One way to change this perception, some church leaders, social commentators and journalists say, is for mainstream news organizations to employ ”” and keep ”” more evangelicals in their newsrooms.

“Journalism has become more of a white-collar field that draws from elite colleges,” said Terry Mattingly, director of the Washington Journalism Center for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities and a religion columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. “While there’s been heavy gender and racial diversity … there’s a lack of cultural diversity in journalism,” including religion.

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Suicide rates in the USA are up after more than a decade of dropping, and middle-aged whites primarily account for the increase, a report says.

The rate for whites 40 to 64 years old jumped 19% for women and 16% for men from 1999 to 2005, say researchers from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Their analysis was published online in the AmericanJournal of Preventive Medicine.

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Following reports of a £1.2m shortfall in the funding of this year’s Lambeth Conference, the Church of England’s Archbishops’ Council and Church Commissioners have set up a review, under the independent chairmanship of John Ormerod, a former senior partner of Deloitte, to examine the financial management of the Lambeth Conference.

The team has also been asked to make recommendations regarding the future involvement of the Council and the Board of the Church Commissioners in assisting the financing of meetings of the Lambeth Conference. A spokesman for the Church of England told the Gazette: “The inquiry is due to report back to the Council and the Board early in 2009 with a preliminary report on the financial difficulties and how these arose. A final report, examining the way forward, will be produced in summer 2009. The Council and Board have indicated that the inquiry’s report should be published.” The membership of the inquiry will be: John Ormerod; the Rt Revd Tim Stevens, Bishop of Leicester, and Christina Baxter (both Archbishops’ Council); and Timothy Walker, Third Church Estates Commissioner.

Last August, the Board and the Council met to discuss an approach from the Lambeth Conference Company – the body with responsibility for the finances and administration of the Lambeth Conference 2008 – for financial help.

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MARTIN BAILY, Brookings Institution: Well, I was very pleased that Bernanke supported that. The economy is looking pretty ugly at the moment. I would expect that we’re going to report a negative third quarter. The fourth quarter looks like it could be substantially down. And then probably a continuing recession into the first half of 2009.

So we need to try to sort of reverse that. Initially, the financial crisis didn’t seem to be having that much ill effect on the overall economy, jobs and production, but now it is. And we need to do something to reverse that. And I think a stimulus package is definitely needed.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do you agree with that as a starting point?

WILLIAM BEACH, Heritage Foundation: I think the problems of the financial sector are beginning to spread throughout the economy. We’ve had such a long period of time when credit was tightening. Every day, we would get more news of tighter credit.

And ultimately that affects people where they work, their payrolls, vendors in businesses, and then it goes out into the consuming public, because they can’t get the credit necessary.

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The unusual trial could establish a precedent for clergy in hierarchical religious institutions to turn to civil courts to challenge their superiors over personnel matters.

In his opening statement at the Montgomery County Courthouse, lawyer John Lewis portrayed his client, the Rev. David Moyer, as the target of a cynical plot by Bennison to “fraudulently” remove him from the priesthood.

Head of the five-county Diocese of Pennsylvania for 10 years, Bennison deposed Moyer in 2002 as a priest and rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont. Moyer, a conservative, had publicly clashed with the more liberal Bennison over the ordination of women and the acceptance of homosexuality and had repeatedly accused him of dishonesty.

Moyer, 57, is suing for unspecified damages on the ground that his removal not only was improper under Episcopal church law but also caused him suffering, isolation and loss of income.

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Even Americans unschooled in the history of the Middle East know that Iraq comprises Sunni, Shia and Kurdish Muslims, thanks to the Bush administration’s much-publicized effort to promote reconciliation among those groups. Often overlooked is the fact that Iraq has an ancient Christian population that has suffered grievously from the instability that followed the U.S. invasion.

More than 1,300 Christians recently fled the city of Mosul after 14 were killed — perhaps by Al Qaeda in Iraq — following a protest about an election law that didn’t provide Christians with fair representation on provincial councils. But that is only the latest exodus of Christians from Mosul, which served as a refuge for those driven out of Baghdad, and from Iraq as a whole. A Chaldean Catholic archbishop has warned that Christians in his country face “liquidation.”

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The 300-member congregation recently bought the former Playtime Drive-In movie theater to develop as their meeting place, and it held a bit of a surprise for staff members when they closed on the sale: cases and cases of pornography from the 1970s and 1980s.

