Battered by weak sales, declining market share and miserable credit ratings, Detroit’s Big Three automakers are now turning to the US government for help.
General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC will be launching a campaign in the coming days to secure at least 25 billion dollars in federal loans to help get past the current economic malaise.

“This isn’t a bail out,” said Greg Martin, Washington spokesman for GM, the largest US automaker which has been awash in speculation for months that it is running short of cash.

“These are direct loans that we have to pay back,” added Ford spokesman Mike Moran.

Read it all.

Watch it all.

[KIM] LAWTON: The gathering was part of a new Democratic strategy to incorporate religion and more aggressively reach out to faith-based voters. Observers say it’s a sea change from 2004, when the Democrats appeared reluctant to address issues of faith.

Reverend ROMAL TUNE (Clergy Strategic Alliances): Four years ago, the party was still gaining momentum in terms of the outreach in the religious community. But now the party is more willing to express its views as people of faith, the diversity of the faiths represented by the Democratic Party.

LAWTON: But when it comes to religion, the Democratic Party still has some major challenges to overcome.

LAWTON: According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, only 38 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party is friendly toward religion. That compares to more than half of all Americans who think the Republican Party is friendly toward religion. Democratic leaders hope the prominent role of faith at this convention will change those perceptions.

The Democrats incorporated faith on many fronts here. As is the tradition for both political parties, various religious leaders opened and closed every floor session with prayer. Faith-based groups were part of a service day where delegates were encouraged to do volunteer work. Some delegates helped out at a feeding program at Trinity United Methodist Church. Kathy West, a United Methodist delegate from Illinois, was one of them.

KATHY WEST (Illinois Delegate): We’re the party closest to the people, in my opinion. That’s one of the reasons I am a Democrat.

Read it all.

KIM LEHMAN (Iowa Delegate): It wasn’t as lukewarm as much as it was waiting to see if John McCain was going to hold to his commitment to have a pro-life administration.

[KIM] LAWTON: Lehman says McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate changed everything.

Ms. LEHMAN: It was like taking a rubber band, pulling it backward and just shooting us through excitement. And so all of us being on the reciprocating end of emails, phone calls””everybody’s excited.

Governor SARAH PALIN (during acceptance speech, Republican National Convention): We are expected to govern with integrity, good will, clear convictions, and a servant’s heart.

LAWTON: The nomination of Palin, an evangelical Christian who bly opposes abortion, has been controversial in some quarters. But it has clearly mobilized the Republican Party’s social conservative base and given the McCain ticket a big boost of energy. Many in that base were deeply concerned in the weeks leading up to the convention when McCain’s campaign floated the idea of picking a pro-choice running mate.

Dr. RICHARD LAND (President, Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission): I told the McCain people flat out that would inflict a mortal wound on his campaign, one from which he could not have recovered. If he had picked a pro-choice candidate, he was going to lose. He still may lose. But that would have been it. He could never have recovered among evangelicals and social conservative Catholics if he had picked a pro-choice running mate.

Read it all.

A friend who is deeply read in Anglican history and theology predicted that Lambeth 2008 would give a negative response to gay and lesbian people on the matter of their full inclusion in the life and orders of the church and that at Lambeth 2018 the discussion would be about banning women priests and bishops. So far his prediction has come fairly accurately true. On this most perplexing matter dividing our communion, the Lambeth’s Reflections do not even clearly call for continuing dialogue and listening to gay and lesbian people””despite the resolutions of Lambeth 1998.

From a theological perspective, the finest documents to emerge from this Lambeth Conference were the Archbishop of Canterbury’s presidential addresses, but it is also clear that many of the other addresses were rich in theological content (eg. the Chief Rabbi’s lecture on Covenant). From an ecclesiological perspective, his decision to make this Lambeth a conference has been, in my view, a major step forward. The Reflections document issued at the end is by its very nature vague, and reflective of the multiplicity of positions on most of the questions that perplex us. This may be a healthy stage of conversation; it offers us all a clearer picture of the range of diversity and contexts in which we seek to live our mission.

