President-elect Barack Obama has signaled that he will pursue a far more ambitious plan of spending and tax cuts than anything he outlined on the campaign trail ”” a plan “big enough to deal with the huge problem we face,” a top adviser said Sunday ”” setting the tone for a recovery effort that could absorb and define much of his term.

A member of the Obama economic advisory team, William M. Daley, acknowledged that because of the gravity of the situation, Mr. Obama was leaning toward letting a Bush tax cut for the wealthy expire on schedule in 2011 rather than repealing it sooner.

There were hints Sunday that a stimulus package might be extraordinarily large. Austan Goolsbee, a senior Obama economic adviser, charged that the Bush administration had “dithered” as the economy turned down and suggested that the incoming administration would take dramatic action.

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Washington National Cathedral will eliminate 30 jobs, drastically scale back the Cathedral College of Preachers and cut $8 million from its current budget because of the global financial downturn.

In a November 19 news release, the Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, the cathedral’s dean, said the cuts are “financially prudent” and are “necessary to protect our important work in the city and the nation.

“Like many other institutions around the world, Washington National Cathedral has been affected by the current downturn in the financial market,” said Lloyd. “And this is having a serious impact on invested funds that we have used to support our mission.”

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IN 2007 the small city of Mesquite, a suburb of Dallas, was trying to overhaul its ageing infrastructure and faded industrial zones. City officials launched a renewal programme, but found their efforts marred by payday lenders. These are shops that offer small, short-term loans (in advance of payday) on unfavourable terms, and their neon signs hardly suggest a thriving and vital place. “They project an opposite kind of image,” says one city official. So Mesquite passed a strict zoning ordinance that will make it difficult for any new payday lenders to set up shop. The city cannot bar the practice, but it can try to elbow it out.

The payday lending industry has taken several hits this month. On November 6th the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that large fees for small loans violate the state constitution. In Arizona, voters rejected an industry-sponsored “reform” initiative that would have done away with a sunset provision on payday lending in the current law. In Ohio, voters decided not to repeal a law capping annual interest rates. This could mean the end of payday lending in those three states.

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Just how far and how fast will the economy drop this quarter? There’s lately been a race to the bottom among forecasters, with the economists at Goldman Sachs leading the way. Early in the week, they put out a report saying that -3.5% annualized GDP growth was their baseline forecast for the quarter, but they also went so far as to outline a “just awful” scenario of -6.0% and a “worst case” of -7.8%. Today they updated their baseline forecast to -5%.

That puts Goldman well ahead, for the moment at least, of even Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor known as Dr. Doom ”” whose current forecast is about -4%. Lots of Wall Street economists less renowned for their gloominess have by now moved past the -3% mark. In fact, one explanation for the stock market’s horrible week could be that the realization of just how bad the quarter will be is finally sinking in among investors.

We haven’t been through anything this bad in a while. The last time the economy shrank faster than 3% was in the first quarter of 1982, when GDP dropped at a 6.4% annual rate. It hasn’t exceeded Goldman’s worst-case forecast of -7.8% since the first quarter of 1958, when it was -10.4%.

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Took our son Nathaniel on the tour and information learning seminar at Columbia University. Gee, it is an impressive place.

Spent time in the bookstore (say you are surprised). They had a book by Columbia graduates remembering their time at school. I remembered that Alexander Hamilton and Teddy Roosevelt went there, but how did I blank out on Thomas Merton? You learn something new every day–KSH.

I was in the Big Apple this week with my family. We went to see In the Heights on Broadway. My heavens, it is no wonder the play won the Tony for best choreography–KSH.

45 years ago today, John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley died.

President-elect Barack Obama will name former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers the director of his National Economic Council, placing the Harvard University economist he passed over for Treasury secretary inside the White House as his closest economic adviser, Democratic officials said Saturday night.

The move came as the president-elect prepares Monday to introduce his new Treasury secretary nominee, Timothy Geithner, and the rest of his economic team at an event in Chicago Monday. Among those on stage will be Mr. Summers, who was central to his campaign’s economic team and is now leading efforts to draft a massive economic stimulus plan the president-elect hopes to sign into law as one of his first acts as the nation’s leader.

