This is part of the bigger problem identified by Dr Wil­liams in his final address. As he put it, the question emerging from Canterbury was not “What is Lambeth ’08 going to say?” but “Where are we going to speak from?” Not only do we not know who is to resolve the Com­munion’s problems ”” if not the Lambeth Conference, then the Primates’ Meeting? ”” we do not know who can define them with any authority. The Windsor Con­tinua­tion Group attracted atten­tion during the Conference because it articulated the problem with candour. The group func­tions as something between a Select Committee and a think tank, however, and the uncer­tainty of its status adheres also to its pro­nouncements. Its remit is merely to submit recommenda­tions to the Anglican Consultative Council next spring, taking into account the bishops’ views as expressed in Canterbury.

Thus the weight given to the group’s resurrection of mora­toriums as the solution to gay consecrations, same-sex blessings, and territorial incursions seems disproportionate. The Episcopal Church in the United States will be uneasy with the request, especially as it is open-ended. When would such a moratorium end? When half the Communion embraces a more tolerant atti­tude? When Muslims in North Africa stop taunting Christians with belonging to a “gay Church”? Similarly, conser­va­tives behind plans to create an alternative US hierarchy have not been im­pressed by attempts to put extra-provincial interventions on the same footing as same-sex blessings. Nothing suggests that they have changed their view.

All this is to say that the Anglican Communion is in a bigger fix than any conference could sort out. On the other hand, the effort and expense of the Lambeth Conference justify the expectation that it will have done something to draw Angli­cans into a more coherent body. This is why the Reflections are so irritating. Where, indeed, are they speaking from? Whether for logistical reasons, or from a desire to avoid clause-by-clause wrang­ling, they were not available to bishops before they were issued. The result is a rich field for the higher criticism. To take a trivial instance, how many bishops asked for a Lambeth Conference every five years? A handful of enthusiasts, or the majority?

This uncertainty must colour any reading of the remarks about sexuality and suggested revisions of the Anglican Covenant ”” a consequence of holding these discussions at the end of the Con­ference, without time to achieve any corporate ownership of the suggestions. Some of the propo­sals would take the Communion back to the drawing board, and there is no sense of the relative weight that the bishops gave to them. The Covenant remains the only game in town. It is note­worthy that it was not dismissed by the bishops, most of whom have reservations about it; but it would have been good to have more than a disjointed set of suggestions.

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Beneath these particular quarrels are two deeper problems within Anglicanism, and these problems shed light on the deeper problems within every ecclesial body derived from the Protestant Reformation.

The first problem is one of identity. Just what is Anglicanism? Before it went global, Anglicanism was the Church of England, with all its genteel and lovely customs. The Anglican Communion was the Church of England transplanted.

Things have moved on. Now, most Anglicans live in Africa. Anglicanism is uncertain about itself. Is it English or African? Is it Protestant or Catholic? Is it essentially liberal? It used to be that no one much cared. Now the Anglicans in all three groups are entrenched and are increasingly adamant about their own stance — and are prepared to fight the other two sides for the heart of their church.

The second foundational problem is the one of church authority. When I was an Anglican priest, thinking through the problem of womenÂ’s ordination, I listened to both sides. They both had their experts. They both had arguments from Scripture. They both had arguments from tradition. They both were made up of prayerful, sincere people who believed they were being led by the Holy Spirit. How to decide?

This question led me to realize that Christians need an external authority structure to make the final call, and of course, that question led me to the banks of the Tiber.

As Catholics, it is important to understand the problems facing Anglicanism because the underlying fault lines can expand into our own church if we are not careful.

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Another resource which is worth the time.

One of my many disappointments with certain radio websites is that their material is only available for a short time after it is originally broadcast. Thus, the BBC Northern Ireland Sunday Sequence segments from last Sunday, August 10th, are now no longer available. However, for those of you who can do podcasts you can get the August 10th show via podcast and it really is worth the time. It is quite a long show (almost one hour and 27 minutes total) and includes many sections and interviews, including, for example, a section on blogging and Lambeth which includes comments from Simon Sarmiento. There is also an interview with Bishop Clive Hanford, Chair of the Windsor Continuation Group, and Archbishop Ian Earnest, Primate of the Indian Ocean, and an interview with Irish Archbishop Alan Harper. The final segment is a panel discussion with Lisa Nolland, David Virtue, Bishop Chilton Knudsen, and activist Peter Tatchell.

The link for the podcast (and remember the date of the one you are after is August 10th, the show entitled “Live from Lambeth”) is here.

