Is the United States no longer the global beacon of unfettered, free-market capitalism?

In extending a last-minute $85 billion lifeline to American International Group, the troubled insurer, Washington has not only turned away from decades of rhetoric about the virtues of the free market and the dangers of government intervention, but it has also probably undercut future American efforts to promote such policies abroad.

“I fear the government has passed the point of no return,” said Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian. “We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams.”

The bailout package for A.I.G., on top of earlier government support for Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has stunned even European policy makers accustomed to government intervention ”” even as they acknowledge the shock of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

“For opponents of free markets in Europe and elsewhere, this is a wonderful opportunity to invoke the American example,” said Mario Monti, the former antitrust chief at the European Commission. “They will say that even the standard-bearer of the market economy, the United States, negates its fundamental principles in its behavior.”

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The wonder of financial crises is how events can move straight from impossible to inevitable, without ever passing through improbable.

Two weeks ago nobody would have imagined that, before the end of the month, the Bush Administration would have nationalised the world’s biggest insurance company, that two of the four biggest global investment banks would be out of business and that the US Government would take responsibility for three quarters of the country’s new mortgage loans.

Sadly, the events of the past two weeks may be only the prelude, not the climax, of this amazing crisis. Even the apparent rescue of Halifax Bank of Scotland may result in a bigger crisis, if the drowning HBOS drags down its rescuer, Lloyds TSB. If this happens, every big bank in Britain, except possibly HSBC, will have to be nationalised, Northern Rock-style.

The same would become inevitable in the US if market speculators who have been richly rewarded by the US Government for taking down Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers and AIG, turn their attention to the next group of stumbling financial institutions in the firing line: Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citibank. If any of these wounded giants collapses, the others will fall like dominoes and the entire US financial system will have to be nationalised. In a financial crisis, the impossible can become inevitable in one day, as we saw in Britain on Black Wednesday.

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Adoption of the proposed Anglican Covenant could be completed much sooner than the 10-year time frame mentioned frequently during the Lambeth Conference, according to one of the two Covenant Design Group members from The Episcopal Church.

Basing on submissions received from bishops attending the Lambeth Conference, the Rev. Ephraim Radner predicted that only a small minority of provinces would fail to approve the Covenant. Prof. Radner, who teaches historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto, said the Covenant Design Group is scheduled to disband after holding a second meeting sometime after the first of the year. From there, the Covenant is scheduled to be considered by the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), which meets next May in Jamaica.

Prof. Radner told The Living Church it is not clear whether the ACC would be asked to hold an up-or-down vote on the final language drafted by the Covenant Design Group or whether they would be encouraged to propose amendments before a vote.

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Jefferts Schori described the Georgia Diocese as “healthy” and one that “represents the broad range of the church across the nation.”

“There’s room for everyone who wants to be a part of this body, and I think this diocese is a good example. There is room for people who want to use the 1928 prayer book, and there is room for Integrity,” she said, referring to a national Episcopal group that supports the blessing of same-sex couples and the ordination of people who are openly gay.

“The difficulty can be when one member of the body says another can’t be a member.”

Jefferts Schori briefly addressed the church’s pending lawsuit against Christ Church Savannah, a 275-year-old congregation known as “the mother church of Georgia” that voted in 2007 to leave the Episcopal Church but keep its historic downtown property.

“I’ve heard you say you need to protect the property of the Episcopal Church, that it’s your fiduciary responsibility,” said Robert Lundy, spokesman for the theologically conservative American Anglican Council based in Atlanta. “At what point is it just not worth it to sue people who believe they are Christians just like you do?”

“We’re not suing people because they believe they’re Christians,” Jefferts Schori said. “I lament that, and I would bless that journey. But it’s not my right to send with them the family heritage.”

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Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.

But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.

“One of our great exports used to be constitutional law,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had.”

From 1990 through 2002, for instance, the Canadian Supreme Court cited decisions of the United States Supreme Court about a dozen times a year, an analysis by The New York Times found. In the six years since, the annual citation rate has fallen by half, to about six.

