local church and eventually parlaying his quick wit, candor and knack for financial plain-speaking into a multimedia empire.

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Friday the financial crisis that has pounded the country — coupled with higher inflation — is taking a toll on the economy and poses a major challenge to Fed policymakers as they try to restore stability.

“Although we have seen improved functioning in some markets, the financial storm that reached gale force” around this time last year “has not yet subsided, and its effects on the broader economy are becoming apparent in the form of softening economic activity and rising unemployment,” Bernanke said in a speech to a high-profile economics conference here.

While Bernanke welcomed the recent drops in oil and other commodities’ prices, and believes inflation will moderate this year and next, the Fed chief also warned the inflation outlook remains highly uncertain.

The Fed, he said, would monitor the situation closely and will “act as necessary” to make sure that inflation doesn’t get out of hand.

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The House of Bishops will meet in special session Sept. 17-19 in Salt Lake City, Utah, with the Lambeth Conference being the primary topic on the agenda.

Normally during a Lambeth Conference year there is no fall meeting of the House of Bishops, said Neva Rae Fox, program officer for public affairs at the Episcopal Church Center. But at their March meeting, the bishops felt it was important to meet to debrief after the conference.

Four sessions devoted to Lambeth are on the preliminary agenda, according to Ms. Fox….

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Barack Obama named Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential running mate early Saturday, balancing his ticket with a seasoned congressional veteran well-versed in foreign policy and defense issues.

Obama announced the pick on his Web site with a photo of the two men and an appeal for donations. A text message went out shortly afterward that said, “Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee.”

Biden, 65, has twice sought the White House, and is a Catholic with blue-collar roots, a generally liberal voting record and a reputation as a long-winded orator.

Across more than 30 years in the Senate, he has served at various times not only as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee but also as head of the Judiciary Committee, with its jurisdiction over anti-crime legislation, Supreme Court nominees and Constitutional issues.

In selecting Biden, Obama passed over several other potential running mates, none more prominent than former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, his tenacious rival in dozens of primaries and caucuses.

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According to Cathedral Provost Canon Catherine Brall, the draft resolution was prepared over the last several months by the Cathedral Chapter and sent to all active members of the Trinity on August 22. Cathedral parish members will have a number of opportunities to discuss the resolution over the next three weeks, and then will come together for a final all-parish meeting on September 14.

Canon Brall praised the work of the Chapter, saying that the ideas encapsulated in the resolution “grew out of a very thorough and wonderful season of Chapter members seeking to envision how Trinity Cathedral might best position itself to fulfill its unique identity and destiny as a historic Penn Land Grant Church deeded to foster and preserve Anglican and Episcopal worship.”

Bishop Duncan also thanked the Chapter for their work and commended the resolution to the Cathedral parish membership. “Trinity Cathedral, more than any other church building in the diocese, belongs not just to whoever may “win” the right to administer it in our sad divisions, but to all of us, to the city, and the whole region. I see this resolution as a good initiative to acknowledge and protect that unique role and to protect the Cathedral’s future as Mother Church of all Anglicans and of the City,” he said.

Read it all and check out the full text of the resolution here also.

But why now? And is Bishop Lamb possibly hoisting himself on his own petard here? Word has it that he is planning a “diocesan convention,” to be held in Hanford in October””conveniently the same weekend that the Southern Conites are planning theirs in Fresno (45 miles away). We’re back to the “you can’t have it both ways” situation that I outlined here. If Bishop Lamb wants to maintain the fiction that his “diocese” is indeed the rightful manifestation of the entity that existed as the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin prior to December 8 of last year, then every member of the clergy whom he does not depose is presently “in good standing,” and entitled to seat, voice, and vote at any convention of the diocese. The total of those so eligible is in the neighborhood of 110. According to the constitution of the diocese (as it read prior to December 8), a quorum of clergy for the transaction of business would be 37, give or take. He doesn’t have that many, but he could be within striking distance if he can cull the total in order to reduce the number needed for a quorum. So there’s some incentive to “downsize.”