More depressing, in my view, is that despite all protestations to the contrary and arguments about confrontation with Islam in Africa and elsewhere, the evangelical side of Anglicanism is leading us more and more toward a form of Christianity which is simply another variant of fundamentalist Islam….

Read the whole piece.

Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, has expressed “frustration” that the Canadian church has not been given an opportunity to present its situation with regards to the blessing of same-sex unions during hearings conducted by a body formed to determine the next course of action for the Anglican Communion to salvage its fractured unity.

Archbishop Hiltz, who attended the once-a-decade conference of the world’s Anglican bishops here, said that it would be “a huge challenge” to merge what has been happening in bishops’ discussion groups, called indaba, with what the Windsor Continuation Group (WCG) has been recommending as the way forward for the Communion.

“I think what we’re running into is a kind of difficult rubbing between the indaba process which has been in large measure very conversational, very relational” and the work of the WCG, which is “seeking to find structures and procedures whereby we can remain in communion with one another,” said Archbishop Hiltz.

Read the whole article.

Was Alfred Hitchcock a sexual monster? Or was he, as the French film makers Rohmer and Chabrol once claimed, a moralist whose films are steeped in Roman Catholic themes?

Whatever his achievement as an artist, the personal reputation of Alfred Hitchcock remains the subject of heated dispute. Glance at biographies of the British director and two wildly differing Hitchcocks emerge. Donald Spoto’s highly readable The Dark Side of Genius: the Life of Alfred Hitchcock portrays a frustrated lecher who delights in torturing his leading blondes. Yet in Patrick McGilligan’s later, authoritative, 818-page Alfred Hitchcock: a Life in Darkness and Light, Hitchcock appears as an iconoclastic if ultimately devout Roman Catholic whose entire oeuvre is “suffused” with a profound Catholicism.

“His Catholicism is overt on a superficial and a profound level” McGilligan claims. “On a superficial level, he is irreverent: think, for example, of the false nun with high heels in The Lady Vanishes. On a profound level, the Catholicism is conscious. A constant theme in the Hitchcock film is the wrong person being caught by the police, and convicted. The police in his movies are often stupid, and Hitchcock was not prepared ”“ with the exception of The Paradine Case (1947) – to let his victims go to court. Often they precipitate their own demise. Hitchcock was strongly opposed to capital punishment and his films question the infallibility of earthly justice as opposed to God’s justice.”

Read the whole article.

It is perhaps not accidental that the Times Register, in which the Faith page appears, is also the section of obituaries. Obituaries are written when a life is completed, and an assessment can be made, of attributes and achievements, of the meaning and purpose lived out in this particular history of this unique person. A good spiritual exercise, often used for evaluating candidates for ordination, is to be asked to write one’s own obituary, to judge what one would wish to have said about one’s life at the end. Honestly done, this can be a sobering exercise and point towards the choices that have to be made if that obituary is to be true in reality not just in aspiration.

Life can be interpreted only after it has been experienced, and our own history informs our understanding of the future. For Kierkegaard our human project was to become that man or woman whom we are after the image of Christ. Jesus was the one who is “the proper man”, the one who is, in St Paul’s words, “the image of the invisible God” who made us in love for Himself. It is He who is the key to what it is to be truly human, and His history therefore becomes our history too. As year after year the Church celebrates the life of Christ, Christians enter into the meaning of His birth, His life and teaching, His death and resurrection. Week by week as the word is preached, the Eucharist is celebrated, and Christ’s life is received in the sacrament, the meaning and pattern of our life is given.

Christian hymn writers have seen the providence of God at work in their lives as they look backwards. Joseph Addison praises the God who cared for him “before my infant heart conceived from whence those comforts flowed”, and who kept him safe “in the slippery paths of youth. . . Thine arm unseen conveyed me safe, and led me up to man.” John Keble, knowing that same providential grace, sees our waking each morning as a sacrament of God’s presence, “through sleep and darkness, safely brought, restored to life and power and thought”, with each day bringing new opportunities through the trivial round and the common task for the one thing needful, “a road to bring us daily nearer God”.