On January 15th 2008, the Bishop was informed by the Presiding Bishop that he had been charged with abandonment of the communion. Up until this point no negotiations had happened between the diocese and the Presiding Bishop’s office. The group of rectors who would not realign met on January 18th (a meeting scheduled long before the charges were announced). Since the reason for delaying the statement was to enable negotiations and it was clear that those negotiations were not forthcoming, we decided to write a brief statement about our decision, and pray for the next week about issuing it. At the end of that week we agreed to issue the statement with the twelve signatures. Three members of the group met with the Bishop on January 28th to inform him of the statement after which it was mailed out to every parish on the 29th. Unfortunately, a member of the group sent the statement to the press without consulting the other eleven and so it was in the Pittsburgh papers the day after being sent.

It is not our desire to be disloyal to the diocesan leadership but rather to prayerfully follow where we believe the Lord is leading. Over the past several months Bishop Duncan has made it a priority to visit many parishes of the diocese and to present to the congregation (and often separately to the vestry) his reasons for advocating realignment. As far as I know, every rector who has signed the statement has welcomed the Bishop to make his presentation.

These are difficult times for the Diocese of Pittsburgh and it has been painful for many of us to be divided from colleagues with whom we have deep and abiding friendships. The group that signed the letter has attempted to be as forthright and transparent with the Diocesan leadership about where we are and what we are doing, and we hope to continue to do so in the future. Please keep all of us in prayer.

Read it all.

On the evening of May 21 the Chapman’s’ lives were suddenly horribly shattered when Maria, 5, was accidentally struck and killed by an SUV driven by her brother Will Franklin, 17. “At first you don’t even know if you can breathe. You don’t know if you are going to survive the grief and the deep, deep, deep sadness. You just want to lay down and die,” says Steven, 45, a five-time Grammy winner and one of Christian music’s biggest stars. “Every lyric I’ve ever written has been tested beyond what I ever imagined.”

–People Magazine, August 25, 2008, page 63

Update: Some more here.

Even as Archbishop Williams delivered his up-beat, closing address to the Lambeth Conference, the English bishops of Exeter and Winchester called for the Church to recognize the inevitability of the split and to take steps to ensure that the coming separation was done in a peaceful and equitable manner.

Can anything be done to prevent the African and other conservative dioceses from forming a new church? There are only two actions that could prevent the split. If the U.S. and Canadian branches back down from their acceptance of the rights of gays within the church, or if these two branches themselves withdraw from the Anglican Communion.

Read it all.

In recent weeks energy policy has moved to the fore in the US presidential contest. This is a welcome change: front and centre is where it belongs. Sadly, the issue has come to prominence in a way that inspires little faith that the next president will get it right.

To their credit, Barack Obama and John McCain have repudiated the Bush administration’s neglect of climate change. In addition, both emphasise the need for greater “energy security” and “energy independence” ”“ which is also fine, provided those terms are correctly construed. So far, however, neither has presented a good strategy for achieving these aims, and neither has even begun to prepare the electorate for the costs of such a policy. On this second point, in fact, it is rather the opposite.

The problem is that climate change, economic stability and geopolitics are not the factors that have pushed energy to the fore. The price of petrol at the pump ”“ which one can describe, without exaggeration, as a national obsession ”“ gets the credit for this. At $4 a US gallon, less than half of what one pays in the UK, the distress is extreme. The candidates therefore have to deal with contradictory public sentiments. Voters genuinely want the country to curb its carbon emissions and moderate its addiction to imported oil, but more than that ”“ much more than that ”“ they also want cheap petrol. Presidential candidates are understandably inclined to tell voters they can have everything they want, even when, as in this case, they cannot.

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Studios including Universal, 20th Century Fox and Pathé are failing to include details of the explicit content of films or their age classification on posters and publicity material.

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has sent a warning to the studios reminding them of their obligation.

Its guidelines require that all films which carry the U, PG, 12A, 15 and 18 certificates must display their classification and warnings about sexual or violent content on all promotional material, including trailers.

But inquiries by the BBFC and The Sunday Telegraph have found several new releases being advertised on billboards and in magazines either without their certificate or the warnings, or both.

Read it all.

“KEEP your house” reads the handwritten sign on a chain-link fence some 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. It is an advertisement, although it could be the attitude of an overstretched buyer who owes the bank more money than his home is worth. Many people in Moreno Valley have simply walked away from their properties. As abandoned lawns turn brown in the desert climate, the fallout spreads. It is no longer a matter of saving individual houses, but a whole city.