“Obviously, we knew the right thing to do would be to destroy it, and not let it ever be out on the market, so to speak,” senior pastor Mark Eldredge tells NPR’s Melissa Block.

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In the 1930s, the American people didn’t fall ”” unlike so many of their supposed intellectual betters ”” for either fascism or Communism. Since World War II, the American people have resisted the temptations of isolationism and protectionism, and have turned their backs on a history of bigotry.

Now, the Pew poll I cited earlier also showed Barack Obama holding a 50 percent to 40 percent lead over John McCain in the race for the White House. You might think this data point poses a challenge to my encomium to the good sense of the American people.

It does. But it’s hard to blame the public for preferring Obama at this stage ”” given the understandable desire to kick the Republicans out of the White House, and given the failure of the McCain campaign to make its case effectively. And some number of the public may change their minds in the final two weeks of the campaign, and may decide McCain-Palin offers a better kind of change ”” perhaps enough to give McCain-Palin a victory.

The media elites really hate that idea. Not just because so many of them prefer Obama. But because they like telling us what’s going to happen. They’re always annoyed when the people cross them up. Pundits spent all spring telling Hillary Clinton to give up in her contest against Obama ”” and the public kept on ignoring them and keeping her hopes alive.

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The Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music is seeking General Convention approval for a replacement it has prepared to the Book of Lesser Feasts and Fasts, authorization to begin work on a new edition of the Book of Occasional Services, and approval of a new collection of prayers and liturgies addressing reproductive loss and grief.

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(ENS) In addition to telling their stories, all nine parishes and six missions of the convocation displayed photos around the church, portraying aspects of ministry in their varying contexts.

“The experience of being the convocation, with dozens of nationalities represented and several languages spoken, has some lessons to offer other Anglicans, beginning with Episcopalians in the United States, even as we ourselves have so much more to learn,” said Whalon in his pastoral letter, which included reflections on this summer’s 2008 Lambeth Conference of bishops and an overview of the life and mission of the group of churches he leads in Europe.

“What we have learned in the convocation’s life is that not participating in a larger common life of churches leads only to isolation and a false sense of being the only ‘real’ Episcopalians,” he said. “Alternatively, as we have wrestled with the need to harmonize the policies and procedures of our common life, we have seen the need to take time to fully understand the circumstances of each congregation, in their differing contexts, before setting forth common rules of life.”

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One of the goods things which have emerged recently from the travails of Anglo-Catholicism in a riven Anglican Communion is a more profound reflection on what constitutes our patrimony: what makes Anglo-Catholicism actually distinctive, and justifies the anxiety which unites us to find a future for what we have received. After all, the great majority of Catholic Christians manage quite well without adding a national qualifier to the third mark of the Church adumbrated by the Creed. But those of us who live within our embattled, contrary tradition know that there is a tone, a way of doing things, a pastoral and liturgical ethos which is both absolutely distinctive and yet also prophetic in pointing beyond itself towards a greater unity ”“ those of us who went recently with the Archbishop of Canterbury to Lourdes will understand what I mean. When we look at the lives of the saints we see that in their diversity of character and spirituality they point us towards the truth of Revelation in different ways: for S. Thomas Aquinas, the overarching principle which organizes his understanding of reality is truth, for S. Francis of Assisi it is goodness, for S. Augustine it is beauty. Our tradition, rather at odds actually with the puritan mentality of the first Tractarians, values beauty: the beauty of holiness in Christian living, the beauty of holiness in Christian worship, the beauty of holiness in the magnanimous expenditure of human wealth on the splendour of Christian cult.It is important to recognise that this is not just an aesthetic preference (although there is nothing wrong with that). Attentiveness to beauty in religion is not like an enthusiasm for Bellini or Bonsai, it is to recognise a fundamental characteristic of the nature of truth as indeed beautiful because divine: as Augustine cried, Late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient, ever new. To prefer the trite, the banal, the makeshift to the artful, the well-crafted and the beautiful is to make a theological mistake about God. The present Pope is very anxious to rescue the ideal of liturgical beauty from the charge of aestheticism and is determined to put this right in a way which should rejoice all Anglican Catholics who have from the beginning been attentive to this core aspect of evangelisation. It was both moving and significant that on the feast day of Ss. Peter and Paul this year he invited the Ecumenical Patriarch to inaugurate with him the year of Paul in a liturgical celebration which reflected a new commitment to beauty in music and vesture which many of us thought was lost in the 1960s. But the great eastern fathers of the Church were not simply interested in aesthetics, not simply Christians of good taste. They understood beauty to be a morally valuable quality, human creativeness which exemplified our creation in the image of God himself, and our transformation into the divine likeness by the work of grace.