Read it all (requires subsciption).

Bees are eating Lichfield Cathedral. It sounds like science fiction, but it is science fact. I might take back the kind words I had for bees in this column (June 28), except that the cathedral-eating kind are not our beleaguered honey bees.

The vandals are masonry bees, of which there are nearly 20 species in Britain. Who’d have thought it? Normally they do little harm, as readers have reported in the Telegraph letters page (July 26). But Lichfield cathedral is built of soft old sandstone, which crumbles like cheese. The bees take advantage of exfoliating stone, and where one lays her eggs, others are attracted. Their little mandibles can burrow a system of galleries, and the holes fill with water, which freezes in winter, splitting the stone, and providing yet more desirable residences for bees.

Masonry bees favour the sunny south side of buildings, and it was this side of the cathedral, overlooking the town, that I was staring at when I bumped into the Dean, the Very Rev Adrian Dorber. He told me that English Heritage has given £250,000 this year towards restoration of the stonework, which cathedral fundraisers have matched. The next step is an application for a £5 million Lottery Heritage grant.

Read it all.

Those who came to attack Christians here early last week set their trap well, residents say.

First, they built makeshift barricades of trees and small boulders along the roads leading into this village, apparently to stop the police from intervening.

Then, villagers say, the attackers went on a rampage. Chanting “Kill these pigs” and “All Hindus are brothers,” the mob began breaking into homes that displayed posters of Jesus, stealing valuables and eventually burning the buildings. When they found residents who had not fled to the nearby jungle, they beat them with sticks or maimed them with axes and left them to die.

A local official said three people died as a result of the attack on Aug. 25. The carefully placed roadblocks accomplished their purpose; residents say a full day passed before help arrived.

One villager, Asha Lata Nayak, said, “I saw the mob carrying sticks, axes, swords, knives and small guns. They first demolished the village church and later Christian houses. Nobody came forward to help us.”

Read it all.

Indonesia’s sprinkling of small churches have periodically been raided, burned down or bombed by angry mobs. It would seem to be a good place for Christians to keep a low profile.

Instead, some wealthy Christian leaders in the predominantly Muslim nation have embarked on a bold and possibly provocative strategy: building megachurches as an assertion of their faith.

At least four multimillion-dollar churches that can seat thousands of people — patterned on the evangelical colossi of the U.S. — are nearing completion around Jakarta, the capital, and others are cropping up elsewhere.

Read it all.

Download the full pdf and read it all.

Please note that this is an introduction to the following post written by Mark McCall–KSH.

Sad to say, it seems virtually certain that TEC will reject any covenant proposal that limits its autonomy. Its leadership has consistently argued for a view of communion that resides in mutual hospitality and practice (as seen from the leadership’s perspective). They have also made clear their resistance to any meaningful form of restraint on a Province that decides to act against the views of the Communion as a whole.

Should the General Convention reject the proposed covenant, the paper we are posting clearly implies that individual dioceses within TEC have a constitutional right to vote for adoption on their own. The Instruments of Communion would then have to decide whether or not to allow individual dioceses that dissent from the negative actions of their Province to be covenant partners with the other Provinces of the Communion. Circumstances such as these present other polity issues, but the Archbishop of Canterbury has already indicated the theological appropriateness of this course of action. It would, nonetheless, still have to receive some form of Communion approval. It is difficult to imagine that such approval would not be forthcoming.

It is painful to think of TEC rejecting the covenant, though this is the course of action intimated. This eventuality will result in individual dioceses being put in the position of adopting a covenant on their own. There is a promise of renewal and reform attached to these possibilities. By adopting the covenant, dissenting dioceses within TEC would place themselves within a communion of provinces and dioceses wherein effective hierarchies are extant. In so doing they would place the hierarchy that orders their own dioceses within a more Catholic (with big C) and less congregationally ordered form of polity.