Mr. Obama has instructed his economic advisers to draft a stimulus that could dwarf the $175 billion version he campaigned on, stretching it over two years and pushing to create 2.5 million new jobs with it.

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Like an unwatched pan of milk, readers of the Church Times have seethed up and boiled over in response to an analysis of the Church of England by the ever-controversial historian Jonathan Clark.

Professor Clark, once the enfant terrible of Peterhouse and All Souls, now wields his scalpel from remote Kansas, but it cuts as sharply. The Church of England, he argues, is “losing command of its history”, thus losing its identity (as if a man had lost his memory, one might say).

In the 20th century, he notes, “Anglicanism was powered by German theology rather than by Anglican historiography”. One result is a loss of authority, which “is ultimately historically grounded”. That’s why, he says, “feminism and gay rights should today occupy so much of the attention of Anglicans”.

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Perhaps we are seeing three devel­op­ments, overlapping and reinforcing each other. First, increasing numbers of able ecclesiastical historians in England have for some time been Roman Catholics ”” Aveling, Bossy, Duffy, Gilley, Hastings, Ker, Mayr-Harting, Morrill, Nockles, Questier, Riley-Smith, Scarisbrick, and others ”” and the Church of England has found no adequate reply.

This cannot just be chance. Increasingly, the Anglican history of the years since the 1530s is implicitly emerging as a phase, not a norm.

Second, the Church of England is increasingly indifferent to its his­torical dimension, neglecting the teaching of its history, unconcerned at the fate of ancient libraries, actively resistant to promoting scholarly clergy who might have historical views that would threaten a reigning consensus established on other evidential grounds than the historical.

Third, the few Anglicans who are historically aware now often depict the Church of England as essentially a radical Protestant denomination with a revolutionary foundation in the early 16th century, and revolutionary implications for morals and manners in our own day.

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Whatever our personal views on this election might be, the outcome is the same for all of us. All of us, no matter what our political perspective or our hopes for our nation and our world, are in this together.

Part of the deep tradition of the Episcopal Church is to pray for our leaders: rarely if ever have these prayers been more needed. Our nation and our world face vast and staggeringly complex problems; none of which can be solved quickly and easily. The problems are economic but they are aspirational as well. Bluntly put: how do we pay for things, and why do we make the particular choices that we do. As we answer that question we raise the deepest question of all: to what end do we live and move and have our being?

These will be testing times; times that, unless we are careful, will tempt us to pit one part of the population against another. Increasingly it will become clear to all that the journey will be long and it will be difficult. Speaking in economic terms, there will be a price to be paid: no one will be exempt. That being said, it is of fundamental importance that we, as a people, not give in to the temptation to balance budgets at the expense of those who simply lack the power to make their needs heard: the poor and those who serve the poor. However, sad to say, if history is any indicator, this is exactly what will happen.

I find it more than a little ironic that when the issue of meeting basic human needs is raised: be that education, or healthcare, or housing for the homeless, a common objection is the firm and wise sounding declaration: you know, you can’t just throw money at a problem. And yet, when financial institutions are in crisis, led by the very well paid people, who did so much to bring us this crisis in the first place, when they ask for aid that is exactly what happens. Money has been thrown at the problem. And it has been thrown without a really clear understanding of exactly what it will actually accomplish. As you know so well, we’re not talking here about billions of dollars, or tens of billions, not even hundreds of billions, but, in the end, something in excess of a trillion dollars. In human terms this is more money than the human mind can fathom.

Mind you, I am not saying that this shouldn’t be done, or that it won’t work. What I am saying is that we should keep all these things in perspective and be mindful of just who finally is asked to actually pay the price for the national excess that has brought us to this sad moment.

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You have a Treasury Secretary that seems to have left the field before the end of the third quarter.