Until recently Moreno Valley was one of the fastest-growing cities in America. It lies in the Inland Empire, a two-county region in southern California that is so called largely because it is difficult to know how else to characterise such a sprawling expanse of detached homes, strip malls and warehouses. Between 1990 and 2007 the Inland Empire’s population grew from 2.6m to 4.1m””the equivalent of adding a city the size of Philadelphia.

As in other regions now suffering from a rash of foreclosures and falling house prices, such as south Florida and Nevada, rapid growth is itself largely to blame. Moreno Valley had the misfortune to swell at a time of lax lending practices. Whole neighbourhoods were built on cheap credit and inflated expectations””palaces for the middle class. Around Camino del Rey, on the city’s southern edge, huge Spanish-style houses with three-car garages sit empty. The city’s population growth appears to have gone into reverse. Moreno Valley’s high schools expected to enrol 9,850 pupils last year. They fell short by 780.

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“…this opposition to divinely ordained determinacy with regard to bodily gender can only proceed by disregarding divine prohibitions. Veritatis Splendor repeatedly insists that ”˜the negative moral precepts, those prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behavior as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception. They do not leave room, in any morally acceptable way, for the ”˜creativity’ of any contrary determination whatsoever.’”

–Hans Boersma, “On the rejection of boundaries: Radical Orthodoxy’s appropriation of St. Augustine,” Pro Ecclesia 15, 4 (Fall 2006), p 444. (Hat tip:SP)

Speaking to a group of evangelical Christians, Sen. Barack Obama said Saturday that his greatest moral failure — and the country’s — has been selfishness, but his opponent, Sen. John McCain, cited his failed first marriage.

McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, added that the country’s greatest shortcoming has been a tendency to not devote itself “to causes greater than ourselves.”

“I think after 9/11, my friends, we should have told Americans to join the Peace Corps, expand the military, serve a cause greater than your self-interest,” he said.

Obama told the Rev. Rick Warren that “we still don’t abide by that basic precept of Matthew: that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me.

“That basic principle applies to poverty. It applies to racism and sexism; it applies to not thinking about providing ladders of opportunity for people to get into the middle class.”

Posted in * Culture-Watch, * Economics, Politics, Religion & Culture, US Presidential Election 2008

O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his steadfast love endures for ever!

–Psalm 118:1

Power has been draining away from Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf for more than a year. His party suffered a stunning electoral defeat in February that accelerated his isolation. Had he departed peacefully when his constitutional term expired in November 2007, he would have won some respect. Instead, he imposed a state of emergency and sacked the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who was hearing a petition challenging the legality of his presidency. Now Musharraf is under heavy pressure to resign, threatened with impeachment and abandoned by most of his cronies, who accumulated land and money during his term and are now sidling in the direction of the new power brokers.

The February election put the Pakistan People’s Party led by Asif Ali Zardari, husband of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto, at the head of a fragile coalition government with former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League-N. The country moved from a moth-eaten Musharraf dictatorship to a moth-eaten democracy.

Six months later, the ideals of the election, embraced by the hopeful youth and the poor of the country — political morality, the rule of law, civic virtue, food subsidies, freedom and equality of opportunity — once again lie at their feet, broken and scattered. Zardari and his men are extremely unpopular. Removing Musharraf, who is even more unpopular, might buy these venal politicians some time, but not much.

Read it all.

The event reflects the importance of religion in American life and, increasingly, in politics. It also marks the coming of age of a broader brand of evangelicalism that is more socially minded and more diverse than the orthodox religious movement of the Christian right.

The two candidates have been lobbing long-distance attacks at each other for weeks now, but any encounter in person here that is less than cordial would come as a surprise. This is not a debate with partisans cheering from the sidelines; it is a sanctuary. Game face is not only not required, it is discouraged.

Mr. Warren, who personally arranged the meeting through cellphone calls to the candidates, both of whom he knows, said in a statement that his conversations would focus on how they make decisions and what kind of leaders they would be.

“Leadership involves far more than promoting programs and making speeches, and since no one can predict what crises will happen over the next four years, it is vital to know the decision capacity and process of each man,” he said. He also said he wanted to avoid “partisan ”˜gotcha’ questions that typically produce heat instead of light.”

Read it all.

Bestselling author. A Southern Baptist minister who breaks the conservative mold. Touted by some as the likely successor to Billy Graham.