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I was General Secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion in the eighties. I saw this development before my eyes. While EFAC groups grew in England and North America and Australia, in Africa there seemed no need for them: for the Church of Kenya was evangelical; the Church of Uganda and Rwanda, fresh from the inspiration of the East African Revival was charismatic and evangelical. The Church of Tanzania had both evangelical and orthodox Anglo-Catholic roots. Where there was biblical evangelical and orthodox faithfulness, the churches grew. Where these elements were not present, the Anglican church stagnated as in Japan.

The result today is that two-thirds of the non-western Anglican Churches are biblically faithful Anglicans of the evangelical variety.This is the fruit of the identity and space forged for evangelical Anglicans in the Communion by the Keele Congress. Keele and its products validated the possibility of there being evangelical Anglicans in a liturgical Church that was seen as Catholic . As a result the Church of Nigeria for example could grow as an evangelical Anglican church.

The first time this reality came to global prominence was the 1988 Lambeth Conference. It was there that the African Bishops in particular were able to make a united stand for calling for a decade of evangelism. That was their idea. Then in 1998 they made a stand for orthodoxy in the communion’s teaching on sexuality. Then in 2008 they [chose for reasons of conscience no to attend]… the Lambeth Conference and held GAFCON.

It is not possible to understand these developments without understanding the emergence of Global non-western Anglicanism that is fundamentally orthodox. Since 1988 they have been slowly taking responsibility for the whole Anglican Communion.

This responsibility has been exercised carefully in the years since Lambeth 1998. There the non-western orthodox Anglicans took responsibility to safeguard the orthodox teaching of the communion on marriage. When this was challenged in the years after 1998, again and again the orthodox primates ensured that the primates meetings and the ACC repeatedly stood by Lambeth 1.10 and called for order and discipline.

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Denver Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput labeled Barack Obama the “most committed” abortion-rights candidate from a major party in 35 years while accusing a Catholic Obama ally and other Democratic-friendly Catholic groups of doing a “disservice to the church.”

Chaput, one of the nation’s most politically outspoken Catholic prelates, delivered the remarks Friday night at a dinner of a Catholic women’s group.

His comments were among the sharpest in a debate over abortion and Catholic political responsibility in a campaign in which Catholics represent a key swing vote.

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In Eau Claire, Tom Giffey, the editorial-page editor at the Leader-Telegram, described the profusion of cut-and-paste e-mails that his page has received during the campaign. “In the old days, there were Republican or Democratic newspapers, but there was more of a level playing field and both sides had to argue from the same facts,” Giffey said. “Now we’re in an age when you can simply reinforce your own viewpoints. And it’s hard to have a discussion of the facts when you’re dealing with two separate sets of facts””two sets of talking points that came down from on high. With the Internet, all of us were going to be content producers, but it’s become an echo chamber.”

As Dave Herbert, the building contractor at Bonnie’s Home Cooking, put it, “Partisanship has crept into every crease in this country.” In 2008, a customer at a breakfast spot in Appalachia, or a worker at a union office in Columbus, is able to repeat the latest dubious campaign sound bites within days, if not hours. Everyone hates the media, and everyone sounds like a talking head.

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The Bishop of Brandon in the Anglican Church of Canada, the Right Reverend Jim Njegovan, sent letters on 16 October 2008 to the Rev Paul Crossland and the Rev Ann Crossland, rector and honourary assistant rector of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC) parishes of Church of the Resurrection (Brandon) and Church of the Redeemer (Dauphin), purporting to “inhibit” them (prevent them from ministering as priests). Bishop Njegovan implies in his letters that, since he was not informed that Paul and Ann had relinquished their Anglican Church of Canada licences, they had no right to minister “within the bounds of this Diocese” ”“ that is western Manitoba.

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The Synod of the Diocese of Sydney has overwhelmingly endorsed the Jerusalem Declaration, the key document to emerge from GAFCON earlier this year.

Debate on the motion was begun by the Bishop of North Sydney, Dr Glenn Davies, who was on the Gafcon committee which drafted the Jerusalem Declaration.

The Bishop described it as an honour to serve on the commitee, saying the statement itself was not pre-written but was developed word for word during the week.

