This message is specifically directed to every priest in charge of a congregation in the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth. However, I am sending it to all clergy, vestry members, and convention delegates on our mailing list so that everyone will know what I am proposing.

As the date approaches for our momentous Diocesan Convention vote in November, many parish clergy have attempted to make certain that their parishioners understand the issues surrounding the proposal that we separate from the General Convention of The Episcopal Church. In several places parish forums have been held, where outside speakers have been brought in to present the opposing sides on the question of realignment. Some of you have preached sermons on this subject, written articles for your parish newsletter, and even in a couple of places brought in General Convention authorities to speak to your people. In addition, several different groups have been formed in the Diocese, including Remain Episcopal, Via Media, and Remain Faithful, which have attempted to educate, organize, and motivate the laity to take sides on the question: “Should we remain with TEC or with the Diocese?” Legal counsel has been engaged, lawsuits are being anticipated, various steering committees have been formed, and outside assistance from the “815” church headquarters in New York is being sought.

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In Moscow, there has been no official comment about Vice President Dick Cheney’s visit to Georgia. Russia has so far ignored or dismissed warnings from the West of economic and diplomatic consequences for its attack on Georgia. Russian officials appear to be enjoying defying the West.

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The best deal on fuel in the country right now might be here in Utah, where people are waiting in lines to pay the equivalent of 87 cents a gallon. Demand is so strong at rush hour that fuel runs low, and some days people can pump only half a tank.

It is not gasoline they are buying for their cars, but natural gas.

By an odd confluence of public policy and private initiative, Utah has become the first state in the country to experience broad consumer interest in the idea of running cars on clean natural gas.

Residents of the state are hunting the Internet and traveling the country to pick up used natural gas cars at auctions. They are spending thousands of dollars to transform their trucks and sport utility vehicles to run on compressed gas. Some fueling stations that sell it to the public are so busy they frequently run low on pressure, forcing drivers to return before dawn when demand is down.

It all began when unleaded gasoline rose above $3.25 a gallon last year, and has spiraled into a frenzy in the last few months.

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Here’s the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing — the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party — are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women — and to many men too — who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the “white-male-only” sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won’t work. This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton’s candidacy stood for — and that Barack Obama’s still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, “Somebody stole my shoes, so I’ll amputate my legs.”

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I will consider posting comments on this article which are submitted first by email to: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Married couples in their later years often show a great deal of affection,says best-selling author Maggie Scarf, 77, who has spent more than 30 years studying relationships.

“There’s intimacy.There is pleasure in each other’s company. They say to each other, ‘I loveyou more than ever.’ ” Scarf’s new book is September Songs: The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years, out today. She has been married for 55 years to Herb Scarf, 78, a Yale professor.

They have three daughters. Scarf shares her insights with USA TODAY…

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Palin’s speech ended up being much more partisan than I expected. But that was added to by the fact that she had to start her speech while the auditorium was still awash in the teeth-gnashing froth ginned up by Rudy’s speech. I’ve seen political events that I totally got and others that I thought I got but was totally wrong about. So who knows? But take this as a sign that the McCain campaign has abandoned an effort to compete for swing voters and go back to the base energizing strategy that worked for President Bush in 2004. The numbers make that look like a tough proposition. But I think a few months from now, everyone will agree this was a mistake.

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I will consider posting comments on this article which are submitted first by email to: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Several moderate-Democrat friends of mine have been emailing–few if any would ever vote for McCain–but all agree that Palin was very strong. The more liberal among them are a little panicked.

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I will consider posting comments on this article which are submitted first by email to: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

The imposition of Canon 15 “comes with regret after many years of dispute with the clergy and lay leadership of these two parishes,” said Dean Elliott. “The clergy in both parishes have relinquished their licenses as priests of the diocese and their orders within the Anglican Church of Canada. In our polity, a parish is a creation of the diocese.”

He added that parish properties “are entrusted to clergy, licensed by the diocesan bishop, to offer the ministry of the Anglican Church of Canada.” Therefore, he added, “loyalty to the bishop is a key part of the oaths that clergy make at ordinations and inductions.” Since he said clergy no longer hold the bishop’s licence, the diocese is “legally required to ensure that the authorized ministry of the Anglican Church of Canada continues in those places,” added Dean Elliott.