Of course, there is also a quorum requirement in the lay order. In San Joaquin, this requires the registered presence of at least one elected delegate from one-third of the congregations that are in union with the diocese. Since the story that they’re sticking to is that dioceses can’t leave TEC, and therefore ADSJ hasn’t, then that means none of the parishes have either. (See the cyber-version of the Episcopal Church Annual””aka the Red Book. The page for the Diocese of San Joaquin lists nearly all the congregations that were part of the pre-12/8/07 entity, including a direct link to the website of my former parish, which, when one clicks on it, reveals a congregation that is very much gone from the Episcopal Church! The irony is mind-boggling.) So there would need to be at least one delegate from some 15 congregations in order to have a valid convention. This is a harder nut to crack, since a bishop cannot just “depose” a congregation. It takes an act of convention. But if there’s no quorum, there’s no convention. To top it all off, there is some question whether all the congregations Bishop Lamb claims are part of his diocese have even been informed officially of the upcoming convention, such notice being required by diocesan canons. And this is to say nothing of the congregations (four, as I count them) that were “planted” by the EDSJ after the split; this only raises the threshold for a canonical quorum. Want some Dramamine?

Read it all.

Stephen Crittenden: And …[Archbishop Rowan Williams] seems to have carried that through with the support of Primates. In fact like Phillip Aspinall from Australia, he made it fairly clear he was behind it. So there seems to have been at least a central group who was in favour of pursuing that right through the conference and out the other side.

Bruce Kaye: Absolutely. And the second thing he saw support for was what he called his ‘pastoral forum’, designed to help people who are minorities in particular provinces. And then he said a number of other things, how the instruments of communion work, and international development work and so on.

What I think that means is that what you have is a conference of general conversation in which the President, Archbishop Rowan Williams, identifies back to the conference what really was the consensus general direction of the conference, without any voting on that question.

Stephen Crittenden: Given his reputation, he’s actually being very bureaucratically and strategically clever on this occasion.

Bruce Kaye: Well I was going to say he’s been very papal, actually.

Stephen Crittenden: The draft covenant that the bishops saw at Lambeth seems to have been more punitive and legalistic than the majority of the bishops present were comfortable with.

Bruce Kaye: I think the general consensus according to the documents produced so far, was that they didn’t like the appendix, which is very bureaucratic.

Stephen Crittenden: Is the Anglican church going to end up with a document or indeed some new institution, a pastoral council or a faith and order committee that actually does have real teeth? I mean this gets back to the whole way the Anglican tradition deals with conflict.

Bruce Kaye: Yes, it does. I’m not sure what will happen in that direction, but I’m sure that there’ll be persistent efforts to try and find some way of making decisions about levels of affiliation.

Stephen Crittenden: In other words, if you’re not willing to give up a certain degree of autonomy, you may have to settle for a lower level of participation in the central church?

Bruce Kaye: I think that’s right.

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Some local Episcopalians will soon have a chance to personally ask questions of the church’s top U.S. official.

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church, will visit parishes in Augusta, Savannah and Statesboro on Sept. 12-14.

Jefferts Schori’s visit starts with a closed meeting with clergy of the diocese and those studying for ordination Sept. 12 at Trinity Episcopal Church in Statesboro.

She will meet with laity and diocesan officials Sept. 13, at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in two, two-hour sessions. The morning and afternoon meetings each include an hour of question-and-answer with the audience. Some questions will be submitted in advance but some will be taken from the floor.

“We’re trying to do this so she gets a fair breadth of diocesan concerns,” said the Rev. Jim Parker, spokesman for the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia.

The diocese is issuing tickets to the sessions at St. Peter’s, which holds seating for “several hundred,” Parker said. The church comfortably seats at least 400 people in the pews.

The event is not open to the public. Episcopalians who would like to attend are asked to contact their pastors.

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A LEADING Georgian churchman this week described the situation in his country as “appalling”, despite some signs of a Russian withdrawal.

Archbishop Malkhaz Songula­shvili, of the Georgian Evangelical Baptist Church returned to Georgia on Sunday to reports of looting and rape by Russian troops.

He said that the Georgian people feel “humiliated and devastated” by the situation, and he believed many displaced people could die if they did not receive food and shelter before winter.

“I cannot believe what I am seeing on TV footage: Russian soldiers are plundering villages and taking truck­loads of goods, even people’s clothes. They’re taking everything, and there are reports of rape, and people being kidnapped for ransom, by South Ossetians backed by Russian troops.”

The Archbishop estimates that about 60,000 people have fled to the capital Tbilisi, where they are being housed in hospitals and schools, often with little medical or food supplies.