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The huge rally came after the government moved overnight to rescue troubled insurer American International Group Inc. with an $85 million bailout loan. The Federal Reserve stepped in after AIG, teetering on collapse from losses tied to the subprime crisis and the credit crisis, failed to find adequate capital in the private sector.

The emergency measure came a day after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., a 158-year-old investment bank, filed for bankruptcy after failing to find a buyer.

Fearing more tightening of credit markets, investors reacted swiftly and began dumping stocks and socking money into gold, silver and other safe-haven commodities. Gold is especially attractive during times of crisis because the metal is known for holding its value.

Jon Nadler, analyst with Kitco Bullion Dealers Montreal, said buying accelerated as rumors spread across trading floors that another financial firm may be in trouble.

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The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., whose insurance fund has slipped below the minimum target level set by Congress, could be forced to tap tax dollars through a Treasury Department loan if Washington Mutual Inc., the nation’s largest thrift, or another struggling rival fails, economists and industry analysts said Tuesday.

Treasury has already come to the rescue of several corporate victims of the housing and credit crunches. The government took over mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and helped finance the sale of investment bank Bear Stearns to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Eleven federally insured banks and thrifts have failed this year, including Pasadena, Calif.-based IndyMac Bank, by far the largest shut down by regulators.

Additional failures of large banks or savings and loans companies seem likely, and that could overwhelm the FDIC’s insurance fund, said Brian Bethune, U.S. economist at consulting firm Global Insight.

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Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said she will ask the House of Bishops to decide on September 18 whether Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh has abandoned the communion of the Episcopal Church.

If the bishops, who are meeting September 16-19 in Salt Lake City, agree with the findings of a review panel that he has abandoned communion, their next move would be to depose Duncan.

“I shall present to the House the matter of certification to me by the Title IV Review Committee that Bishop Robert W. Duncan has abandoned the Communion of this Church within the meaning of Canon IV.9,” Jefferts Schori wrote in a September 12 letter to the bishops.

The full text of the Presiding Bishop’s letter may be found here.

Duncan posted a pastoral letter the following day on the Diocese of Pittsburgh website in which he characterized the proceedings as an effort to have him removed from office “before the realignment vote.” He has said he will not attend the meeting. The bishops usually gather in fall and spring.

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1. The process against Bishop Duncan has been flawed from the start.

The Presiding Bishop’s letter of September 12, 2008, to the bishops states that she made a submission to the Title IV Review Committee in November 2007 “suggesting” that Bp. Duncan had abandoned the communion of this Church. She states that the “thrust” of her submission was not that he had already left TEC, but that by claiming that the diocese had a right to do so and should exercise that right he had made an open renunciation of the discipline of TEC. She then states that the Review Committee “evidently” agreed with her analysis because it sent her a certification of abandonment.

The reason for the Presiding bishop’s uncertainty about what the Review Committee concluded is that the Committee did not specify the basis for its certification, which is plainly contrary to the requirement of Canon IV.9 that the certification contain “a statement of the acts or declarations which show such abandonment.” The certification simply referred to voluminous evidence of news clippings and other materials dating back to 2003.

Taking a different approach, a memorandum from the Task Force on Property Disputes, dated September 5, 2008, claims that “Bishop Duncan has conclusively completed his own separation from TEC” and that “there is no doubt that Bishop Duncan has left The Episcopal Church.” (Emphasis supplied.) This submission relies on materials obtained in August 2008 in the civil lawsuit brought against Bp. Duncan, raising the question whether the purpose of that lawsuit was not to use the civil courts to assist in the deposition attempt. In six pages of highlighted documents from the lawsuit, the Task Force memorandum manages only to establish the unsurprising conclusion that Bishop Duncan proposed that the diocese amend its canons to permit re-alignment and supports passage of the canon amendments. And that conclusion is not made any more surprising by attaching the adverb “actively” to every bullet point. Note the inconsistency between the Task Force’s claim that Bp. Duncan “has conclusively completed his
own separation” and the Presiding Bishop’s complaint that “Bishop Duncan has unfortunately announced that he will not attend this meeting of the House.” And not even the Presiding Bishop knows where the Review Committee stands on this issue, but she assumes they “evidently” agree with her.