ANiC Chancellor Cheryl Chang, however, insisted that “whether the diocese of New Westminster has the right to unilaterally replace these duly elected trustees and move to seize control of the parishes’ assets is in dispute.”

In a press statement, she said that “the elected trustees of the parish believe the parish properties are held in trust for the benefit of the current congregation who have paid for and maintained these properties, and who are upholding traditional Anglican ministry in accordance with the founding principles of the Anglican Church of Canada (contained in the Solemn Declaration 1893), and the current doctrine of the global Anglican Communion.”

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As a final vote approaches on whether the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh should secede from the national church, local Episcopalians who want to remain part of the New York-based denomination are meeting to plan for their future.

“A Hopeful Future for the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh: An Alternative Solution” will present reasons for opting to stay in the Episcopal Church.

It will also present what may happen with property, a new diocesan government and other issues if Bishop Robert Duncan and most local Episcopalians change their allegiance to the theologically conservative Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, which covers six nations in southernmost South America. The Episcopal Church is the U.S. branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

“A Hopeful Future” will take place at 1 p.m. Sept. 13 in St. Paul Episcopal Church, Mt. Lebanon.

On Oct. 4, the diocesan convention is expected to take the second of two votes required to attempt to secede from the Episcopal Church. In the first, taken in November, laity voted 118-58 and clergy voted 109-24 to leave the Episcopal Church.

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Senator John McCain’s Republican primary campaign looked all but hopeless. He had risked the wrath of his party to push for an immigration overhaul and now, just months before the Iowa caucuses, his grand compromise was falling apart on the Senate floor as well.

“Lindsey, my boy, this may bring us down,” Mr. McCain said, turning to his friend Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “But wasn’t it fun?”

By this spring, when Mr. McCain had astounded political handicappers by virtually locking up the nomination, the thrill of noble defeat had been replaced by an anxious discomfort about his own victory. “I refuse to believe that this is possible,” he said, curling up his face during an interview on his campaign plane. “I tend to be fatalistic about these things.”

As he accepts the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday night in St. Paul, John Sidney McCain III, of Arizona, stands at the pinnacle of a career defined by a singular ambivalence about his own ambition, and success. Time and again, he lunges for the prize, then lashes himself for letting his pursuit get the better of him ”” for doing favors for his patron Charles H. Keating Jr., for stooping to ugly attacks on George W. Bush during the 2000 primary, for outbursts of temper at lawmakers who get in his way.

It reflects what his brother, Joe McCain, calls a “public dialectic” between the senator’s drive to succeed and his desire to serve a higher cause. For decades his outward display of that inner conflict has proved advantageous, helping advance his career by forging his image as the un-politician, the candidate with an almost reckless disregard for his own fortunes.

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“The frontier mentality, whether myth or not, is still alive,” said Donald Linky, director of the Program on the Governor, at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

Political organizations and the careful grooming of rising stars have long been part of the political culture in creating governors-to-be in many other states, Mr. Linky said. Not so in Alaska, and elsewhere in the West.

In places where politics is closer to the ground, an insurgent like Ms. Palin, who challenged a governor from her own party in 2006 and won, has an easier road, Mr. Linky said. Ms. Palin’s storming of the gates was helped by the taint of the Alaskan money culture gone awry, as federal authorities investigated oil-cash corruption in the State Legislature in 2006, an inquiry which has since expanded to include Mr. Stevens and others.

“It was a situation that was absolutely ripe for somebody to come in and say, ”˜Hey, the emperor has no clothes,’ ” said Mr. Haycox of the University of Alaska. “To give her her due, she had the morals and intellectual acumen to do that, but the situation was just waiting for someone to take advantage.”

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Sure, large parts of the speech were clearly not hers. And she usually didn’t lean forward like that when she made a point. But that pursed lip thing? Where her lower jaw juts out a little when she’s looking tough?

“Oh, this is so Sarah,” he said. “When she twists her mouth that way that’s her.”

“That’s just like her mother Sally,” said Ms. Morgan.

All in all, what America saw Wednesday night was just the beginning, her friends said.

“That’s why we’re so excited,” said Mrs. Peek. “She doesn’t change. I just keep picturing her at lunches and meetings. They’re going to be shocked because this is who she is.”

“All this stuff is definitely from her heart,” said Ms. Morgan, including all the smack talk about Senator Barack Obama.