Read it all.

One weekday morning in 1981, when he was new to Baltimore, Arnold Graf descended into the basement of the Enon Baptist Church. The steps took him into the midst of 60 skeptics. They were the black ministers whom Mr. Graf, a white Jew, was trying to persuade to join him in community organizing.

Even among a loquacious crowd of preachers, conversation stilled at Mr. Graf’s arrival. “I don’t know if we should be talking about this stuff with an outsider here,” one minister said, as Mr. Graf recently recalled the meeting.

Then the Rev. Vernon N. Dobson, one of Baltimore’s legendary civil rights leaders, replied. Alone among the dozens of ministers, he was already a member of Mr. Graf’s group, Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development. Alone among them, Mr. Dobson had already gotten to know Mr. Graf during the organizer’s brief months in the city.

“He’s with me,” Mr. Dobson said. “And who’s blacker than me here? The man is my brother.”

Read the whole article.

The Anglican Communion has been broken and it is an “illusion” to believe things can ever be the same again, the archbishops of the Gafcon movement said last week following their first organizational meeting in London.

The leaders of the conservative wing of the Anglican Communion, representing more than half of the Church’s active members, on Aug 29 released a statement affirming the aims of the movement — now known as the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA) — and restated its commitment to the reform and renewal of the Communion.

However, they disagreed sharply with the course taken by Archbishop Rowan Williams in avoiding a full and frank airing of the issues, with one insider telling The Church of England Newspaper the Anglican Communion’s sex wars had taken on a Dickensian quality, and like “Jarndyce and Jarndyce” was still dragging its “dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.”

Read it all.

In this fourth volume of his quartet of books on the Bush White House, Bob Woodward reaches a damning conclusion about the presidency of George W. Bush. “A president must be able to get a clear-eyed, unbiased assessment of the war,” he writes. “The president must lead. For years, time and again, President Bush has displayed impatience, bravado and unsettling personal certainty about his decisions. The result has too often been impulsiveness and carelessness and, perhaps most troubling, a delayed reaction to realities and advice that run counter to his gut.”

“After ordering the invasion,” Mr. Woodward goes on, “the president spent three years in denial and then delegated a strategy review to his national security adviser. Bush was intolerant of confrontations and in-depth debate. There was no deadline, no hurry. The president was engaged in the war rhetorically but maintained an odd detachment from its management. He never got a full handle on it, and over these years of war, too often he failed to lead.”

In this respect, Mr. Woodward’s portrait of Mr. Bush in “The War Within” ”” a book Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, has called incomplete and misleading ”” amplifies the one he drew in his last book, “State of Denial” (2006), in which the president emerged as a passive, stubborn and intellectually incurious leader, given to an almost religious certainty about his decision making and inclined to make instinctive gut calls. It stands in striking contrast to the laudatory portrait in the first book in this series, “Bush at War” (2002), which depicted the president in Rovian terms as a strong, resolute, even visionary leader.

Read it all.

As a nation and as individuals, we tend to view the world through the prism of our own experiences. Over the last few weeks, Russians, Georgians, Abkhazians and South Ossetians have reminded us that ethnic nationalism and secessionism are on the rise around the globe. I worry that the American experience leaves the United States and its citizens unprepared to confront it.

Not long ago, I had dinner with a conservative media figure who seemed perplexed that I’m a student of “identity.” “What made you do that?” he asked. “I think the world would be better without it.”

I tried to explain that it wasn’t something I was either for or against but that exists and needs to be understood. And just because one may not want to “believe” in identities — ethnic groups and ethno-religious groups — that doesn’t mean that they somehow disappear from the world. Absurd as it sounds, we have a collective blind spot on the topic. And our refusal to take the issue of ethnic and ethno-religious identity seriously has helped to undermine our foreign policy initiatives.

