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Facebook, the Internet’s largest social network, wants to let you take your friends with you as you travel the Web. But having been burned by privacy concerns in the last year, it plans to keep close tabs on those outings.

Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni and the online video hub Hulu.

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Until two weeks ago, I strongly advocated the Anglican Communion refusing to establish a new province in North America and mandating that provinces cease violating provincial boundaries by conducting ministries or establishing congregations within the Episcopal Church’s jurisdiction.

Then I read that the Episcopal Church had spent in excess of $1.9 million in 2008 on lawsuits connected to the departure of parishes and dioceses from this Church. Daily I read about critical needs for healthcare, food, sanitation, and shelter in the United States and abroad. I see the spiritual illness and death that afflict so many. I remember that Anglicans have wisely never claimed to be the only branch of the Christian Church.

I started to wonder, Was I wrong? Why not another North American province?

Interesting to see this perspective from a reappraiser–check it out.

In the United States, this year’s commemoration comes in a moment of transition for American democracy. A new President and new Congress will shape this nation’s response to HIV/AIDS at home and around the world. Many significant challenges face America’s leaders in the coming years.

We must find ways to build on successes in fighting HIV and AIDS in the developing world. American leadership since 2003 has brought life-saving treatment to more than 1.7 million people in sub-Saharan Africa (in contrast to 50,000 in 2002), while supporting more than 33 million counseling and testing sessions and providing prevention services for nearly 13 million pregnant women. Still, more than 6,000 people continue to die each day as a result of the pandemic, and infection rates in some of the hardest-hit places continue to grow. Earlier this year, Congress and the President pledged significantly increased funding, and renewed strategies, for the global fight against AIDS. It will be up to the new Congress and Administration to keep the promises that have been made by their predecessors.

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As the United States and other major countries prepare to combat the threat of deflation and recession with interest rates fast approaching zero, a five-year policy experiment in Japan shows how important it is to act quickly and boldly.

Japan fought its way out of deflation after a property and stock bubble burst in the 1990s with quantitative easing, a policy measure that involved flooding banks with far more cash than was needed to keep short-term rates at zero.

It was a groundbreaking experiment and took a long time to work because the Bank of Japan was slow to employ the entire gamut of policy options and spell out its goals in credible fashion.

These lessons are now acquiring a special relevance to the U.S. Federal Reserve, facing the risk of a Japan-style deflationary spiral after a mortgage market meltdown that battered the banking system and resulted in the worst bear market for stocks since the Great Depression.

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Warren, prompted by his wife, Kay, has made AIDS a major focus of his international efforts. They are pouring the energy and profits born of his world-wide best selling Bible handbook, The Purpose-Driven Life, into health, social, economic and religious efforts carried out by local churches in African villages.

He’s held major AIDS events at his Saddleback Community Church in southern California for three years now with Hillary Clinton and Obama among hundreds of high-profile political, religious and medical speakers.

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After decades of failed efforts to reshape the nation’s healthcare system, a consensus appears to be emerging in Washington about how to achieve the elusive goal of providing medical insurance to all Americans.

The answer, say leading groups of businesses, hospitals, doctors, labor unions and insurance companies — as well as senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the new Obama administration — is unprecedented government intervention to create a system of universal protection.

At the same time, those groups, which span the ideological and political spectrum, largely have agreed to preserve the employer-based system through which most Americans get their health insurance.

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Vanier was in Durham partly to promote his new book, Living Gently in a Violent World, co-authored with Duke Divinity professor of theological ethics Stanley Hauerwas.

Much of Vanier’s message makes the connection between loving the people whom society has cast aside as unlovable and the struggle to create a more peaceful world.

“The fundamental principle of peace is a belief that each person is important,” Vanier writes in Living Gently.

“People with disabilities remain the most oppressed people of this world,” said Vanier, a tall man with a voice so soft it is often hard to hear. “Many feel that they are not entirely human.”

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Because of weaknesses of ACC, Donald Coggan called first meeting of Primates. This has been crucial in helping people understand one another and work on issues facing Anglican Communion. It has no legislative power ”” it is a consultation.

Anglican Communion is facing many things, many challenges, growing in some places, declining in others, making decisions which offend some parts of Anglican Communion and lacking opportunities to dialogue.

