LISA LING: Even though he’s done this now for several years, [John] Plocher says he’s still surprised by the personal things people leave behind.

People always say that the first thing they take if there was some kind of a disaster is photographs, but…

JOHN PLOCHER: No, we find pink slips to automobiles. We find birth certificates. Now, those types of things we keep and we attempt to mail those…

LISA LING: Computers, computer printers.

JOHN PLOCHER: Yes, there’s a computer. It’s all intact.

LISA LING: Two computers in here.

JOHN PLOCHER: Yes, two computers in there, a table.

LISA LING: Incredible. Incredible.

JOHN PLOCHER: We’ve found dozens of things, but one of the things we found just recently was an urn that somebody’s remains they had been cremated in, and they left their urn at the house. And we called the bank and said, “What do we do with that?” And they said, “Do not trash that.”

Read it all or better yet watch the whole video report.

Giants of the auto, airline and technology industries ordered emergency action against the global financial crisis on Friday as shares took a new hammering amid mounting gloom.

Even a 1.5 million barrel a day production cut by OPEC failed to stop oil prices falling amid fears of a deep global recession.

Grim news backing those fears came from around the world.

China, Japan and 11 other Asian nations agreed to set up an 80-billion-dollar war chest to fight what ex-US Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan called a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami”.

Read it all.

It’s a controversial idea in a country known for prudishness about sex ”” teaching kids as young as 5 about the birds and bees.

But with one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Europe, the British government is bringing sex education to all schools in England ”” including kindergarten-aged children.

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

A new study of Orthodox Christians in America has found a larger-than-expected number of converts, mostly from Roman Catholic and evangelical Protestant backgrounds.

The report, released by the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute in Berkeley, Calif., surveyed 1,000 members of Greek Orthodox or Orthodox Church in America congregations, which represent about 60% of America’s estimated 1.2 million Orthodox Christians.

Although Orthodox churches were historically immigrant communities, the study found that nine out of 10 parishioners are now American-born. Thousands of members had converted to the faith as adults: 29% of Greek Orthodox are converts, as are 51% of the OCA.

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Poverty (of sorts) is suddenly in fashion. Politicians and commentators blame the financial crisis on greed, not only by malefactors on Wall Street but also by all the denizens of Main Street who live beyond their means, accumulate useless possessions and despoil the environment. It is not quite clear what a nongreedy Wall Street would look like. But for the rest of us, after due repentance, the solution to our financial woes is held to be a more ascetic life. If it is voluntary, rather than compelled by circumstance, it has the glow of moral superiority. “Green is good,” says a latter-day Gandhi as he goes to work by bicycle. But if you are really poor, asceticism does not mean giving up your SUV — it means eating just one meal a day because it is all you can afford.

Far more attractive to poor people, who are a majority of its adherents, is the “prosperity gospel,” a version of Christianity asserting that material benefits will come to those who have faith, live a morally upright life and, not so incidentally, give money to the church. Broadly speaking, this is what Max Weber called the Protestant Ethic, but with much less emphasis on self-denial and more on hard work, planning for the future, family loyalty and educating one’s children.
The prosperity gospel probably originated among the poorer elements of the evangelical community in America. It is now a global phenomenon, especially among the rapidly spreading Pentecostal churches in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

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By now, most homeowners know that their monthly mortgage payment might go to a pension fund in another state or a bank in another country, thanks to the bundling of home loans into securities.

What they might not realize is that these mortgage-backed securities are only the beginning of the slicing and dicing that has brought the world’s financial markets to the abyss. Companies that purchase these securities also buy something called “credit default swaps,” a product cooked up by Wall Street in an effort to insure against losses.

The explosive growth of these credit derivatives, as they are known, is a tale of hubris, folly and blind devotion to markets. Derivatives now back more than $60 trillion in credit ”” that’s 20 times the annual budget of the United States making them kind of like cluster bombs spread throughout the global economy.

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THE Rt Revd Bob Duncan, the former Bishop of Pittsburgh in the Episcopal Church in the United States, deposed from holy orders by the Presiding Bishop last month for “abandoning communion” after his diocese realigned itself with the Province of the Southern Cone, has warned that English traditionalists could find themselves similarly threatened……

At a press conference in London last Friday, Bishop Duncan said that the Episcopal Church in the US had treated him “unjustly and uncan­on­ically”. He had been deposed, two weeks after his diocese’s vote to leave the Episcopal Church, under a canon designed to remove those who had become RCs or Pres­byterians or who had lost their faith. But he expected to be re-elected by the diocese at a Convention on 7 November. “I will have been both the 7th Bishop of Pittsburgh and the 8th Bishop of Pittsburgh, and I didn’t die in between.”

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Brenda Jerez hardly seems like the kind of person lenders would fight over.