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Indonesia has received a lot of bad press in recent years: for bombings in Bali and at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in the capital, Jakarta ”” both the work of al-Qaida-linked militants ”” and for numerous attacks on Christian churches. But Indonesia overall is a far more tolerant place than these acts suggest, and it appears to be getting even more accepting.

Indonesia is home to more Muslims than any other nation. But in Jakarta, a $27 million Christian church that seats more than 4,500 people opened its doors last month. The Reformed Millennium Cathedral is the work of preacher Stephen Tong, a sprightly 67-year-old who waited 16 years to get permission to build his church.

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While Mr. Cisneros says he remains proud of his work, he has misgivings over what his passion has wrought. He insists that the worst problems developed only after “bad actors” hijacked his good intentions but acknowledges that “people came to homeownership who should not have been homeowners.”

They were lured by “unscrupulous participants ”” bankers, brokers, secondary market people,” he says. “The country is paying for that, and families are hurt because we as a society did not draw a line.”

The causes of the housing implosion are many: lax regulation, financial innovation gone awry, excessive debt, raw greed. The players are also varied: bankers, borrowers, developers, politicians and bureaucrats.

Mr. Cisneros, 61, had a foot in a number of those worlds. Despite his qualms, he encouraged the unprepared to buy homes ”” part of a broad national trend with dire economic consequences.

He reflects often on his role in the debacle, he says, which has changed homeownership from something that secured a place in the middle class to something that is ejecting people from it. “I’ve been waiting for someone to put all the blame at my doorstep,” he says lightly, but with a bit of worry, too.

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As the presidential campaign winds down, members of America’s largest and most silent minority may be excused for feeling a little left out. As Republicans and Democrats escalate their appeals to 2008’s most contested and prized constituency ”” swing voters among evangelicals and Catholics ”” they treat those who are not religious as if they are invisible….

But something is wrong with this picture. It erases vast numbers of Americans ””not only atheists, agnostics and secularists, but also those who have turned away from the God and religion of the Old and New Testaments. And it makes it seem as though most of those who claim to be “believers” believe pretty much the same things ”” though this is manifestly false. It encourages the sense that there are two kinds of Americans, the overwhelming majority who believe and belong, and those few do not believe, and are outsiders. But the conventional wisdom that nearly all Americans believe in God is wrong.

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On the surface, [Sarah] Palin seems to be a champion broadly embraced by evangelicals. Yet in recent weeks, some polls suggest that she may not be significantly boosting support for the top of the GOP ticket among undecided White evangelicals, a key demographic.

Why is this? In the Sunbelt and heartland suburbs where middle class evangelicals determine the outcome of national elections, I detect a growing unease with Palin as a potential president. It predates her disastrous interview with Katie Couric and the conservative columnists’ calls for her to step aside. It may be slowed by her performance in the vice presidential debate, but it is unlikely to be reversed.

“Gov. Palin is gifted and full of potential, and the media has been embarrassingly and abysmally condescending toward her,” said the Rev. Kendall Harmon, a conservative Episcopal leader from Summerville, S.C. “She has much to offer but she is not ready to take on this assignment. She lacks the credentials – at this time – to be in this position. This is too much too soon.”

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Anyone else around here willing to support a tax on all foundation endowments, including those of colleges and universities, in excess of, say $1,000,000?

I’d go further, actually, and end the tax deduction for anything that is not directly helping poor people–helping them get health care, food, education, etc. I’m not quite sure where religious institutions would fit in.

—Richard Adams

Health insurance premiums for South Carolina families rose 5.7 times faster than earnings between 2000 and 2007, according to a report released Thursday.

Annual premiums for family health coverage provided through the workplace rose from $6,600 to $11,624, an increase of 76.1 percent. Meanwhile, median earnings increased from $23,057 to $26,140, or 13.4 percent.

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a national nonpartisan group based in Washington, D.C., said, “What is so surprising about these numbers is that these premiums purchased thinner coverage.”

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Just three weeks after a church court ruled that he should be removed from office, Episcopal Bishop Charles E. Bennison Jr. faces the start of an unusual civil trial today that could cost the financially struggling Diocese of Pennsylvania millions of dollars.

Bennison, 63, is being sued for damages in Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas by the Rev. David Moyer, who alleges that Bennison used fraud and deception to defrock him as a priest of the diocese six years ago.

Moyer’s attorney, John Lewis, said that Moyer v. Bennison appears to be the first trial in American jurisprudence involving “the ecclesiastical discipline of a priest in a hierarchical church.”