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A few weeks ago, a group called Roman Catholic Womenpriests staged what it called an ordination, vesting three Boston-area women in white chasubles and red stoles. It told the local papers that the ordinations were valid, despite the Catholic Church’s teaching to the contrary; it even asserted episcopal approval from a rogue bishop whose name it won’t reveal. But, as a statement from the Archdiocese of Boston put it: “Catholics who attempt to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the women who attempt to receive a sacred order, are by their own actions separating themselves from the Church.” In other words: The ordinations were not Catholic.

Don’t tell that to Judy Lee, one of the “priests.” She insists that the archdiocese’s pronouncement will be a dead letter: “We are Roman Catholics. . . . The all-male hierarchy and their legal traditions came along with the spiritual package that we embrace. We do not have to embrace both if they are contradictory.” Bridget Meehan, spokeswoman for Roman Catholic Womenpriests, which claims 61 priests in North America, including one bishop, insists: “Nothing or no one can stop the action of God’s Spirit moving in the Church. . . . We are not discouraged by excommunication. In fact, in many ways, it is a catalyst for growth.” Ms. Meehan, who was ordained in 2006, believes that a “more transparent, community model” can bring nonpracticing Catholics back into the fold.

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Watch it all.

Taking a step that professors may view as a bit counterproductive, some universities are doling out Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods to students.

The always-on Internet devices raise some novel possibilities, like tracking where students congregate. With far less controversy, colleges could send messages about canceled classes, delayed buses, campus crises or just the cafeteria menu.

While schools emphasize its usefulness ”” online research in class and instant polling of students, for example ”” a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Basking in the aura of a cutting-edge product could just help a university foster a cutting-edge reputation.

Apple stands to win as well, hooking more young consumers with decades of technology purchases ahead of them. The lone losers, some fear, could be professors.

Students already have laptops and cellphones, of course, but the newest devices can take class distractions to a new level. They practically beg a user to ignore the long-suffering professor struggling to pass on accumulated wisdom from the front of the room ”” a prospect that teachers find galling and students view as, well, inevitable.

“When it gets a little boring, I might pull it out,” acknowledged Naomi J. Pugh, a first-year student at Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn., referring to her new iPod Touch, which can connect to the Internet over a campus wireless network. She speculated that professors might try harder to make classes interesting if they were competing with the devices.

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A nice profile of one family involved in this year’s Olympics–watch it all.

An Illinois man has petitioned the state supreme court to weigh in on a clause in his father’s will that disinherits grandchildren who marry non-Jewish spouses.

In a 2-1 decision, a state appeals court on June 30 upheld a lower court ruling that a provision in a will known as the “Jewish clause” was “unenforceable” and “contrary to state policies.”

“I believe (the case) does create a precedent for conditions attached to estate planning,” said Michael J. Durkin, attorney for Michael Feinberg, who wants the “Jewish clause” in his father Max Feinberg’s will held intact.

“It would be a reduction of a person’s right to dispose of his or her property as he sees fit, and an intervention by virtue of public policy by those rights.”

Read the whole article.

Over the succeeding five years [since 2003], the inability of Anglican bishops to worship round a common altar has not been addressed, and even with a boycott of over 200 bishops the opening eucharist in Canterbury Cathedral saw three primates and a number of bishops refrain from receiving communion due to their theological difficulties with the American church. These positions were not softened during the three weeks at Lambeth, but hardened with some bishops convinced that dialogue in the terms proposed by Dr. Williams was now fruitless.

Up until now, the Anglican Communion has held together “by appealing to diversity,” Bishop [Greg] Venables said.

However, he asked “Can we sacrifice what we believe for unity? I don’t think we can make that decision on the spur of the moment. It is unfair to ask people to sacrifice their convictions for the sake of a unity that is by no means certain.”

The attempts at conversation had not worked. “I hoped we would be able to talk about very serious things, we tried to but were unable to,” he said. The small group process helped “but there wasn’t enough trust. The level of conflict, fear, mistrust, frustration hasn’t allowed it.”

The problem of authority within Anglicanism was not being addressed, he argued. “Anglicanism has always said we were not a vertical church, but now it would help to have a council of cardinals to help us.”

“You have authority in the local church, authority in the diocese, authority in the province, why not have it in the whole church?” he asked. However, there are “no ground rules to define the Anglican Church. No ground rules outside the province. Now we have no way of avoiding the division,” Bishop Venables said.