Three years ago, she became ill with cancer and ran up $50,000 on her credit cards after she was forced to leave her accounting job. She filed for bankruptcy protection last year.

For months after she emerged from insolvency last fall, 6 to 10 new credit card and auto loan offers arrived every week that specifically mentioned her bankruptcy and, despite her poor credit history, dangled a range of seemingly too-good-to-be-true financing options.

“Good news! You are approved for both Visa and MasterCard ”” that’s right, 2 platinum credit cards!” read one buoyant letter sent this spring to Ms. Jerez, offering a $10,000 credit limit if only she returned a $35 processing fee with her application.

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The idea of helping Main Street has an undeniable appeal. Housing is at the root of the financial crisis, and preventing foreclosures could bring a double-barreled benefit. It would allow families to remain in their homes and could also help keep the housing market from spiraling out of control. The more foreclosed homes that are dumped on the market, the more home prices will fall.

But before any of the various rescue plans reaches the point of inevitability ”” and these days, ideas can go from unlikely to inevitable in about 48 hours ”” I think it’s important to stop for a moment and consider how complicated any such plan would be. Every one of them, in fact, faces an inherent conflict: coming up with a large-scale homeowner bailout without also helping millions of people who don’t need help is almost impossible.

That’s a big reason that the various efforts to stem foreclosures so far, both from the Bush administration and Congressional Democrats, have been so modest. You just can’t solve the foreclosure problem without causing a lot of collateral damage ”” in the form of lavishing money on homeowners who can stay in their homes without assistance.

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A church-state watchdog group has asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate whether the Roman Catholic bishop of Paterson, N.J., violated tax laws by denouncing Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama.

In a letter sent to the IRS on Wednesday (Oct. 22), Americans United for Separation of Church and State accused Paterson Bishop Arthur Serratelli of illegal partisanship for lambasting Obama’s support of abortion rights.

In a column posted on the Diocese of Paterson’s website and published in its weekly newspaper, Serratelli also compared Obama to King Herod, the biblical monarch who ordered the death of John the Baptist.

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“There is a complete loss of confidence and it was brought on by the decline in Japan,” said Francis Lun, general manager at Fulbright Securities in Hong Kong. “We are going back to the stone ages.”

–From a Marketwatch story on the bloody Friday in the markets

So where does that leave us?

Well, firstly there is the matter of the complainant. I am not aware as to who Richard Chartres received the formal complaint from, but he or she should by now have received a copy of the Bishop’s report. Whether the process concluded at section 11 or 12, the complainant has a right to appeal. That means that we may not have heard the last of this. If anybody knows who the formal complainant actually is, do let us know!!!!

Secondly, the fact that the process appears to have concluded at section 12 and 13, and given that the Bishop threatened to take further action against Dudley were he not to permit his letter to be published, implies that despite the paucity of an apology in Dudley’s letter (regret rather than repent – where have we heard that before) it is very clear from the disciplinary procedure that what Dudley did was wrong. The key to the interpretation of the letter is this sentence:

I undertake not to provide any form of blessing for same sex couples registering civil partnerships

.

The implication is clear. What Chartres is threatening is not just action against Dudley, but action against anybody who now performs any form of blessing of a civil partnership (i.e. to equivilate it in any way to a marriage).

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In late 2007, Centinela Hospital in Inglewood was losing nearly $1 million a month and had piled up $15 million in debt. Among the causes of the crisis: $25 million in overdue bills.

Collecting that money would have given Centinela a measure of relief. But the bills went unpaid, and the century-old medical center was sold. The new owners slashed services, closed half the operating rooms and laid off a third of the employees.

Who owed Centinela that elusive $25 million? According to hospital officials, it was health insurance companies.

“Insurers have found a very creative way of denying, delaying or slowing payments in a way that is having a real impact on patient care and some of our survival,” said Von Crockett, Centinela’s chief executive. “Every single doctor and hospital is writing off money they are legally owed but don’t collect. It’s an insane situation.”

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New figures released today show that regular church attendance in the Diocese of London has risen, in contrast to a fall nationally. According to the latest figures, between 2005-2006 the capital saw church attendance rise by 2%.

The new figures for 2006 show that 80,600 Londoners on average attended services throughout the week at the Diocese’s 479 churches, compared to 79,300 in 2005. Of the 80,600 churchgoers, around a fifth (17,700) were under the age of 16.

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From here:

The Assistant Bishop of London has issued the following statement regarding the service that took place at St Bartholomew the Great on 31 May.
Dear Colleagues,

I am contacting you all on Bishop Richard’s behalf since, as you know, he is currently away on holiday.

Earlier this year, the Bishop wrote to you regarding a service held at St Bartholomew the Great on May 31st, which had generated considerable publicity and consternation.