It is one thing for the Presiding Bishop to speculate as to what the basis of the Review Committee’s certification was, but another thing for the respondent to have to guess….

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Benedict XVI sent a message to the president of France thanking him for the country’s warm welcome this weekend.

The Pope returned to Castel Gandolfo today, after a four-day trip to Paris and Lourdes.

The Holy Father arrived in Paris on Friday, and met with political, religious and cultural leaders before meeting with France’s youth in front of the Notre-Dame cathedral. On Saturday the Holy Father celebrated a Mass at the Esplanade des Invalides, which was attended by 260,000 people.

He traveled to Lourdes in the afternoon to participate in the celebrations surrounding the 150th anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady to St. Bernadette Soubirous.

In Lourdes the Pope visited all the stages of the Jubilee Way: the parish church where Bernadette was baptized, the abandoned prison known as the “Cachot” where the Soubirous family lived, the grotto of the apparitions and hospital oratory where Bernadette made her first Communion.

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Primate of the Anglican Church in Nigeria, Archbishop Peter Akinola, has stated that the recent creation of Ministry of Niger- Delta by the Federal Governemnt is a show of the country’s lack of political will to implement government decisions.

“I do not think our problems require more ministries. What this country lacks is the political will to implement decisions. As for me, it is the issue; it is not the creation of more ministries. We have the NDDC. What are they doing? I know where the problem is; evil of corruption, that’s the issue”.

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During the past 10 years, the Diocese of South Carolina has experienced one of the highest rates of growth in baptized members and attendance in The Episcopal Church, but to the consternation of Bishop Mark Lawrence the diocese’s African American congregations and clergy have not shown abundant growth.

The realization of this disparity came to light during a meeting on Sept. 6 involving Bishop Lawrence, members of the clergy and lay leadership of the diocese’s African American congregations, as well as other African American clergy. This was Bishop Lawrence’s first opportunity to meet and greet many of these individuals since he was consecrated bishop last January. In all, about 85 persons attended and have agreed to work together to strengthen the diocese’s African American congregations.

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Reserve Primary Fund became the first money-market fund in 14 years to expose investors to losses after writing off $785 million of debt issued by bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

The fund, whose assets plunged more than 60 percent to $23 billion in the past two days, said the Lehman losses forced the net value of its assets below $1 a share, known as breaking the buck. Reserve Primary, the oldest money fund in the nation, fell to 97 cents a share and redemptions were suspended for as long as seven days.

Money-market funds are considered the safest investments after cash and bank deposits, and Reserve Primary’s losses come as confidence in financial markets has been shaken by the collapse of subprime mortgages, the failure of 11 U.S. commercial banks and Lehman’s bankruptcy yesterday. The only other money- market fund to break the buck was the $82.2 million Community Bankers Mutual Fund in Denver, which liquidated in 1994 because of investments in interest-rate derivatives.

“This is uncharted territory,” said Peter Crane, president of Crane Data LLC in Westborough, Massachusetts, which tracks money-market funds. “That’s certainly a stunner.”

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Update: More on this here.

FORMER archaeologist John Wyn Evans has been flung into the frontline of the Anglican Communion as the new Bishop of St Davids.

The 61-year-old was shocked at his elevation, which followed the resignation of Carl Cooper after intense speculation about his personal life.

He takes the helm of the ancient diocese at a time when the future of Anglicanism is shrouded in uncertainty.

Disputes over scriptural authority and sexuality have sparked fierce confrontations between traditionalists and liberals.

The Governing Body of the Church in Wales meets today in Lampeter. Every member knows the Church in Wales has the potential to trigger an earthquake in the Communion next month if high-profile celibate gay Dean of St Albans Jeffrey John is named as the next Bishop of Bangor.

But while the crises in Angli-canism have made headlines, churches face the deeper challenge of connecting with an increasingly secular society.

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Philosophical debates arise at the oddest times, and in the heat of this election season, one is now rising in Republican ranks.

The narrow question is this: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be vice president?

Most conservatives say yes, on the grounds that something that feels so good could not possibly be wrong. But a few commentators, like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum and Ross Douthat demur, suggesting in different ways that she is unready.