—Charles Gabriel at Alpha Partners speaking this week about Hank Paulson

He was a career staffer in the international affairs division of the Treasury Department in the early 1990s when then-undersecretary Lawrence H. Summers noticed and promoted him. By the end of the Clinton administration, Summers was Treasury secretary and [Tim] Geithner was an undersecretary. Now, Obama is apparently passing over Summers for his onetime protege, though Summers is also said to be returning to government as a White House adviser.

In congressional testimony following the March rescue of Bear Stearns, Geithner and other officials faced tough questions about their actions. An angry Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) demanded to know how the financial system became so fragile. The chairman of the Fed, a Treasury undersecretary and the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission sat silently.

Geithner responded: “What produced this is a very complicated mix of factors. I don’t think anybody understands it yet. But we have to spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out how to get a better handle on this sort of stuff . . . because it’s very important that we try to figure out a way to make this system less vulnerable to this in the future.”

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Things are looking up for substantive reform of America’s troubled health-care system.

No one who knows the history of such efforts, from Harry Truman’s administration through Bill Clinton’s, needs to be reminded of the difficulties that inevitably confront any plan to overhaul one-seventh of the U.S. economy and bring high-quality medicine to millions of the uninsured.

But developments at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue last week — and across the country — pointed up both the urgency of the problem and the prospects for seeing significant action.

When Barack Obama’s transition team let out word that former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle would be his choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services and to quarterback his work on health reform, it signaled that Obama is serious about his campaign promise to make that issue a first-term priority.

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“The reality is that the cathedral serves as a sacred space for the nation,” says Sam Lloyd, dean of the cathedral. “A place the nation looks to in critical times.”

Washington National Cathedral also transcends politics and even the separation of religions. Though nominally an Episcopal church, it welcomes everyone. It is at once deeply Christian and deeply interfaith. The Episcopal Church has a long history of inclusiveness. The first black bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, John Walker, presided there. Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first female presiding bishop in the Episcopal Church, was inducted there. And Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson of the Diocese of New Hampshire was the first openly gay bishop in Christendom.

“We are a place that welcomes people of all faiths and no faith,” says Lloyd, echoing Barack Obama’s words of two years ago. “Whatever we once were,” Obama said then, “we’re no longer just a Christian nation. At least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation and a Buddhist nation and a Hindu nation and a nation of nonbelievers.”

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President-elect Barack Obama has instructed his economic team to develop a plan to create 2.5 million jobs over the next two years, suggesting that he intends to push a more expensive package to stimulate the economy than he has so far proposed.

Speaking during the Democrats’ weekly radio address, Obama said that his team would work out the details of the package in the coming weeks but that he expects to present it to Congress in January and to sign it into law soon after taking office.

It will be a two-year nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy, Obama said. “We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels,” as well as fuel-efficient cars.

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The wildfires that have burned approximately 40,000 acres and hundreds of homes in Southern California have also destroyed a historic Episcopal monastery set on a hill in Santa Barbara.

Nancy Bullock, guesthouse director for the Mount Calvary Monastery and Guesthouse, said because the 20,000-square-foot Spanish-style home was situated on a hill, residents could see the fire coming before it reached the monastery last Friday morning.

“We did not wait for a call from the fire department,” she said. “We evacuated before that.”

The 22 guests of the monastery were told to leave before the seven resident monks packed up the essentials. Bullock said the only painting saved was a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe that hung in the monastery’s chapel.

Read it all and you can see some pictures of what the facility used to look like here.

The annual convention of the Diocese of New York approved a resolution petitioning General Convention to grant continued use of either the lectionary found in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer or the Revised Common Lectionary indefinitely. Convention met Nov. 15-16 at a hotel and convention center in Mahwah, N.J.

Convention approved several other resolutions, including one calling on “the governor and the legislature of the State of New York to ensure civil marriage equality in this state by enacting the necessary legislation to permit same-sex couples to marry.”

