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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Secretive, run by and often for the super rich, hedge funds control a gigantic pool of money. Often they make huge profits, but not now. Two shut down this week. What happens to the markets if more fail?

Listen to it all.

The story of Daniel James is almost unbearable. Paralysed in a rugby scrum, he made several suicide attempts and finally persuaded his parents to take him to the Swiss Dignitas clinic to end his life. At 23.

His parents have been questioned by police; what happens next is anybody’s guess. Since its inception Dignitas has left the British legislature mortally confused. Take Debbie Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis: she has challenged the Director of Public Prosecutions to state unequivocally whether or not her husband will be charged with assisting suicide (a 14-year sentence) if he takes her there, when she decides the time has come. Ms Purdy robustly says that, if the answer is yes, then she will go alone – and therefore much sooner. If he is in the clear, she can enjoy her remaining time. She deserves that clarity.

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The real cause of the violence against Christians in Orissa, and now elsewhere in India, is the fear among extremist Hindu movements that many “untouchable” and “tribal” people will turn to the Christian faith because of the appalling treatment they receive from their caste-ridden communities and the love and care they are shown by Christian humanitarian organisations. Some of those who receive such care, but by no means all, become Christians of their own free will. Is this so unacceptable in secular and democratic India?

Scores of Christians have been murdered. Their homes, churches, presbyteries, convents and charitable institutions have been destroyed, allegedly in retaliation for the murder of a Hindu swami and some of his followers, probably by Maoist insurgents. During this time, it seems that the state authorities have not allowed Christians from other parts of India, let alone elsewhere, even to bring relief to fellow believers. The Federal Government also appears to have been paralysed and ineffective.

There is an outcry when a single Hindu is killed, and Christian leaders have strongly condemned any such incident. Christians in Orissa are, however, rapidly running out of cheeks to turn.

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Second I have wanted to report on the situation and that is what I am doing in front of you and with those with whom I have met privately. We are in the curious place in the States of a bishop removed contrary to the plain dictates of the canons and constitution of the church. The primary motivating argument in the House of Bishops for my removal was that it was the best way to guarantee the Episcopal Church’s claims on the property of my diocese. Of course the efforts to remove me have had no bearing on the property of the diocese. Indeed two weeks after I was deposed unjustly and uncanonically, my diocese voted to leave The Episcopal Church and become the second of the American dioceses to leave. Two more dioceses are hard on our heels: the Diocese of Quincy will vote to leave The Episcopal Church on November 7th and on November 14th the Diocese of Fort Worth will vote to leave. At that point there will be four American Dioceses, San Joaquin in California, Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, Quincy in Illinois and Fort Worth in Texas, in some ways the four points of the compass on a US map.

The spirit in the Diocese of Pittsburgh is good. The standing committee is presently the ecclesiastical authority. I had said in the process of the Episcopal Church that I accept the discipline of the Episcopal Church because I was a Bishop of the Episcopal Church. The charge against me was abandonment of communion. That charge was rather remarkable under a canon that was meant to remove those who had become Roman Catholic or Presbyterians or had lost their faith but nonetheless I accepted the sentence. The standing committee became the ecclesiastical authority. When the Diocese of Pittsburgh left the Episcopal Church on October 4th, it was at that point ”“ I had been immediately received into the House of Bishops of the Southern Cone ”“ the Presiding Bishop of the Southern Cone Gregory Venables had appointed me his Episcopal commissary for affairs in Pittsburgh and the US, the standing committee asked me to return to my episcopal function from the time they left the Episcopal Church, and the standing committee has determined under the canons of the diocese that there will be a re-electing convention on November 7th, so I will be in the rather remarkable position of being both the seventh bishop of Pittsburgh and the eighth bishop of Pittsburgh and I did not die in between. Folks like me in the church’s past tended to be burnt at the stake, but that’s not something that the church does anymore and I have proved remarkably fire retardant. That’s the situation in Pittsburgh and three other dioceses that have or are stepping out.

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From here:

The most important issue facing America is not the economic crisis, the war against terrorism, our national debt, environmental concerns, education or health care.

The greatest issue is a loss of trust in our key institutions. This includes our government (all branches), financial institutions, corporations, the political system, educational institutions (all levels) and the media.

The degree to which trust can be restored will determine the future of America. It is awfully hard to regain trust once it has been lost.

I hope those at the highest levels in all of these institutions will realize this and do all in their power to restore the trust of the people.

If this is not done quickly, I fear a revolution will eventually occur. We do not need change as much as we need trust. Without it we cannot survive.

Bryan B. England

Pawleys Island

Dr Philip Lewis, an interfaith adviser to the Bishop of Bradford, said that the plans threaten to establish a ghetto of Muslims taught to embrace jihad.

Tablighi Jamaat, the group behind the proposal, are “isolationist”, “patriarchal” and has a narrow reading of Islam that leaves it vulnerable to extremists, he said.

In the first intervention by a Church figure over the controversial project, Dr Lewis raised fears that a 12,000-capacity mosque in London would lead to a segregated Muslim community. The mosque would be four times the size of Britain’s largest cathedral.

“Tablighi Jamaat does not try to engage with wider society so there must be clear worries that such a mosque would lead to a ghetto,” he said.

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