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Communion, the central ritual of most Christian worship services and long a members-only sacrament, is increasingly being opened to any willing participant, including the nonbaptized, the nonbeliever, and the non-Christian.

The change is most dramatic in the Episcopal Church, particularly in liberal dioceses like Massachusetts. The denomination’s rules are clear: “No unbaptized person shall be eligible to receive Holy Communion in this Church.” Yet, a recent survey by the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts found that nearly three-quarters of local parishes are practicing “open Communion,” inviting anyone to partake….

Strikingly, the transformation is taking place with little public controversy, as parish by parish, Episcopal priests are making their own decisions about whom to invite to the Communion rail. The Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts has taken a hands-off approach.

“Episcopal Church leadership recognizes that Episcopalians have varied interpretations from Scripture and early Church practices,” said the diocesan spokeswoman, Maria Plati. “At this time the decision to invite unbaptized persons to Communion is understood and accepted as a local option.”

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Conservatives and liberals generally use dramatically different lenses to interpret the Bible. Christian conservatives tend to emphasize an interpretation of the Bible that doesn’t change with the times. They say the Bible describes marriage as only between a man and a woman.

“You’ve got the California Supreme Court rewriting sacred heritage,” said Steve Madsen, pastor of Cornerstone Fellowship, an evangelical megachurch in Livermore.

Liberal Christians tend to emphasize that divine revelation can come from many places, even outside the church. For example, many denominations don’t allow same-sex marriages, while California law does.

“Culture is going to manifest Christ in a way that summons the church to new realities,” said Episcopal Bishop Marc Andrus.

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Perhaps making it interesting to the point that everyone dismissed their chances was the only way for the Rays to do it.

It worked all season, as they proved their impressive spring training record could carry over into the regular season; as they recovered from a skid heading into the All-Star break many expected to finish them; as they responded to the loss of two of their best players in August by putting together their best month of the season.

Simply an amazing turnaround from last season–congratulations to them. Read it all.

AT THE end of 1964 the Dow Jones Industrial Average traded at 874.1. Seventeen years later, despite rapid inflation, the average had inched forward only to 875. It was the kind of grinding bear market that drove investors to despair. Near its end, Business Week famously proclaimed “The Death of Equities”.

It is beginning to look as if we are in the middle of another of those great phases, what commentators call a secular, as opposed to a cyclical, bear market. Broadly speaking, the 20th century can be divided into six phases; bear markets from 1901-21, 1929-49 and 1965-82 and bull runs from 1921-29, 1949-65 and 1982-2000.

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A question whether he has got the Archbishop of Canterbury’s attention. Has the Archbishop failed to stand up for Bishop Duncan?

Answer: I maintain regular contact with the Archbishop of Canterbury. I have tried in the last five years never to surprise him. He is certainly aware of my presence here in the United Kingdom. He is informed about our situation. He is attempting to lead in what are clearly uncharted times. I think the institutions of the Anglican Communion are in a season of real re-evaluation. I think he has not found it possible, in terms of what he believes the limitation of his office are, to have done the things that actually would have secured the role of his office over the long haul of the 21st century. This is not an office which in terms of the life of the Anglican Communion for the future is going to look anything like it did for the previous century.

If you look at 20th century secular politics, in a moment of extraordinary crisis a leader can often go beyond the boundaries of what has been commended to him in terms of the exercise of his office or precedent. Franklin Roosevelt in the States at the time of the Great Depression went way beyond what any president had ever done in restructuring the government. The Supreme Court some years later found that some of the things he had done were unconstitutional. But the people stood with it because it was what the nation needed to be brought out of its trouble. The Anglican Communion in the last decade has been in crisis. Some leaders might have gone beyond precedent and might have gone beyond what their legal adviser said they could or could not do, and I suspect the communion would have followed. And the precedent would have been established. But that is not the direction it has gone. So what it means is that a different kind of instrument of unity ( and I have written on this before) is likely to emerge. The British period of Anglicanism is coming to an end. I lament that. But we are living through it. Just like the American period in international relations is coming to an end.

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Collapsing house prices are plunging 60,000 homeowners a month into negative equity, which means the country is on course for a worse crisis than the 1990s crash.

At current trends, 2m households will enter negative equity by 2010, outstripping the 1.8m affected at the bottom of the last housing slump.

New research from Standard & Poor’s, the ratings agency, coincides with evidence that banks are aggressively seizing homes whose owners have slipped just a few hundred pounds behind on their mortgage payments.

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