The charges against Duncan were initiated by Pittsburgh Episcopalians who feared he would lead the diocese into secession and take church property with him.

Duncan “has rejected numerous opportunities and warnings to reconsider and change course,” said the Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh in a statement. “Instead, he has continued to resolutely pursue a course of action designed to remove this diocese and many unwilling Episcopalians from the Episcopal Church.”

Elected bishop of the 20,000-member diocese 11 years ago, Duncan has been a prominent voice for conservative Episcopalians distraught over the liberal drift of the church on biblical interpretation and sexual ethics. He leads the Anglican Communion Network, a conservative network that claims some ten dioceses and 900 congregations in North America.

Duncan is the second Episcopal bishop removed from active ministry this year. In January, Fresno bishop John-David Schofield was deposed for leading the San Joaquin diocese to secede.

Read it all.

When people think of religion on YouTube, most probably flash to “gotcha” videos of Sarah Palin’s old church or Barack Obama’s old pastor. But the video-sharing site is also being used by a wildly diverse collection of pastors, rabbis, imams, gurus, and pious laypeople ”” like Roman Catholic Steve Silvia, who made the video above ”” to celebrate and explain their creeds. These aren’t glitzy televangelists. In keeping with the YouTube ethos, many simply fire up camcorder and go. But low cost and infinite range, plus the mini-video’s ascent as one of the culture’s preferred ways of imbibing information, means vastly increased exposure for clerics who would otherwise have tiny flocks. “For years, people in my business talked about how the Internet was going to revolutionize religion the way the printing press helped create Protestantism, but it didn’t happen,” says Steve Waldman, founder of the multi-faith website Beliefnet. But with the rise of YouTube, he thinks the unassuming, grass-roots religion clips like the ones that follow “could be the beginning of that kind of transformation.”

Read it all.

The iJET is a new type of solar cell that’s cheap and easy to make, requiring not much more than a pizza oven, some nail polish remover, and a common inkjet printer. Australian scientist Nicole Kuepper describes her invention.

Listen to it all and note carefully HOW she made the discovery.

Judging from tales about the rise and fall of empires, there is always a point when things are going so well that the emperors doubt that anything could ever go wrong. “THRIFT,” warned Nero’s adviser Seneca, “comes too late when you find it at the bottom of your purse.” In the Old World, nations grew fat and then lazy, until they collapsed under their own weight. But that was not to be our story. American greatness–the vision of the founders, the courage of the pioneers, the industry of the nation builders–reflected a mighty faith in the power of sacrifice as a muscle that made young nations strong. Banks were like gyms for the soul: the first savings banks in Boston and New York were organized as charities, where “humble journeymen” could exercise good judgment, store their money and not be tempted to waste it on drink. Architect Louis Sullivan carved the word THRIFT over the door of his “jewel box” bank nearly a century ago, for it was private virtue that made public prosperity possible.

That virtue died with the baby boom, but it had been ailing ever since the Depression, argues cultural historian David Tucker in The Decline of THRIFT in America. That crisis, he writes, invited economists to recast THRIFT as “the contemptible vice which threw sand in the gears of our consumer economy.” A White House report in 1931 urged parents to let children pick out their own clothes and furniture, thereby creating in the child “a sense of personal as well as family pride in ownership, and eventually teaching him that his personality can be expressed through things.” These days you can buy your baby daughter a BORN TO SHOP onesie with little pink purses on it.

Somewhere along the way, THRIFT did not just stop being a value; it became a folly. Saving was for suckers; you’d miss the ride, die leaving money on the table when you could have lived it up. There are no pockets in a shroud, as the saying goes. We once saved about 15% of our income. By the roaring ’80s the rate was 4%; now we’re in negative numbers. Bob Hope liked to joke that “a bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.” But that too changed as easy credit bloomed and usury became another of those vices that had somehow lost its juice. The average American has nine credit cards with a total $17,000 balance. We borrow against our houses and pensions to live in a way that dares us to actually grow old.

Read it all.

Take a look

The BBC blurb says:

As a severely disabled woman in Britain goes to court to clarify the law on assisted suicide, could there be a duty to die so you don’t become a burden on your loved ones?