“She can be very, what should we say, fierce?” she said.

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Tropical cyclones have been getting stronger over the past several decades, according to a new report in the journal Nature. This finding supports a theory that storms will get stronger as the surface of the ocean heats up because of global warming.

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After days of mounting questions about her qualifications, Governor Sarah Palin rallied the Republican National Convention tonight by touting her small-town government experience and ridiculing concerns about whether she is up to the job of vice president.

“Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown,” Palin said. “And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”

The remark was a not-so-veiled shot at the career of Senator Barack Obama, who began his public service as a community organizer in Chicago.

In spirited remarks, Palin also took on what she portrays as an elite media establishment unwilling to accept that her government service in a small town and a sparsely populated state gives her the resume to serve at the highest levels of the federal government.

“I’ve learned quickly, these past few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone,” she said in her remarks. “But here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion – I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.”

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Read it carefully and read it all.

Please note that this is the prepared text–for those of you who watched it the quip about the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom is not in there and was off the cuff–KSH.

From July 3 1984:

Where is it written that only senators are qualified to become President?… Or where is it written that mere representatives aren’t qualified, like Geraldine Ferraro of Queens?… Where is it written that governors and mayors, like Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco, are too local, too provincial?… Presidential candidates have always chosen their running mates for reasons of practical demography, not idealized democracy”¦. What a splendid system, we say to ourselves, that takes little-known men, tests them in high office and permits them to grow into statesmen…. Why shouldn’t a little-known woman have the same opportunity to grow?… [T]he indispensable credential for a Woman Who [sic] is the same as for a Man Who [sic] ”“ one who helps the ticket.

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I will consider posting comments on this article which are submitted first by email to: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Every four years, Democrats in the United States make the same mistake. They underestimate the appeal of the Republican Party to Middle America, and then reduce their own appeal by belittling it. Now, Democrats are falling into the same trap again with Sarah Palin, John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee.

Palin is a tremendously popular pick among the party base, which had previously been unenthusiastic about McCain’s candidacy. These are not people who are interested in gender as such; they like Palin for her persona and her politics. So far, though, Palin’s critics have concentrated mainly on her persona. In her speech to the Republican National Convention this week, Palin has a great opportunity to take advantage of these tone-deaf critics.

Most obviously, Palin can benefit from criticism of her family life. Some commentators have attacked Palin for running for vice-president when she has a new baby with special needs. It is ironic for anyone on the left to say that a woman should just stay home with the kids. Never mind that they would never say such a thing about a male candidate (or a female Democratic one). This makes Palin more relatable to working moms, and the families who pitch in to help them. It makes her critics look sexist.

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I will consider posting comments on this article which are submitted first by email to: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

(ENS) The Rev. Robert Certain, an Episcopal priest who was a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, opened the Republican National Convention evening session on September 2 with prayer.

Certain asked God to “grant wisdom and grace” to President Bush and other U.S. leaders and that the presidential, vice-presidential and other political candidates be granted the “courage to face the rigors of the campaign (and) honesty and integrity to cast a vision of unity, progress and liberty.”

He also asked God to “teach our people to rely on your strength, and to accept their responsibilities to their fellow citizens, that they may put country first, elect trustworthy leaders and make wise decisions for the well-being of our society.”

He wasn’t quite sure how the invitation came about, said Certain. A few years ago, however, he invited Sen. John McCain, slated to be the Republican presidential nominee, to share his “spiritual journey” at a parish meeting in Georgia.

When asked before his appearance what he was prepared to say, Certain chuckled: “I’m an Episcopalian. Of course, I went to the Book of Common Prayer, to the prayers for the nation in the back.”

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But if the “not black enough” argument has failed to gain traction among black voters, it clearly strikes a chord among some black leaders, apparently at a visceral level. How else to explain the unraveling of Jeremiah Wright except as the case of a black leader so accustomed to the role of challenger that he could not abide Obama’s success as (in his eyes) a bargainer””or, as Wright put it, “just another politician who says what he needs to say.” Jesse Jackson’s charge, accompanied by the n-word, that Obama is “talking down to blacks” when he criticizes absentee fathers, appears to be another complaint of a perennial race-based challenger irritated by the success of someone who thinks he can transcend race. Watching the recent behavior of Wright and Jackson, Steele surely must have felt that his analysis of leadership styles was richly confirmed.

