A website launched Friday with the backing of technology industry and Hollywood elite urges people worldwide to help craft a framework for harmony between all religions.

The Charter for Compassion project on the Internet at www.charterforcompassion.org springs from a “wish” granted this year to religious scholar Karen Armstrong at a premier Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in California.

“Tedizens” include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin along with other Internet icons as well as celebrities such as Forest Whittaker and Cameron Diaz.

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No googling or using references, etc. Who is the only American writer to win an Academy award, a Tony award, and the Pulitzer prize. I didn’t know and wondered if you did–KSH.

I will be speaking at a seminar at this major event this morning which draws hundreds of youth from throughout the diocese. Please pray for the gathering, the speakers, Bishop Lawrence, and especially the participants. if you have a moment, check out the homepage of the youth minstry in the diocese of South Carolina. They do fantastic work–KSH.

The Reverend Robert Stocksdale of St. Andrew’s Church in Meriden, voted in favor of the [diocesan] resolution.

“I would like for us to have the ability to chose,” he said. “I don’t think Jesus would turn away anyone.”

Turn people away from doing what, exactly? Or does Jesus not care what people do. There is that rich young ruler gentleman, for example, whom Jesus let walk away. And for a reason too. Read it all.

The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, is expected today to become the fourth theologically conservative diocese to break away from the national Episcopal Church, part of a long-running dispute between conservatives and liberals.

The debate among the 2.2 million members of the U.S. Episcopal Church has raged over issues ranging from interpretations of the Bible to ordination of gay priests and blessing of same-sex unions.

The vote will be held today during Fort Worth’s 26th annual diocesan convention. It is expected that 80 percent of the delegates will vote to leave, reflecting a vote held last year, part of a long “discernment” process, Bishop Jack Iker explained.

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Lanette Carpenter can’t say enough about the people of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Hurst, especially choir members she has sung with for years.

“They’ve walked with me through the best and worst times of my life,” she said.

But the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, including St. Stephen’s, is to break officially from the Episcopal Church today, becoming the fourth diocese in the nation to leave since last year over such issues as the ordination of female priests and the acceptance of an openly gay bishop.

Though Ms. Carpenter doesn’t agree with everything the Episcopal Church does, she loves it, and doesn’t want to leave.

So on Sunday, she and other Episcopal Church loyalists from St. Stephen’s plan to hold services at a local women’s club.

“It’s like a man and woman getting a divorce, and now they have to have two households,” she said. “It saddens me greatly.”

Read it all. This is not mainly over “social” issues, but theological ones, the nature, authority and intepretation of the Bible, how the church makes decisions, marriage, Christology and yes, even soteriology, the nature and means of salvation.

A vote this weekend will determine where Wichita Falls’ Episcopalians sit in church Sunday.

Disagreements that have been festering for years in the Episcopal Church will be addressed today and Saturday at the annual convention of the Diocese of Fort Worth at St. Vincent’s Cathedral in Bedford, Texas.

The published agenda includes a vote on a constitutional amendment that would remove the Fort Worth diocese ”” including its church property in the diocese ”” from the Episcopal Church and tuck it under the South American-based Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, a realignment under the branch of the church that is headquartered in Argentina.

Who will own the actual buildings in Wichita Falls ”” All Saints Episcopal at 2606 Southwest Parkway, Church of the Good Shepherd at 1007 Burnett, and St. Stephen’s Episocopal Church at 5023 Lindale Drive near Rider High School ”” is in question and may require a court to decide, officials say.

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Finally, the outlines of a coherent debate on the federal bailout. This comes as welcome relief from a campaign season that gave us the House Republicans’ know-nothing rejectionism, John McCain’s mindless railing against “greed and corruption,” and Barack Obama’s detached enunciation of vacuous bailout “principles” that allowed him to be all things to all people.

Now clarity is emerging. The fault line is the auto industry bailout. The Democrats are pushing hard for it. The White House is resisting.

Underlying the policy differences is a philosophical divide. The Bush administration sees the $700 billion rescue as an emergency measure to save the financial sector on the grounds that finance is a utility. No government would let the electric companies go under and leave the country without power. By the same token, government must save the financial sector lest credit dry up and strangle the rest of the economy.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is willing to stretch the meaning of “bank” by extending protection to such entities as American Express. But fundamentally, he sees government as saving institutions that deal in money, not other stuff.

Democrats have a larger canvas, with government intervening in other sectors of the economy to prevent the cascade effect of mass unemployment leading to more mortgage defaults and business failures (as consumer spending plummets), in turn dragging down more businesses and financial institutions, producing more unemployment, etc. — the death spiral of the 1930s.

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Happy-Go-Lucky starring Sally Hawkins. Elizabeth and I saw it last night. Terriific. Ideal for adult small groups to go see and discuss, or for you to go to with friends and discuss. Thought-provoking, moving, funny and touching. Put it on your list–KSH.

THE ARCHBISHOP of Jerusalem and the Middle East has welcomed Dr Rowan Williams’ decision to hold the 2009 Primates’ Meeting in Alexandria, Egypt, telling The Church of England Newspaper the witness of Egypt’s embattled Christians in the face of persecution can serve to strengthen the Anglican Communion.

While the agenda and locale remain to be settled, the Bishop of Egypt, Dr Mouneer Anis, said he was proud to be able to host the conference. However, suggestions by the Archbishop of Canterbury that he would use the Indaba process to manage the Primates’ Meeting has prompted private scorn from the primates contacted by CEN, and public criticism from evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics unhappy with the ”˜manipulation’ and management of the Indaba process at Lambeth.

“I want [the primates] to see, to feel the history of the Church as they walk through Alexandria,” Dr Anis said on Nov 11. For in Alexandria one “steps in the blood of the saints shed in obedience to the faith, a faith that has been watered by the blood of the martyrs.”

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For most of October, more than 200 Catholic bishops, along with sundry theologians and experts, met at the Vatican to figure out how to get Catholics to read the Bible — a project easily dismissed by Protestants and some Catholics as too ambitious and about 500 years too late. After all, wasn’t it Rome’s fears about letting mere lay people consult Holy Writ that stoked the Reformation? And Catholics don’t want to read the Bible anyway, right? They’re all about the Mass and the sacraments.

The first supposition has some merit, though the truth is a good deal more complex, and the Reformers — pace, Martin Luther — a good deal less enlightened on that score than is generally assumed. And, yes, Catholics continue to be sacramentally centered Christians who find the “summit and source” of their spiritual nourishment in the Eucharist.

But a funny thing happened on the way to modernity: The Catholic Church opened itself to the Word in a way it hadn’t done before. In the process, it fostered a balanced culture of biblical exegesis and devotion (at least among most scholars and clerics) that many in sola scriptura Protestantism might envy. Especially in light of trends in mainline denominations that foster a radical deconstruction of biblical texts on the one hand, or, on the other hand, a blinkered literalism that appeals to many conservative pew-sitters.

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