Since this time, under the Bishop’s instructions, the Archdeacon of London has carried out an investigation into the matter, alongside the Chancellor of the Diocese. This has involved a series of frank discussions with the Rector, Revd Dr Martin Dudley.

As a consequence, the Rector has made expressly clear his regret over what happened at St Bartholomew the Great and accepted the service should not have taken place. Bishop Richard has considered the matter and has decided to accept the Rector’s apology in full. The matter is therefore now closed.
To avoid any uncertainty over what has been said, I have enclosed below, with the Rector’s permission, his statement of apology to the Bishop:

“I can now appreciate that the service held at St Bartholomew the Great on 31 May 2008 was inconsistent with the terms of the Pastoral Statement from the House of Bishops issued in 2005. Whilst the precise status of this pastoral document within the Church of England generally and the Diocese of London in particular may be a matter of differing interpretations, I ought to have afforded it far greater weight. I regret the embarrassment caused to you by this event and by its subsequent portrayal in the media. I now recognise that I should not have responded positively to the request for this service, even though it was made by another incumbent of your Diocese, who is a colleague, neighbour and friend of us both nor should I have adopted uncritically the Order of Service prepared by him and his partner. I had not appreciated that the event would have been attended by so many nor that it would have attracted the publicity and notoriety which it did.

“I share your abhorrence of homophobia in all its forms. I am profoundly uneasy with much of the content of the House of Bishops’ Pastoral Statement which anecdotal evidence suggests is being widely, though discretely, disregarded in this Diocese and elsewhere. Nonetheless, I am willing to abide by its content in the future, until such time as it is rescinded or amended, and I undertake not to provide any form of blessing for same sex couples registering civil partnerships.”

As I say, following the Rector’s full and frank apology, the Bishop considers the matter now closed.

With best wishes and prayers

Pete Broadbent
Assistant Bishop of London

We are saved. Amid the rubble of the world’s financial markets, we can catch sight of the foundations of a new international order. The big lesson of the crisis has been learnt: we cannot escape our mutual dependence. Global markets require multilateral rules.

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Alan Greenspan, the formerchairman of the US Federal Reserve, has dramatically repudiated large parts of his laissez-faire ideology and joined the chorus of voices saying that the credit crisis reveals a need for more regulation of the finance industry.

Returning to Capitol Hill to testify before Congress, where lawmakers were once in awe of his intellect and his reputation as a steward of the economy, a bewildered-sounding Mr Greenspan admitted that his view of the world had been flawed.

Self-regulation by Wall Street had failed, he said. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity ”“ myself especially ”“ are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

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Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years.

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The Rt. Rev. David Colin Jones, the bishop suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, has accepted an invitation from the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh to serve as a “consulting bishop” as it rebuilds.

Bishop Jones will provide the Pittsburgh diocesan Standing Committee, the current leadership team, with practical advice on the details of diocesan administration, clergy deployment, and support for congregations remaining in the Episcopal Church in the United States.

“Bishop Jones’s experience in Virginia, especially his pastoral care for congregations that continued with the Episcopal Church, provides us a great resource and guiding hand,” said the Rev. James Simons, President of Pittsburgh’s Standing Committee.

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One of the things that I re-learned in-depth is that the Episcopal Church probably has the most federal understanding of what the Anglican Communion is and the churches in the developing world have the
most organic, or unified understanding of the Anglican Communion. … If you’re living in southern Africa and you go to Eucharist in Zimbabwe, you feel like you’re in your church. It feels like one church to them”¦. From our end of the spectrum, we feel like we’re in a federation of churches that share a heritage. ”¦ As they expressed their reaction to our actions, they were also expressing the depth of their sense of communion with us.

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“MORALITY, LIKE ART, means drawing a line someplace,” Oscar Wilde once observed. Anglican bishops historically wield the pen, drawing the line between error and truth, between right and wrong doctrine.

Yet at some point in the mid-20th century, the bishops of the church began to abdicate this responsibility – even before the American Church reformed its ordinal in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, removing the injunction to bishops that they “banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word.”

Where once the church celebrated Anglican comprehensiveness, it now celebrated diversity. Confessionalism morphed into conversation, as those charged with guarding the faith suffered a loss of nerve. The church, like the universities, the arts, literature and other repositories of high culture in the West, was trampled underfoot by the long march of the left through the institutions.

THE 2008 LAMBETH CONFERENCE of Anglican bishops in Canterbury July 16-August 3 was a milestone in this march of relativism. While nothing extraordinary happened – no fist fights or beatific visions – a number of prelates came away from Lambeth realizing the Anglican Communion no longer worked. Its structures were not a place for holy men, but for hollow men: bishops who knew in their hollow hearts they were stuffed with straw, trapped in a purposeless whirl of apathy and spiritual torpor called “dialogue.” The Anglican Communion had finally broken, coming to an end “not with a bang but a whimper.”