Featured are Debbie Purdy, the disabled woman just mentioned above,John Hardwig of the Philosophy Department of the University of Tennessee, and Professor Hank Jacomsen from a private institute for medical ethics in the Netherlands.

It starts at about 8:40 and the segment runs approximately 9 1/2 minutes.

What’s occurring now is a frantic effort to prevent a modern financial disintegration that deepens the economic downturn. It’s said that the $700 billion bailout will rescue banks and other financial institutions by having the Treasury buy their suspect mortgage-backed securities. In reality, the Treasury is also bailing out the Fed, which has already — through various actions — lent financial institutions roughly $1 trillion against myriad securities. The increase in federal deposit insurance from $100,000 to $250,000 aims to discourage panicky bank withdrawals. In Europe, governments have taken similar steps; Ireland and Germany have guaranteed their banks’ deposits.

The cause of the Fed’s timidity in the 1930s remains a matter of dispute. Some scholars suggest a futile defense of the gold standard; others blame the flawed “real bills” doctrine that limited Fed lending to besieged banks. Either way, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, a scholar of the Depression, understands the error. The Fed’s lending and the bailout aim to avoid a ruinous credit contraction.

The economy will get worse. The housing glut endures. Cautious consumers have curbed spending. Banks and other financial institutions will suffer more losses. But these are all normal symptoms of recession. Our real vulnerability is a highly complex and global financial system that might resist rescue and revival. The Great Depression resulted from the mix of a weak economy and perverse government policies. If we can avoid a comparable blunder, the great drama of these recent weeks may prove blessedly misleading.

Read it all.

The Bishop of Blackburn, the Rt Rev Nicholas Reade, has agreed that the relationship between Synod and the episcopacy needs to be clarified. He said: “Synodical government served us well in the early days but it’s been a kind of juggernaut. I think it’s got totally out of control.”

Bishop Reade spoke against the Synod becoming parliamentary with two competing sides: “Ideally I think the House of Bishops should be there, and we should be listening to the debate, and we should go away and make the decisions.”

He said the clergy and laity should vote, but that it should simply be used as information for the bishops. The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, had also spoken in July against using General Synod as a parliament, emphasising that the Church was managed by synod, rather than governed by it.

Read it all.

Check it out.

After an overwhelming vote here over the weekend by the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh that created the second schism with the national church since the 2003 election and consecration of an openly gay Episcopal bishop, both sides were hoping for a simple resolution.

“If the national church would stay out of it, we could work it out,” said the Rev. Jonathan Millard, who favored secession and led the convention on Saturday. “And I think 90 percent of the churches here would agree with me.”

Mr. Millard was referring to that most secular of issues: resolving who owns what among the millions of dollars’ worth of diocesan and parish property.

It is a huge concern for both sides after the vote on Saturday, which realigned the majority of the 74 parishes of the Pittsburgh diocese with a more conservative branch of the church in South America. On Saturday, 119 of 191 lay members voted in favor of leaving the national church, as did 121 of 160 clergy members.

Read it all.

A lovely video report which I used in the sermon yesterday on Paul Newman’s wonderful service to children–watch it all.

Two September shocks will define the presidency of George W. Bush. Stunningly enough, it already seems clear that the second — the financial crisis that has only begun to unfold — may well have far greater and more lasting ramifications than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

That’s because while 9/11 changed the way we view the world, the current financial crisis has changed the way the world views us. And it will also change, in some very fundamental ways, the way the world works….

The current economic debacle is far more likely to be seen by historians as a true global watershed: the end of one period and the beginning of another. The financial chaos has brought down the curtain on a wide range of basic and enduring tenets also closely linked with the Reagan era, those associated with neoliberal economics, the system that the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has called “that grab-bag of ideas based on the fundamentalist notion that markets are self-correcting, allocate resources efficiently and serve the public interest well.” Already this crisis has seen not just our enemies but even some of our closest allies wondering whether we are at the beginning of the end of both American-style capitalism and of American supremacy.

Read the whole piece.