Just look at Iraq. The Bush administration — and all the “experts,” both Americans and exiled Iraqis, who guided its policy — made a fundamental error by relying on the assumption that Iraqis were nonsectarian nationalists, more concerned with preserving a nationalism that had been imposed on them by Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party than with the position and fate of their own tribes and mullahs. As plenty of critics have observed, even the faintest acknowledgment of the social cleavages on the ground could have helped the U.S. war effort.

Read it all.

Worse still, credit markets remain under strain. The list of troubled banks has increased from 90 to 117, and is predicted to grow further, putting a strain on the resources of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which guarantees deposits up to $100,000. Banks such as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Wachovia and HBOS will have to raise a total of almost $800 billion to cover debt that is coming due this year and next, according to JP Morgan Chase. Institutions such as Lehman Brothers will continue to struggle. And the sovereign wealth funds whose investments in financial institutions have dropped in value will be more cautious. Finally, considerable uncertainty surrounds the future structure of Freddie Mac (a client of mine) and Fannie Mae now that the government is taking them in “conservatorship”. They support some 75% of the mortgage market.

But, as is always the case, there are contradictory signs. The first is that the housing market is beginning to touch bottom. “It appears that existing home sales have stabilised,” report economists at Goldman Sachs. Banks are unloading repossessed properties, sales of new homes are now exceeding housing starts, and house prices are no longer on a hiding to nothing – prices are up recently in more cities than in those in which they continue to drop.

The second bit of cheer is that several of the banks that need to replace debt that is coming due have reported that “debt repayment is business as usual” (HBOS), can be comfortably (Goldman) or “seamlessly” (Wachovia) handled, or met from customer deposits (Merrill Lynch).

Meanwhile, Temasek, the Singapore sovereign wealth fund, has expressed satisfaction with its investments in Merrill and Barclays, and the government has decided that Freddie and Fannie are here to stay in some form or other.

Read it all.

Edgar Allan Poe never lived in one city for long, and ever since he died and was buried here in 1849 this city has claimed him as its own.

But last year Edward Pettit, a Poe scholar in Philadelphia, began arguing that Poe’s remains belong in Philadelphia. Poe wrote many of his most noteworthy works there and, according to Mr. Pettit, that city’s rampant crime and violence in the mid-19th century framed Poe’s sinister outlook and inspired his creation of the detective fiction genre.

“So, Philadelphians, let’s hop in our cars, drive down I-95 and appropriate a body from a certain Baltimore cemetery,” Mr. Pettit wrote in an article for the Philadelphia City Paper in October. “I’ll bring the shovel.”

So far, no one has taken up Mr. Pettit’s call for Philadelphia’s best grave robbers to bring home the city’s prodigal son before the bicentennial of Poe’s birth in January 2009. But the ghoulish argument between the cities over the body and legacy of the master of the macabre has continued in blogs and newspapers, and on Jan. 13 Mr. Pettit is to square off with an opponent from Baltimore to settle the matter in a debate at the Philadelphia Free Library.

“Philadelphia can keep its broken bell and its cheese steak, but Poe’s body isn’t going anywhere,” said Jeff Jerome, the curator of the Poe House in Baltimore and Mr. Pettit’s opponent in the debate.

Read the whole article.

Shortly after taking office as governor in 2006, Sarah Palin sent an e-mail message to Paul E. Riley, her former pastor in the Assembly of God Church, which her family began attending when she was a youth. She needed spiritual advice in how to do her new job, said Mr. Riley, who is 78 and retired from the church.

“She asked for a biblical example of people who were great leaders and what was the secret of their leadership,” Mr. Riley said.

He wrote back that she should read again from the Old Testament the story of Esther, a beauty queen who became a real one, gaining the king’s ear to avert the slaughter of the Jews and vanquish their enemies. When Esther is called to serve, God grants her a strength she never knew she had.

Mr. Riley said he thought Ms. Palin had lived out the advice as governor, and would now do so again as the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee.

Read it all from the front page of today’s New York Times.