Steele’s deepest worries about Obama are not about his political chances but about his personal authenticity. Whether as bargainer or challenger or some creative mix of the two, Steele thinks, a black leader must don a mask, forging a persona that will charm or manipulate whites. In taking on this task, Steele contends, black leaders lose themselves, for they are never able to locate what they themselves really think. Steele wonders: Is Obama running for president because of his deep convictions or simply because he is aware of “his power to enthrall whites”?

But questions of authenticity can be raised about every politician. The peculiar job of a politician is to fashion repeatedly points of agreement between people with different and shifting points of view and to project a public persona that can elicit action and be the vehicle for people’s hopes. If personal authenticity is your quest, politics is the wrong medium. We can wish for congruence between the inner and the outer person of the politician, but in the end what matters for the voters is the direction of the policies chosen and the decisions made.

Steele must hope, at some level, that his binary analysis turns out to be wrong and that Obama’s campaign breaks open new models of black leadership. We will know more in November.

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It was a quiet night in the Vestry, and no one was coming to see me about the occasional offices; so, my eyes wandered over the book shelves, and on a whim I took down a book most of us will have read, but maybe like me not for decades; C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. When you re-read a good book after thirty years you are, of course, a different person reading it, and different things stand out. Arriving at Letter Seven, Screwtape’s words to Wormwood (written in 1941) struck me as truly prophetic:

I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The ‘Life Force, the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful.

I would like to spend three months looking at the three things Lewis prophesied: The ‘Life Force’, the worship of sex, and some aspects of psychoanalysis.

There was a time when we believed in Science: we were going to apply it to every aspect of society, rule the world, and bend it to our will. That the world has not been so bent has made us realize the world is not the mute, inert lump of observable, controllable stuff popular scientism told us it was. Rather than advance to a sacramental view of the world, in which the material can be inhabited by the spiritual, our culture has retreated into pantheism.

God is everywhere and everything; so (particularly if it seems to do you good) it must be God. ‘The Force be with you’ intoned Star Trek’s characters, signalling the acceptance into Hollywood thought of deity as impersonal.

The Life Force is now out there on the High Street, and being paid for by you and me through the Health Service. Does anyone question the long-term effects on us, not just physically but as eternal, spiritual beings, of acupuncture, reflexology and the like? A recent episode of Analysis concluded there was no scientific evidence indicating that reflexology had any discernable effect: but modern Western people, now conscious that ‘the drugs don’t work are queuing up for such remedies, for they are in pain; and the healing of Christ is either unavailable, in the hands of the inexpert, or inconveniently tied up with the reality of sin and the virtues of suffering.

You surrender nothing of your ego or your immorality when you consult Life Force practitioners. Like a man visiting a prostitute, the only conscious sacrifice is financial: the unseen sacrifices are the barriers raised between the punter and the good things of God.

The Bible is in no doubt that the Enemy of Souls has, for the time being, a certain amount of power, which he is willing to trade for our eternal destiny. Follow the story of the Gospel’s spread through the Book of Acts, and you encounter Simon the Sorcerer in Acts 8. Study of this incident is instructive, for The Life Force is named as such here: ‘This man is the divine power known as the Great Power’ [Acts 8:10c]. The Scriptures look (through the eyes of Peter) into the heart, however: offering money for the reception of the Holy Spirit [8:18c] Simon is roundly told by the apostle ‘Repent of this wickedness… I see that you are full of bitterness and captive to sin’ [8:23].

To the early Fathers, Simon was the epitome of Antichrist. Irenaeus [Against Heresies i] states that Simon was the founder of Gnosticism; since Gnosticism was the very air the Greek world lived, this seems harsh judgement, but Simon is certainly held up as a type of all that is opposed to God. Justin Martyr [Apology i, 26] mistakenly ascribes an ancient inscription in the city of Rome to Simon. In the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and Homilies the legend about Simon’s becoming the nemesis of Peter is greatly elaborated. Also, the apocryphal Acts of Peter tell how the Christians of Rome were corrupted by this man’s false teaching. All this maybe over-egging the pudding, but it demonstrates this: that in the early Church’s view, ‘The Force’ was not of God.

–From New Directions, July 2008