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One of the saddest moments of the Conference for me personally occurred in our Indaba when a bishop spoke earnestly of his views on same sex issues with a brief and solemn conclusion. Some minutes after I saw him surreptitiously pass a sheaf of the TEC briefing notes to the TEC bishop seated in front of him. He had parroted one of the ’sample narratives’. I wanted to shout and to cry. Any idea of transparency and trust through Indaba had been tragically thrown in our face. Set piece parroting surreptitiously orchestrated was poisoning our communion. God have mercy on us! Although I spoke to our Indaba facilitator of this privately we, as an Indaba group and Conference, had neither the wit nor the will to address our hiddenness.

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When my back seized up, I called my doctor’s office, explaining that I was a minister and was in too much pain to deliver my sermon. Could they help?

The woman on the other end asked me to hold. The next thing I heard was a loud voice announcing, “I have a minister on the phone who can’t stand to preach!”

–Gilbert Vieira in the November 2008 Reader’s Digest, page 43

Voting is like marrying and crying and laughing and buying. We should do it, but only as if we were not doing it. That’s because “the present form of this world is passing away” and, in God’s eyes, “the time has grown very short.” Here’s the way Paul puts it:

The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. (1 Corinthians 7:29-31)

Let’s take these one at a time and compare them to voting.

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Following years of big profits for bankers and home builders in this state, one-fifth of all outstanding U.S. mortgages by dollar value — and a higher percentage of risky loans — are written on homes here. Of the 25 metropolitan areas with the largest home-price declines in the past 12 months, 16 are in the state, according to Zillow.com, a real-estate research Web site.

Those woes weigh on the financial system. Though California represents about 12% of the nation’s population, its homes account for 34% of the loans in a typical mortgage-backed security, according to Fitch Ratings. “California doesn’t have a Wall Street problem. Wall Street has a California problem,” says Christopher Thornberg, principal at Los-Angeles based Beacon Economics and member of the California Controller’s Council of Economic Advisors.

This is a really important article from the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal–read it all.

This moment feels to me like a bad B-movie rerun of the 1980s. And I know how this movie ends ”” with our re-addiction to oil and OPEC, as well as corrosive uncertainty for our economy, trade balance, security and environment.

“Is the economic crisis going to be the end of green?” asks David Rothkopf, energy consultant and author of “Superclass.” “Or, could green be the way to end the economic crisis?”

It has to be the latter. We can’t afford a financial bailout that also isn’t a green buildup ”” a buildup of a new clean energy industry that strengthens America and helps the planet.

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The defenders of the single meaning theory usually concede that the medieval approach to the Bible met the religious needs of the Christian community, but that it did so at the unacceptable price of doing violence to the biblical text. The fact that the historical-critical method after two hundred years is still struggling for more than a precarious foothold in that same religious community is generally blamed on the ignorance and conservatism of the Christian laity and the sloth or moral cowardice of its pastors.

I should like to suggest an alternative hypothesis. The medieval theory of levels of meaning in the biblical text, with all its undoubted defects, flourished because it is true, while the modern theory of a single meaning, with all its demonstrable virtues, is false. Until the historical-critical method becomes critical of its own theoretical foundations and develops a hermeneutical theory adequate to the nature of the text which it is interpreting, it will remain restricted-as it deserves to be-to the guild and the academy, where the question of truth can endlessly be deferred.

Read it carefully and read it all.

In the same way the wrinkles and stoop of an old gentleman can sometimes mask a feisty personality, the faded sign out front of the First Baptist Church here and its weathered exterior belie the vibrant doings within.

Pop your head inside the church’s foyer on any given day and you’ll hear 72-year-old trumpeter Frank Hart improvising Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour with a crew of other elderly musicians. Or swing around back and you’ll likely find the church’s head pastor, the Rev. James Brown, picking grapes in the organic orchard, laughing and talking with some of his congregants, in his deep, gravelly voice, about the importance of eating fresh foods to keep the mind and body strong. The church’s freshwater fish farm ”” teeming with tilapia ”” bubbles nearby. Later, some will be cooked up in a cornmeal batter for church suppers.

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(ENS) The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council heard October 22 that the church’s 2009 budget, if council members approve it, will have a $2.5 million deficit.

However, Treasurer Kurt Barnes told council members that the entire 2007-2009 triennial budget will be balanced, as required by the Episcopal Church’s Constitution and Canons. There were surpluses of $1.2 million in 2007 and $2 million in 2008, Barnes said.

Projections for the 2009 budget anticipate $54.6 million in revenues compared to $57.1 million in expenses. Barnes said that, given the triennial nature of the budget and the previous surpluses, the 2009 budget “could suffer a deficit of $2.8 million” and still be balanced.

Read the whole article.