On Saturday, pastor Rick Warren, author of “The Purpose-Driven Life,” will do what no one else has yet accomplished: bring the presumptive GOP and Democratic presidential nominees onto the same stage to discuss their views.

It’s a sign of religion’s importance in the 2008 presidential campaign. The event, back-to-back one-hour interviews at Mr. Warren’s California megachurch, will be broadcast live on CNN and streamed on the Web. It also represents the emergence of a new style of evangelical leadership on the national stage, which is not tied to a single party and has broadened its social agenda beyond that of the religious right.

“This is absolutely a changing of the guard, and it suggests that the new guard of the evangelical movement is able to generate the attention and focus of both parties,” says D. Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University and author of “Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite.”

Read it all.

What a marvel to watch.

Just to give you a flavour, we had a story from Alice [Chung Po Chuen] from Madagascar, whose husband has to walk eight hours to church, where there isn’t a public pathway or proper road to do that. He’s away from home for anything up to six weeks at a time; so Alice has to hold together a household and keep the family together. She resigned her job as a leading product-development man­ager in Mauritius after her husband’s consecration, and relo­cated to Madagascar. There is a very painful story, but one that Alice is living and working with great joy and fortitude.

Then there is the story of Mugisa [Isingoma] from the Congo. Congo suffered many, many years of conflict, and still does, and she and her family felt called to come and exercise a ministry in the role of reconciliation, bringing together two ethnic groups.

Her husband was arrested and his life was in danger, and had it not been for the intervention of the then Archbishop of Canterbury and others he would not be alive. When you hear Mugisa tell her story, again you’re touched by the passion and commitment with which she feels called to minister alongside her husband.

It is very humbling, and it has been a good learning experience sharing with our brothers and sisters from across the Communion.

Read it all.

I’ve been discussing themes that will be developed in a forthcoming book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile. The book, God willing and my complying, will be out in the first part of next year. As you may remember from last week, the subject is living an authentic Christian life between the “now” of Christ’s victory and the “not yet” of a promised Kingdom delayed.

Great are the uncertainties and the awesome stakes, in this dialectic, this complex back-and-forth of remembering and anticipation; of living the brief moment of what is between what was and what is to be, never losing sight of a destination that transcends history but does not leave history behind. The “new heaven and new earth” of the book of Revelation does not abandon this heaven and this earth. Rather, they are taken up into transcendent fulfillment. It is not as though this earthly city grows and develops into the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem. It is not a matter of historical progress but of eschatological promise.

Eschatology refers to the last things, the final things, the ultimate destination of the story of God’s dealings with the world of his creation. In the Christian view, that destination, that eschaton, has already appeared within history in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. As the New Testament scholar N.T. Wright nicely puts it, the resurrection of the crucified Jesus is not a story about a happy ending but about a new beginning. In the resurrection and in the abiding presence of the resurrected Lord in his body, the Church, the absolute future breaks into present time. Because the principalities and powers rage against the new world order inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus, that future is discernible only by faith. In the words of St. Paul, “we walk by faith, not by sight.”

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PAMELA FERDIN (Animal Rights Activist): Excuse me, can I give you a leaflet about the torture and murder of primates going inside the laboratories of UCLA?

SAUL GONZALEZ: On a recent afternoon, a group of activists gathered outside the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) to protest the use of animals in laboratory research at the school.

Ms. FERDIN: It’s immoral. It’s unethical and evil to take non-consenting animals and, against their will, do these horrific things.

GONZALEZ: These demonstrators are peaceful, but in the last few years more militant animal rights activists have waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation against UCLA scientists involved in animal experimentation, such as using primates to investigate methamphetamine and nicotine addiction. The activists’ tactics have ranged from publishing researchers’ home addresses on Web sites to leaving threatening telephone messages.

VOICE OF UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Quit working on animals. Quit torturing and abusing animals. We can cause more economic damage in one night than you can earn in a year.

GONZALEZ: UCLA faculty members even have had pipe bombs planted at their homes. These episodes have created a climate of fear among researchers on campus.

Read it all.

While Barack Obama and his family were sunning on the beach in Hawaii last week, it was full speed ahead at his headquarters here. When I visited for the first time, the suite of rooms on the 11th floor of a rather posh office building on North Michigan Avenue — known as “The Magnificent Mile” — was filled with young people, most of them engrossed with the laptops on their desks.