“We talk but nothing is decided. People are frustrated,” and Lambeth 2008 did not address these needs, Bishop Venables said.

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Another factor has a profound influence as we consider Anglican strains around the world – a much greater influence than I had realized previously. The distinct polity (church governance) of the Episcopal Church is included; however, this is a larger and more significant matter than polity alone. As Americans, our country was born in revolution, and our individual rights are matters that hold almost a holy quality for us. Our constitutional Bill of Rights is nearly sacred writ in our self-understanding.

Yet the Anglican world values communion and community life as still higher aspirations and greater goods. Individual self restraint and forbearance for the sake of the common good are entirely consistent with Anglican values and priorities in most of the world. Matters involving individual rights and personal justice do not take as high a priority in many other countries as they do in our own. In many places, focus of attention is directed to the whole, rather than to the parts. Please understand that neither is excluded, but the emphasis is often different.

To express this matter as I heard it put repeatedly at Lambeth – when all the Instruments of Communion agreed on a direction for all churches of the Communion, it astounded our fellow Anglicans that we in the Episcopal Church did not follow that course. I need to add that colleagues in Great Britain and elsewhere considered the actions of General Convention 2003 to be much more confrontational to the entire Communion than I did at the time. Having spent these weeks at Lambeth, I do understand better their perception of apparent American disregard of Communion concerns. In the view of many Anglican colleagues, the Archbishop of Canterbury, along with the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates, all indicated disagreement with consecration of an openly gay man in a partnered relationship and yet the Episcopal Church did precisely that. Therefore, our appeals to Provincial polity have a very individualistic and hollow ring in the ears of many fellow Anglicans.

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Phil Dalhausser blocked out the score, the sun and the sounds of the crowd that danced for Brazil while samba music shook the Olympic beach volleyball venue for the gold medal game.

Then he blocked just about everything else.

Rejecting four straight shots in the decisive set of the final on Friday to turn a tight match into a blowout, Dalhausser did it again on the championship point to give the Americans the sport’s first Olympic gold medal sweep.

“I got in a zone, I guess,” Dalhausser said. “I blocked it all out. It’s just one of those things where you see everything perfectly and it all seems to be in slow motion.”

Read it all. I caught it live during the morning run this morning–they played great. I especially enjoyed the after match interview in which they noted how much they benefited from losing early on to Latvia–a match I also caught.

Master cellist Bernard Greenhouse, 92, and his 300-year-old Stradivarius cello have been constant companions for the last half century.

Greenhouse was a founding member of the legendary Beaux Arts Trio, which plays its final U.S. concert at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts.

Make sure to take the time to listen to it all. A superb example of what a real musician is, and what a sense of calling means.

I am around more young people these days than at any point since I was young myself. Between my work…and my status as the parent of teenagers, I hear much of what young people have to say, both the things they say to adults and the things they say to each other. They say a lot ”” some of it scary, of course, but also much of it reassuring.

But here is something I never hear any of them say: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Only adults ask that question, and whenever I hear it, I cringe. I mean, this is mostly from people in their forties and fifties ”“ a group for whom you’d think the experience of deciding, re-thinking, re-deciding, and finally (sometimes) deciding not to decide, would be a fresh one….

My husband tells a story about when he was working as a reporter. He asked a question of Senator [George] Mitchell, during the Iran-Contra affair, and the Senator replied, “I disagree with the premise of your question. If you’d like to ask another, I’ll try to answer it.” Whenever I feel myself starting to ask a student what he or she wants to be, I remind myself that the premise of the question is wrong. It’s not what to be, it’s who.

–Alison M. Bennie

Six months into my junior year at Bowdoin College, I was deployed to Iraq with the Marines. I went from sitting in my Middle East politics class in a quaint Maine town to patrolling the war-torn city of Fallujah. My two lives could not have been more different: I didn’t write papers, play soccer or see kegs in Anbar province. But both Bowdoin and the Marines have made me who I am today. I joined the Marine Reserves for the same reasons I chose Bowdoin: to learn, to meet new people, to improve myself and to gain new perspectives.