The issue starts with an evaluation of Palin, but does not end there. This argument also is over what qualities the country needs in a leader and what are the ultimate sources of wisdom.

There was a time when conservatives did not argue about this….

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Where it gets interesting is that Presiding Episcopal Bishop Katharine Jefforts Schori has been gunning for Bishop Duncan’s ouster for almost a year. She tried to get three senior bishops – including Virginia’s Peter J. Lee, to sign onto this but not all three would do so. Here is a copy of the letter she wrote explaining her legal reasons for getting around this requirement to place a vote to oust Bishop Duncan on the agenda of this Thursday’s Episcopal House of Bishops meeting.

And here is Bishop Duncan’s response. He is refusing to attend the HOB meeting in Salt Lake City and say a vote to oust him is violating the church’s constitution and canons. One major reason is that a vote to kick out a bishop must be assented to by the majority of the church’s bishops – and it’s commonly known that a majority don’t attend the HOB meetings. Bishop Jefferts Schori says the vote shall happen nonetheless and “the discipline of the church shall not be stymied.”

If the HOB decides Bishop Duncan has “abandoned the Communion” of the Episcopal Church (that is the wording of the charge), he would be the latest of several bishops so removed. Usually most of these bishops have already removed themselves by the time there’s a vote to expel them. This time is different as Robert Duncan is still a sitting bishop.

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Acting to avert a possible financial crisis worldwide, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board reversed course Tuesday and agreed to an $85 billion bailout that would give the U.S. government an ownership stake in the troubled insurance giant American International Group.

The decision, announced by the Fed only two weeks after the Treasury Department took over the quasi-government mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is the most radical intervention in private business in the central bank’s history.

With time running out after AIG failed to get a bank loan to avoid bankruptcy, Treasury Secterary Henry Paulson Jr. and the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke convened a meeting with House and Senate leaders on Capitol Hill at about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday to explain the rescue plan.

They emerged just after 7:30 p.m. with Paulson and Bernanke looking grim but top lawmakers generally expressing support for the plan. But the bailout is likely to prove controversial, because it effectively puts taxpayer money at risk while protecting bad investments made by AIG and other institutions does business with.

What frightened Fed and Treasury officials was not simply the prospect of another giant corporate bankruptcy, but AIG’s its role as an enormous provider of financial insurance, which effectively requires it cover losses suffered by other institutions in the instance of defaults of securities that they have purchased. That means AIG is potentially on the hook for securities that were once considered safe.

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A few days ago, I received a press release for GodblogCon, the annual gathering of Christian bloggers. The September 20-21 meeting in Las Vegas (it is scheduled to coincide with the mainstream BlogWorld and the New Media Expo) will feature several prominent Christian bloggers, like Tall Skinny Kiwi’s Andrew Jones, La Shawn Barber, and ScrappleFace satirist Scott Ott.

But at the top of the list, the press release mentioned that a key speaker would be “Joe Carter, the Christian blogosphere’s very own Bono.” Carter, formerly of Family Research Council, World Magazine, The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, the Mike Huckabee campaign, The East Texas Tribune, and the U.S. Marine Corps, is perhaps best known as the creator of EvangelicalOutpost.com.

The five-year-old site became one of the most prominent evangelical blogs and was in many ways was as influential on its own as several of the organizations on Carter’s resume. (Not too many Christian bloggers’ views on bioethics have been profiled by The Washington Post.)

But there’s a new wrinkle. Carter is no longer speaking at GodBlogCon, and is no longer blogging at EvangelicalOutpost.com.

And according to a farewell post on Evangelical Outpost, Carter wonders about the future of independent sites like his.

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When I drove to the Beverly Hills offices of Drexel Burnham Lambert on Feb. 13, 1990, the last thing I expected to hear was that the investment bank where I worked was going under. Yet early that morning, we were told that the company was filing for bankruptcy. I was, to put it mildly, blown away. At the time, Drexel had $3.5 billion in assets and was the biggest underwriter of junk bonds.

It all seemed like a very big deal at the time. But what’s happening this week makes me pine for the good old days.

When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on Monday, it became the latest but surely not the last victim of the subprime mortgage collapse. Lehman owned more than $600 billion in assets. Financial institutions around the world have already reported more than half a trillion dollars of mortgage-related losses and that figure will most likely double or triple before the crisis exhausts itself.