PLENTY of people can be blamed for the calamity on Capitol Hill on September 29th. Two-hundred and twenty-eight congressmen decided they were ready to risk another Great Depression. Nancy Pelosi made an idiotic speech damning the Republicans. Sheriff McCain claimed that he was going to ride into town to sort out the mess””and promptly fell off his horse. But there is no doubt where the lion’s share of the blame belongs: with George Bush. The dismal handling of the financial crisis over the past fortnight is not only a comment on Mr Bush’s personal shortcomings as a leader. It is a comment on the failure of his leadership style over the past eight years.

The convenient excuse for Mr Bush’s performance is that he is at the fag-end of his presidency. Public attention has shifted to the presidential candidates, and the members of the House face the electorate in a month. But this rings hollow: there is nothing about the political cycle that dictates that an outgoing president should have an approval rating of 27% and an army of enemies on Capitol Hill. Bill Clinton ended his two terms with ratings of close to 70%.

The crisis underlined Mr Bush’s two biggest personal weaknesses””his leaden tongue and his indecisiveness.

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It was the first time since my release that I had been face to face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.

“You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk, ” he was saying. “I was a guard therre. But since that time, ” he went on, “I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fraulein-” again the hand came out-“will you forgive me?”

And I stood there-and could not. Betsie had died in that place- could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking?

It could not have been many seconds that he stood there, hand held out, but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.

For I had to do it-I knew that. The message that God forgives has has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. “If you do not forgive men their trespasses,” Jesus says, “neither will your Father in Heaven forgive your trespasses.”

Quoted in this morning’s sermon by yours truly. Astonishing stuff. Read it all.

But by the time Mr. [Daniel] Mudd became Fannie’s chief executive in 2004, his company was under siege. Competitors were snatching lucrative parts of its business. Congress was demanding that Mr. Mudd help steer more loans to low-income borrowers. Lenders were threatening to sell directly to Wall Street unless Fannie bought a bigger chunk of their riskiest loans.

So Mr. Mudd made a fateful choice. Disregarding warnings from his managers that lenders were making too many loans that would never be repaid, he steered Fannie into more treacherous corners of the mortgage market, according to executives.

For a time, that decision proved profitable. In the end, it nearly destroyed the company and threatened to drag down the housing market and the economy.

Dozens of interviews, most from people who requested anonymity to avoid legal repercussions, offer an inside account of the critical juncture when Fannie Mae’s new chief executive, under pressure from Wall Street firms, Congress and company shareholders, took additional risks that pushed his company, and, in turn, a large part of the nation’s financial health, to the brink.

Read it all.

A recommendation from a committee of Protestant bioethical experts calling for a ban on sex selection for non-medical reasons was voted in virtually unopposed at the Presbyterians’ biannual general assembly.

The Bioethics Council, a ministerial advisory committee, recommended in June that the ban on using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to select a baby’s sex purely for social reasons be lifted.

However, the joint Presbyterian, Methodist and Anglican Inte-church Bioethics Council declared the idea “undesirable” on social and cultural grounds.

Read it all.

Germany said on Sunday it would guarantee all private German bank accounts ”“ currently worth €568bn ”“ in a dramatic move to prevent panic withdrawals as fears over the worldwide financial crisis spread to Europe’s largest economy.

“We want to tell people that their savings are safe,” Angela Merkel, chancellor, said at an unscheduled press conference on Sunday. The scheme would cover existing accounts and others which savers might open….

German officials said the move was agreed because of fear that the crisis at Hypo Real Estate ”“ a listed mortgage and public sector lender, whose government-backed €35bn ($48bn, £27bn) rescue collapsed at the weekend ”“ would lead to widespread panic on Monday.

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The Rev. George Werner of Sewickley, a loyalist and a former top official of the Episcopal Church, said the denominations headquarters in New York was “to be advised” by local Episcopalians.

“Many people, myself included, want to make sure that [national leaders] don’t slam a bishop in here who will tear us to shreds,” he said, an acknowledgement that many Episcopal loyalists are also conservative.