When I returned to school after my yearlong tour of duty, I re-entered my Middle East politics class and wrote my final paper on the political choices facing Iraq. Knowing how to detect an IED doesn’t help much with a 12-page essay. But I was a better Marine for learning about the Arab world in the classroom, and I was a better student because of the eight months I lived on the front lines of the Arab world.

When I switched from campus to combat zone, I still carried my other life with me, just like my fellow Marines who left their civilian lives to serve our country. I was always eager for the arrival of the mail convoy, which carried with it notes from friends and family, professors and staff at Bowdoin. Back home, people still ask me why I joined. There isn’t a single answer. As a kid, I kept a poster of a Marine in my room and was always interested in the military. In the Maine town where I grew up, most people do not go to college. Bowdoin seemed like another world. I wanted to get an education and do something honorable; joining the Marine Reserves was a way to serve others and to move the country forward.

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Two weeks before leaving to compete in the Olympics, the archer Brady Ellison waded into a pool not far from the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif., and was baptized in the Christian faith.

In the water with him was Kisik Lee, the head coach of the United States archery team and a Christian who has become a spiritual guide for Ellison, 19, and the larger group of athletes who train and live full time at the Olympic Training Center. He has also served as a sponsor in the baptism of three other resident archers.

During the Olympics, Lee and at least three of the five United States archers who qualified to compete in Beijing met every morning to sing hymns and read from the Bible, and to attend church together in the chapel at the Olympic Village. Lee believes having a strong faith makes for better archers because it helps quiet their minds. To that end, he tailored Ellison’s Olympic schedule to include spiritual and athletic objectives.

“I give him six tasks a day, including reading the Bible and education,” Lee said. “And he’s doing it.”

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Many avid readers know the sense of sadness that can come along with the end of a book. For Ammon Shea, that feeling led him to an idea. Why not read one of the longest books out there, The Oxford English Dictionary?

“I figured if I was reading a book that was almost 22,000 pages long, that that feeling would take significantly longer to come around,” Shea told Renee Montagne….

But Shea says that what also made the reading enjoyable for him was the chance to unearth “wonderful words that are kind of hidden in the depths of the English vocabulary that we don’t come across.”

And once he has learned about a new word, Shea said, he finds himself thinking about the concept it describes more often.

An example, he says, is “petrichor,” a word for the scent that rises from pavement after rain has begun to fall.

“It’s a beautiful smell,” Shea said. “I’ve always loved that smell, when it first starts raining.”

Read or listen to it all (Hat tip: Elizabeth).

Unlike its sister churches in the Anglican Communion, the Protestant Episcopal Church of the U. S. has never had an archbishop. But last week it took a step to get itself within three years the next thing to an archbishop. Hitherto U. S. Episcopalians have merely chosen a Presiding Bishop, expected him simultaneously to run his own diocese and head the church at large. The present Presiding Bishop, the Right Rev. Henry St. George Tucker of Virginia, has a nationwide job but ecclesiastical authority only in Virginia. Most often he is in Manhattan, where he must get leave from Bishop William Thomas Manning to officiate in the chapel of the Church Missions House.

Last week the Episcopalians’ 53rd triennial General Convention, at Kansas City, did not quite get around to creating an archbishopric but it voted to make the National Cathedral at Washington the official seat of the Presiding Bishop, thus giving him a national pulpit for his pronouncements. Eventually the change may mean that the diocese of Washington will become a primatial see for the U. S. such as Canterbury is for England.

Not likely to be the first U. S. Episcopal archbishop is lean, spiritual Bishop Tucker, who as a good Virginia Low Churchman would dislike the trappings of the office. He will reach the retirement age for Presiding Bishops (68) at the next General Convention in 1943, when by a pleasant coincidence Bishop James Edward Freeman of Washington will reach the newly set retirement age for other bishops (72). With the two offices falling vacant at once, Episcopalians will then have a good excuse for merging them.

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A majority of Americans believe that divine intervention can trump doctors’ advice in end-of-life cases, according to a new report published in Archives of Surgery.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut, found that 57 percent of adults believe in the possibility of a miracle even after doctors have told them a family member’s life can’t be saved.

Just 20 percent of trauma professionals felt divine intervention could save a patient.

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For many Asian Americans, the family is a pivotal force. It may provide their main source of strength and support, but when things go wrong, it may also be their greatest torment.