None of the approved resolutions produced extended debate, but approval of the $13.3 million budget as presented was approved only after the Rt. Rev. Mark Sisk, Bishop of New York, spoke in favor of it. The budget, which represented an increase of more than $880,000 over the previous year, was prepared last summer, before the severe financial downturn affected Wall Street. Some convention delegates were prepared to go through the budget line-by-line on the convention floor, but Bishop Sisk urged against a floor fight. Instead, he promised that the trustees would carefully monitor expenses in light of the new financial situation facing most parishes. Bishop Sisk also promised that the diocese would not take excessively punitive measures against congregations which are unable to meet their assessment due to financial hardship.

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A new book documents American Jewish history in an unusual way ”” through vinyl album covers.

Authors Roger Bennett and Josh Kun wrote And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl, which details Jewish vinyl album covers they have collected over the years. Jewish, in these terms, includes everything from the prolific cantor Sol Zim to the Temptations’ Fiddler on the Roof medley.

The kindred spirits found each other in 2003 as they searched for their own Jewish identities and dug through stacks of albums. They pooled their collections ”” word got around ”” and soon their garages were overflowing with vinyl.

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If the hallowed grounds of the Old Churchyard cemetery at the Parish Church of St. Helena (Episcopal) could talk, they would tell the long, storied history of not only the church but of Beaufort itself.

In the 1987 publication, “Old Churchyard: St. Helena’s Episcopal Church,” Lawrence Rowland, associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, called the cemetery “one of the most historic graveyards in America.”

Bob Barrett, the church’s archivist and member, and chair of the Old Churchyard Committee, couldn’t agree more. The cemetery was founded in 1724 — 12 years after the church’s founding and 13 after Beaufort was founded.

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“We do not agree with the innovations of the national church,” said the Rev. John Phelps, who conducts the services at St. Peters, St. Luke’s and Holy Spirit in Graham.

He said there are no changes in the services, the prayer books, the beliefs or the dedication to that which the church believes.
“It was a step taken to preserve the church,” he said.

“By voting to change our diocesan Constitution and Canons, we have withdrawn from the General Convention, dissociating ourselves from the moral, theological and disciplinary innovations of The Episcopal Church,” a letter distributed to parishioners throughout the diocese read Sunday. “We have realigned with another Province of the Anglican Communion. This is a change in affiliation, not a change in worship or doctrine. Our bishop, clergy and congregations have been received into the fellowship of the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone. We are deeply grateful to Archbishop Gregory Venables for this provision, which he has made on a temporary and emergency basis, in response to the crisis in The Episcopal Church. We now look forward to the formation of an Anglican Province in North America.”

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The world’s financial crisis appears to have energized Islamic militants and their supporters.

Groups that monitor terrorist Internet traffic have seen a flurry of messages on al-Qaida-linked Web sites that gloat over the West’s economic difficulties, and urge militants to take advantage.

On one Web site monitored by the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group, a user says, “now is a golden opportunity. If America is hit now, it will never survive, unless God permits it.”

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On Japan, the 120-page report said the country will face a “major reorientation” of its domestic and foreign policies yet maintain its status as an “upper middle rank power.”

It forecast Tokyo’s foreign policies “will be influenced most by the policies of China and the United States,” with a broad spectrum of options possible.

If China continues its current economic growth pattern, Japan will attach importance to maintaining healthy political ties and increase market access, possibly through forging a bilateral free-trade agreement, the NIC report said.

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Citigroup Inc. will probably get rescued by the U.S. government after a crisis in confidence erased half its stock-market value in three days, investors and analysts said.

Citigroup has more than $2 trillion of assets, dwarfing companies such as American International Group Inc. that got U.S. support this year. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke may favor a rescue to avoid the chaotic aftermath of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy in September.

“There is no question that Citi is in the category of ”˜too big to fail,’” said Michael Holland, chairman and founder of Holland & Co. in New York, which oversees $4 billion. “There is a commitment from this administration and the next to do what it takes to save Citi.”

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It is interesting that Obama chose Geithner over Larry Summers and other names like Paul Volcker. Geithner is a young guy at 47 years old. And to the country at large and most of the Washington political establishment, he’s a new face.

Yes indeed, change is coming.

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(The essay subtitle is: On Doing What it Takes to Get What You Want–KSH).