There is agreement that at least 17 parishes will not join the Southern Cone; and the Rev. Simons believes it could go as high as 28. Both sides also agree that many parishes on both sides are likely to lose some members to the other side. The Rev. Werner believes that splits in small churches could cause 20 to 30 of them to fail altogether.

Bishop Duncan did not lead the meeting, celebrate the Eucharist or preach, though mention of his name brought several long ovations.

Read it all.

Most of the time nobody notices the credit flowing through the lungs of the economy, any more than people notice the air they breathe. But everyone knows when credit stops circulating freely through markets to banks, businesses and consumers. For almost a year the markets had worried about banks’ liquidity and solvency. After the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers last month, amid confusion about whom the state would save and on what terms, they panicked. The markets for three-, six- and 12-month paper are shut, so banks must borrow even more money overnight than usual.

Banks used to borrow from each other at about 0.08 percentage points above official rates; on September 30th they paid more than four percentage points more. In one auction to get dollar funds overnight from the European Central Bank, banks were prepared to pay interest of 11%, five times the pre-crisis rate. Astonishingly, rates scaled these extremes even as the Federal Reserve promised $620 billion of extra funding.

Bankers have always earned their crust by committing money for long periods and financing that with short-term deposits and borrowing. Today, that model has warped into self-parody: many of the banks’ assets are unsellable even as they have to return to the market each day to ask for lenders to vote on their survival. No wonder they are hoarding cash.

This is why those politicians who set the interests of Main Street against those of Wall Street are so wrong. Sooner or later the money markets affect every business.

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“This is a sad day,” said the Rev. James Simons, the only member of the diocese’s Standing Committee, the top administrative body, who voted against seceding. “They took the convention’s theme, ”˜A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand,’ and today caused the Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh to be divided indeed.”

Mr. Simons, who will lead a reconstitution of the diocese with the national church, said at least 16 of the 74 parishes in the Pittsburgh diocese were expected to stay with the national church.

The Pittsburgh diocese is the second, after the Diocese of San Joaquin in Fresno, Calif., to vote to leave the national church. At least two other dioceses, in Fort Worth and Quincy, Ill., are scheduled to vote on seceding in November.

The movement is driven by theologically conservative leaders who believe the church has turned away from traditional biblical teachings on issues like whether Jesus is the son of God and the only way to salvation.

Read it all.

From here:

The Rev. John Beverley Butcher (“Creeds are lacking”) is not alone in sensing the creed’s complete exclusion of Jesus’ life and ministry, mentioning only his birth and death and nothing in between. In the flow of the liturgy, Scripture, passing the peace, prayers of the people, the sermon and the Eucharist, Jesus Christ’s ministry and gospel are present. The creed, instituted by Roman decree more than three centuries after the Resurrection, leaves out both entirely. The Council of Nicea’s purpose was to institutionalize Roman power and authority.

We are Episcopalians and have been open to the Holy Spirit to help us in the evolution of our worship from the beginning. In the Nag Hammadi discoveries, we are now fortunate to have the gospels of Thomas, Philip and Mary Magdalene to read. None of the four original Gospels nor these new findings contain the creed.

Women also have sensed the irony of referring to the Holy Spirit as “he” when it is a feminine word in both Hebrew and Greek and would best be translated as “she.” Patriarchal language is problematic in a church with a woman presiding bishop.

“No question, there’s a larger weight in Chicago,” Lee said after the Cubs were swept from the playoffs for the second year in a row. “I hate to call it pressure, because it’s hard to put more pressure on us than we put on ourselves. But you can feel it in the city. They want it bad. It’s understandable. But it’s all about how you perform on the field.”

The Cubs performed their worst when it mattered most. A year after scoring only six runs in a three-game sweep by Arizona, the Cubs produced the same meager output in another early exit.

They have lost their last nine postseason games, and some of the most unsightly were in this series. In Game 1, starter Ryan Dempster walked seven in four and two-thirds innings. In Game 2, the Cubs made four errors, one by each infielder. In Game 3, they went 1 for 11 with runners in scoring position.

The team that led the National League with 97 wins and 855 runs never gave itself a chance. As similar as the result was to 2007, this flameout was harder to explain.

Read it all–it was an awful meltdown.