I went there in part to take the temperature of Obama’s senior aides before next week’s opening of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Having seen the Obama “machine” at work in places from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina and elsewhere during the nomination fight, I was curious how they were gearing up for their first national campaign.

The answer to the first question is that they seem very confident.

As for the second, they appear to have expanded the scope of their efforts without losing the purposeful focus that was so important in the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the other challengers.

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The Saddleback Civil Forum on Leadership and Compassion marks the first joint appearance by John McCain and Barack Obama this campaign season. It’s moderated by pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren.

Listen to it all from NPR.

For those of you interested, it is available here as a pdf file.

The Olympic Basketball Gymnasium here is the first N.B.A.-style arena in China. From the Black Eyed Peas’ singing “Let’s Get It Started” at tip-off to the scantily clad halftime dancers, it has all the trappings of an N.B.A. showcase.

The United States team showed again Saturday night that it is right at home in Beijing. The gym has been host to a show of basketball gluttony that could be known as Team USA Revival.

In their most thorough and dominating performance of these Olympics, the Americans trounced Spain, the reigning world champion and their supposed stiffest competition, 119-82. It was such a thorough demolition that the Spanish star Pau Gasol was asked in the postgame news conference whether his team had tanked the game.

He dismissed the question, in the same way his teammates had no answer for the Americans, who forced 28 turnovers, outscored Spain by 32-0 on fast-break points and had eight players score in double figures.

Read it all. Our son Nathaniel, a Duke fanantic if ever there were one, keeps saying, Dad, of course they are going to win, they have Coach K. They are playing really well, especially Dwyane Wade.

Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, on Saturday signed a revised framework for a deal to halt the fighting in neighboring Georgia, which has stirred some of the deepest divisions between world powers since the cold war. But the Kremlin then indicated that despite the accord’s approval, it would not immediately pull its troops from the country.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, told reporters that Russian forces would stay in Georgia as long as they were needed. He said their withdrawal would depend on the introduction of what he called additional security measures, without explaining what those were.

“The basic agreements do not determine the ceiling for the peacekeeping contingents,” Mr. Lavrov said. “How long it will take, I have already emphasized that it depends not only on us. We are constantly facing problems created by the Georgian side.”

Speaking at his ranch in Texas, President Bush described the Russian endorsement of the cease-fire as a “hopeful step.”

Read it all.

A tie.

With the Fall programs, and regular attendance in church, every member canvasses will be getting to their final stages””unless you use year-round canvasses. But, has your Vestry implemented a planned giving program to benefit your church? I had a phone message last week from a Rector informing me of a $50,000 bequest of which the church was notified. That is one Vestry with a pleasant task of dealing with the remembrance of its mission efforts. This type of task is one that comes from a planned giving program which starts with wills””have you remembered the Church in your will?

The receiving of bequests is the result of intentional teaching of the gospel and its message of abundance and thanksgiving. The Foundation is a resource to provide you with materials, speakers, and information to assist you in informing our members of this scriptural requirement. It would be a blessing to report to Convention that EVERY church in the Diocese had received an appropriate bequest. This will not happen without intentional instruction from our church leaders.

–Rick Harrison Smith, the Executive Director of the Episcopal Foundation, as quoted in the Aurora, the online newsletter of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern California

I am writing to share with you the news that I have been invited (and have accepted) the invitation to take up a key mission post for South America with South American Mission Society (SAMS)/Church Mission Society (CMS). SAMS and CMS are currently finalizing integration talks that may well lead to the formation of a single organization of both of these mission agencies. Their final decisions are expected by early December, after which I will become either Director for South America in the newly-integrated society or Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for a continuing SAMS.

CMS has a very exciting vision for worldwide mission in the Anglican Communion and SAMS will complete the vision with the South American contribution. SAMS administratively has been scattered around England and this move would consolidate all the staff at the CMS headquarters in Oxford. The long term vision is to enable a South American mission office which would coordinate mission work in, from and to South America. Obviously my history with SAMS both in Argentina and Spain (now 18 years ago) and my experience on the SAMS USA board will be very useful.

So, apart from the excitement of a new challenge, why am I leaving Pittsburgh now? One thing I need to be very clear about is that my decision does not reflect any change of heart regarding realignment or my confidence in the vision and leadership of the diocese. Most of you will know of the birth of our first granddaughter in December 2007. Sophie is certainly a major pull for both Catherine and me; we would love to be nearer the family to be able to support them. It is an added bonus that our son, Joel, and his wife Sarah, live in Oxford, at least until he finishes his doctoral studies.

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