The changes now well underway simply described are these. At present, TEC’s Constitution renders the General Convention and the Office of the Presiding Bishop as instruments of its various Dioceses. The change sought by the Office of the Presiding Bishop and many within the House of Bishops would alter this arrangement by rendering each Diocese a creature of the General Convention. Along with this change comes another. The Office of the Presiding Bishop at present serves to execute the policies of the General Convention but does not stand in a hierarchical relation to TEC’s various Dioceses. The change now in progress would place the Office of Presiding Bishops in a hierarchical relation to these Dioceses, and in so doing give the holder of that office executive powers within the several Dioceses not accorded by the Constitution.

In times such as these actions of this sort are by no means unusual. Times of stress almost always lead those in power to stretch the law in order to achieve their purposes. Churches are no more immune to this temptation than are civil governments. Within TEC, one can see this dynamic clearly at work in two recent incidents, each of which reveals a strategy on the part of the Office of the Presiding Bishop to circumvent the requirements either of TEC’s Constitution or its Canons. I have in mind the replacement of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of San Joaquin and the deposition of Robert Duncan, Bishop of Pittsburgh.

These claims are both bold and controversial. Of this fact, I am fully aware.

Because the issues involved are so serious, I will do the best I can to make both my claims and the major objections to them as clear as possible. To my mind the objections are unconvincing. However, a grave flaw in TEC’s polity is the lack of a supreme court. As a result, the House of Bishops and the Office of the Presiding Bishop are each left in these matters to be judge in their own case. The implication of this unhappy situation is that if one excludes (as I believe one should) civil litigation as a means of establishing order in the church, the only credible arbiter left in this dispute is the court of last resort, namely, the people of the church, the court of public opinion.

Read it carefully and please read it all.

At first glance, the continuing clash between the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, and Washington’s Historic Preservation Review Board looks like dozens of others that have roiled American cities. A declining congregation considers demolishing its expensive-to-maintain church, only to be opposed by local preservationists, who argue that the building should be made a landmark.

The actions taken are the familiar ones. The congregation, which bitterly opposed landmark designation in December 2007, filed a federal lawsuit this August arguing that the designation violated its First Amendment rights by restraining its ability to practice religion freely. The District of Columbia responded by asking the court to dismiss the complaint on technical grounds, but urging the court to wait until the mayor’s agent — the chairman of the office of planning, which oversees the review board — makes a decision. The mayor’s agent has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday. If her decision goes against the District — which seems unlikely — all will be settled. Otherwise, both parties will return to federal court.
But this case is more outrageous than the norm, given the structure in question. Most such controversies swirl around church properties of a certain age, as when, in 1981, St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue in New York sought, in vain, to demolish its lovely community house in order to build a modernist tower alongside its renowned Byzantine church, constructed in 1916.

The Third Church’s building, by contrast, is relatively new — indeed, too new to be designated historic under federal law.

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Like girls sifting through dresses at Macy’s, the teens milled through aisles of sparkling pastel- and florescent-hued homecoming gowns, stepping into dressing rooms to try them on and then modeling them before their mothers.

But it wasn’t Macy’s. The girls were at a South Florida flea market where the charity Becca’s Closet gives used and new gowns to high school students unable to afford one. One mom said her hours as a nurse’s aide had been cut. Another whose mortgage payment had increased said she felt humiliated to ask for help.

“I heard money was really tight, especially in our household,” said Desiree Banton, a 16-year-old who attends a technical school and was trying on peach, lime green and bright blue gowns. “And my birthday is around the same week, so I knew it was gonna be really difficult to get everything done for homecoming.”

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One problem is that this is an especially bad time to have a Presidential transition. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has more or less announced that he’s done making major policy calls, save for an emergency. He understandably — if a little too loudly amid a panic — wants to leave the field to the new Administration. Yet President-elect Barack Obama has seemed in no hurry to assemble an economic team, or perhaps he simply hasn’t been able to settle on one. With nerves as taut as they are, picking an HHS Secretary…before a Treasury chief is a rookie mistake.

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