Psychologists at the University of California, Davis, say that conflict within the family appears to affect Asian Americans more adversely than other negative factors, such as depression or poverty ”” to the point of increasing their risk of suicide. The new findings are based on a preliminary analysis of data collected from in-person interviews with more than 2,000 Asian Americans, aged 18 or older, as part of the federally funded 2003 National Latino and Asian American Study. The author of the new paper, whose data were presented Aug. 17 at the American Psychological Association meeting in Boston, seeks to highlight how profound the impact of the family may be for many Asian Americans ”” something that many mental-health professionals may not fully appreciate when dealing with an ethnic minority that is often reluctant to seek counseling.

“In general, Asian Americans are not likely to talk about their psychological problems,” says Stanley Sue, a professor of psychology and Asian American studies at U.C. Davis. “Community practitioners notice that Asian Americans are less likely to self-disclose their personal problems.” Studies suggest that Asian Americans are also less likely than other groups to use mental health services in cases where it may help, Sue says, preferring to rely on culturally acceptable traditions of discipline and family order.

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Some Americans are having a change of heart about mixing religion and politics. A new survey finds a narrow majority of the public saying that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters and not express their views on day-to-day social and political matters. For a decade, majorities of Americans had voiced support for religious institutions speaking out on such issues.

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center reveals that most of the reconsideration of the desirability of religious involvement in politics has occurred among conservatives. Four years ago, just 30% of conservatives believed that churches and other houses of worship should stay out of politics. Today, 50% of conservatives express this view.

As a result, conservatives’ views on this issue are much more in line with the views of moderates and liberals than was previously the case. Similarly, the sharp divisions between Republicans and Democrats that previously existed on this issue have disappeared.

There are other signs in the new poll about a potential change in the climate of opinion about mixing religion and politics. First, the survey finds a small but significant increase since 2004 in the percentage of respondents saying that they are uncomfortable when they hear politicians talk about how religious they are – from 40% to 46%. Again, the increase in negative sentiment about religion and politics is much more apparent among Republicans than among Democrats.

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The conference has ended now with the final plenary in the big tent and the Closing Eucharist in Canterbury Cathedral. The Anglican Communion exists at many levels. Jane Williams said this afternoon in her closing remarks that whatever gets decided or not decided by the bishops, whatever declarations and statements are made, the spouses are clear that communion is about relationships. They will remain together whatever happens.

Archbishop Rowan, in his final address, said something similar. A covenant, he said, can take many forms. Individual bishops can covenant with each other for prayer, mutual support and common mission. He seemed to be suggesting that, whatever the political outcomes of the current disagreements-the Body of Christ is capable of sustaining many layers of relationship.

The Archbishop’s closing address was both clear and, at the same time, highly nuanced. He would like to see official rites for same-sex blessing withdrawn and invading bishops go home. At the same time, he recognizes this may not be possible for everyone for the sake of conscience. While calling for uniformity he also recognizes that the Church needs the questions of its innovators and the voices of its prophets. He seemed to chastise us but, also, to rule us on-side. I’ll try to bring Lambeth home, and we’ll have to consider deeply what it wants us to do. But for now, I want to thank all of you for your prayers.

Read it all.

Something strange seems to happen at one of the most important and terrible moments of life and I hardly believe it is only to me; throughout one of the central moments of our culture and our personal experiences one has to keep editing out, so to speak, the bits that one truly cannot accept. This is even worse if one is unlucky enough to have a silly or tactless vicar, a rash intruding priest who tramples on gentle Anglican ambiguities and uncertainties.

I feel the same reading religious poetry or sermons, some of which I love. Poetry, like religion, is supposed to be about truth, or at least to be truthful, and yet if one has constantly to translate, so to speak, some of its central ideas into another idiom ”“ if one has to translate the religious notion of redemption into something secular, for example ”“ there comes a moment when it loses its power, or at least when one cannot take it seriously.

Some people I talked to, a couple of them actors and agnostics, were not troubled by any of this. They said that they are affected by sound, performance, the power of words; they don’t seem to be confined by my literal-mindedness. I do see that literal-mindedness can be petty and reductive; a great deal of communication happens outside literal meaning. All the same, for an unbeliever what meaning can there be at all in Julian of Norwich’s saying that all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well? Words are only partly music; they must offer sense as well as sensation.

Yet what alternative can there be to one’s own tradition? It is hard, unilaterally and suddenly, to create a new ritual…

Read it all.