But there is a bigger potential failure lurking: the American International Group, the insurance giant. It poses a much larger threat to the financial system than Lehman Brothers ever did because it plays an integral role in several key markets: credit derivatives, mortgages, corporate loans and hedge funds.

Read it all from the op-ed page of today’s New York Times.

Revisionism within the Anglican Communion has caused a serious decline in ecumenical relations with Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and a range of other Christian bodies, Quincy Bishop Keith Ackerman told a gathering of conservative Anglicans on September 13.

Comments from ecumenical partners at the 2008 Lambeth Conference made it “obvious the ecumenical relationships are eroding rapidly in many places,” Ackerman told some 100 persons attending the Festival of Faith at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Bladensburg, Maryland.

The Quincy prelate, who leads Forward in Faith, North America, was joined at the day-long event by West Indies Archbishop Drexel Gomez, chairman of the panel that is formulating an Anglican Covenant designed to help ensure greater unity among historically autonomous Anglican provinces. (See a separate VOL/TCC story on Archbishop Gomez’s remarks.)

Ackerman said Anglican ecumenical relations have been impacted in part by the fact that, increasingly, there are people who call themselves Anglican who share very little, if anything, with traditional Anglicanism.

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The process of finalizing an Anglican covenant needs to move forward more quickly if the Anglican Communion is to be preserved.

That was the message delivered Saturday (September 13) by West Indies Archbishop Drexel Gomez, the chairman of the group charged with formulating the pact intended to help ensure unity in basic beliefs, settle disputes, and administer discipline among historically autonomous Anglican provinces.

“I believe Anglicanism has much to offer the world and has made a tremendous contribution to Christianity. But we are at a dangerous point in our history,” Gomez told more than 100 people attending the Festival of Faith at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Bladensburg, Maryland.

“There is nothing on the immediate horizon that offers any kind of hope to holding the Communion together other than the covenant,” Gomez contended. “Nothing else is on the table. If that fails, we will see only further fragmentation and disintegration. That is not theory but reality,” he said.

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Nearly 70 years after it was published, John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” — which tells of the dirt-poor Joad family’s epic migration from drought-plagued Oklahoma to fruitful (if unfriendly) Central California — continues to resonate as few novels have. In fact, the book may well be more relevant today than at any time since it first appeared in April 1939.

“The Grapes of Wrath” has always been extraordinarily popular. More than 400,000 copies flew off the shelves its first year in print, making it the nation’s No. 1 seller. So powerful was Steinbeck’s portrayal of the Joads’ plight that people began referring to the fictional clan as if it were real. “Meet the Joad Family,” read one newspaper headline. “What’s Being Done About the Joads?” asked another. “The Joads on Strike,” declared a third.

Before long, thanks in part to Henry Fonda’s performance as Tom Joad on the big screen and Woody Guthrie crooning about the Joads in his “Dust Bowl Ballads,” Steinbeck’s characters had become permanently etched into popular culture. When Bruce Springsteen and Rage Against the Machine sang about “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” legions of fans were already tuned in to the generations-old reference.

Indeed, wherever people exhibit tremendous strength amid terrible anguish, the Joads are a potent symbol. “I suspect I met a few Ma Joads and Tom Joads in Kabul,” said Afghanistan-born author Khaled Hosseini as he described the process that led him to write “The Kite Runner.”

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The Church of England has developed a new section of its website at www.cofe.anglican.org/darwin to mark the approaching bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth in 1809, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859.

As media interest grows in the bicentenary, the pages analyse Darwin’s faith and his relationship with the Church of England. A new essay by the Revd Dr Malcolm Brown, Director of Mission and Public Affairs, gives a personal view of Darwin’s contribution to science, whilst warning of social misapplications of his theories.

The Bishop of Swindon, Rt Revd Lee Rayfield, himself a former biological scientist, has contributed a welcome page to the section, and commented: “Theology and science each have much to contribute in the assertion of the Psalmist that we are ”˜fearfully and wonderfully made’. I hope that this new section will not only provide a source of information and knowledge about Charles Darwin and his work, but that it will prove to be a resource for growing in wisdom and understanding.”

In the new section, Darwin and the Church reveals that Darwin was surrounded by the influence of the Church his entire life. Having attended a Church of England boarding school in Shrewsbury, he trained to be a clergyman in Cambridge; was inspired to follow his calling into science by another clergyman who lived and breathed botany; and married into a staunch Anglican family.

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Last week, it was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that needed a government bailout. This week, it looks as though American International Group and Washington Mutual will be on the hot seat. We have actually reached the point where there are now only two independent investment banks left: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. It boggles the mind.

But it really shouldn’t. Because after you get past the mind-numbing complexity of the derivatives that are at the heart of the current crisis, what’s going on is something we are all familiar with: denial.

Indeed, it is not all that different from what is going on in neighborhoods all over the country. Just as homeowners took out big loans and stretched themselves on the assumption that their chief asset ”” their home ”” could only go up, so did Wall Street firms borrow tens of billions of dollars to make subprime mortgage bets on the assumption that they were a sure thing.

But housing prices did drop eventually. And when people tried to sell their homes in this newly depressed market, many of them had a hard time admitting that their home wasn’t worth what they had thought it was. Their judgment has been naturally clouded by their love for their house, how much money they put into it and how much more it was worth a year ago. And even when they did drop their selling price, it never quite matched the reality of the marketplace. They’ve been in denial.

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Peter Lee of Virginia elicited howls of protest and outrage a few years ago when he observed that heresy was better than schism. In fact, though I have known and loved and respected Peter for decades, I was pretty sympathetic to his critics, mostly because I believed that he was being rather self-justifying (to defend his decision to give consent to the consecration of Gene Robinson””which the ensuing years have clearly revealed to be a schismatic action) as well as my concern that he was awfully quick to accept that the “lesser evil” of false teaching was necessary (since the lives of the ordained are supposed to be an example to the faithful then living in a sexual relationship outside of marriage constitutes an implicit false teaching).

Though I still think Bishop Lee was being disingenuous, in the light of impending realignment in our own diocese, I have begun to reflect on his claim from a different perspective. For years, I have prayed and counseled and spoken and voted against the drift of the Episcopal Church toward simply reflecting the cultural norms of our society. That certainly is not because I hate those who disagree with me (in fact, often I believe they are motivated by a sincere commitment to a particular biblical interpretation). It is just that, as hard as it sometimes can be, I still have personally seen the power of God’s Word written, interpreted by the apostolic tradition which has been passed down to us as a precious legacy, to renew and transform individual lives and even institutions. A commitment to a desire for holiness, whetted by an obedience in accord with that of the saints and by the help of the Holy Spirit, has led to the change even of nations over the course of Christian history. To depart from this inheritance, on the basis of culturally influenced values, seems a dangerous and precipitous decision to make. As the Anglican primates have said, the onus to justify such changes clearly lies upon the innovators. So, as a consequence, I view the lobbying agenda of certain interest groups in TEC with intense dismay and as being, at the very least, insensitive and unfaithful.

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Researchers have long known that watching violence on TV or in movies ratchets up aggression, but what about watching people being mean to one another? Could watching Mean Girls make you as aggressive as watching Kill Bill?

A new study suggests the answer is yes.

Brigham Young University professor Sarah Coyne and colleagues asked 53 British college-aged women to watch one of three video clips, featuring either physical aggression (a knife fight from Kill Bill), relational aggression (a montage from Mean Girls) or no aggression (a séance scene from the horror movie What Lies Beneath). They then filled out a brief questionnaire and were allowed to leave the room. Right outside was another researcher who asked if they would like to participate in a study involving reaction times.

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David Say, former Anglican Bishop of Rochester for 27 years from 1961, and who died in 2006, is to have a stone monument in his honour.

The memorial stone is to be dedicated at Rochester Cathedral, England’s second oldest, having been founded in 604AD by Bishop Justus, in memory of the town’s long-serving former bishop, David Say.

The member of the House of Lords until his retirement in 1988 will have a dedication of his memorial stone in a service at the cathedral, at 3.15pm on Saturday.

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