Who is an Anglican? Answer, “Does the ABC recognize you?” He only recognizes bishops, by inviting them to Lambeth. Problem for ABC, if he doesn’t invite a bishop, what does it say about the people in that diocese?

ABC has lots of influence, but no power. If a Bishop is behaving notoriously, he cannot remove that person. He can only talk with ABp or Primate of that area and plead with them.

ACC is in same situation. It has influence but no power.

Lambeth Conference is the same. It has influence, but it has no power.

The Primates’ Meeting is in the same situation.

Read it carefully. A couple of comments. First, I prefer very much the category of authority rather than power. Second, it is NOT true to say that the Lambeth Conference, for example, has no authority, it does have authority, the question is what kind of authority does it have. Again, my preference is to talk in terms of personal and moral authority rather than legislative authority. But this is all a matter for further prayerful reflection–KSH.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has named the Ven. Richard I. Cluett as pastoral assistant to reorganizing dioceses. In this capacity, Archdeacon Cluett will report to Bishop Clay Matthews in the Presiding Bishop’s Office of Pastoral Development.

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Back in June, the people of Ireland stunned the world by voting down the Treaty of Lisbon, bringing the project of ever-closer European integration to a screeching halt. The failure of the Irish vote — the only popular referendum on the treaty anywhere in Europe — seemed to ratify the verdict delivered by French and Dutch voters in 2005 as they torpedoed the European Constitution: no more power for Brussels….

These days, though, such bickering seems like ancient history. Between summer’s turbulence and today’s reality, the New York investment bank Lehman Brothers failed in mid-September, sending the world into a financial tailspin from which it might take years to recover. But instead of sounding the death knell for what was an already flailing EU, the financial crisis has had the effect of breathing new life into a bloc that just a couple months ago looked deflated and defeated.

Now, from Iceland to the Czech Republic, previously wary populations are warming to the EU, heaping praise on the very Brussels-based behemoth they had spent so many years deriding.

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I was very sorry to read this, and I post it for three reasons. First, she was one of my favorite writers on one of my favorite financial blogs. Second, she is an interesting example of why anonymity is sometimes (note, in unusual circumstances) necessary for a blogger, and, thrid, she is but one more example of the further work that needs to be done on ovarian cancer (blog readers may remember my mother died of ovarian cancer in 2007). Read it all–KSH.

If the Big Three automakers follow the instructions of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, they will unveil on Tuesday “credible” plans that “result in a viable industry.”

But there is actually little chance of the Big Three presenting Congress with any “credible” plans. A reborn Detroit requires a radical, harsh restructuring for which neither Detroit nor Washington really has the appetite.

The fevered rhetoric of the past few months has been all about protecting workers and resurrecting the American car industry.

But the sad reality of creating a viable industry is all about firing workers and shutting down excess capacity.

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Did you know that the same amount of corn that produces enough ethanol to fill the fuel tank of an SUV would feed a Mexican for a year?

Or that the price of tortillas, Mexico’s staple food, has tripled and even quadrupled in some parts of that country because the price of white corn, which is indexed to the international price of yellow corn used for ethanol production, has risen dramatically?

In other words, there are people around the world who are starving because more and more land is being dedicated to cash-rich fuel crops like corn instead of food.

These were some of the points raised at a recent forum, Connecting the dots on the food crisis, sponsored by Kairos, the Canadian ecumenical justice organization, of which the Anglican Church of Canada is a member. The forum explored the root causes of the food crisis in the Global South, including the push for agro-fuels in rich countries like Canada and the U.S., the decades-long liberalization policies of governments, and the growth of agri-business transnational corporations.

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To understand how the short-term response might serve the country’s long-term economic interest, I called up Michael Porter, the competitiveness guru at Harvard Business School. Porter wrote an outstanding overview of America’s long-term economic challenges in the Oct. 30 issue of BusinessWeek.

Porter wrote that the U.S. economy has historically benefited from several great assets: an unparalleled environment for entrepreneurialism, a tremendous infrastructure for scientific research, the world’s best universities, a strong commitment to competition and free markets, decentralized regional economies, and efficient capital markets.

But, Porter continued, these advantages are starting to erode. The U.S. has an inadequate rate of reinvestment in science and technology. America’s confidence in free markets is waning. Lack of regulatory oversight has undermined capital markets. Universities have not sufficiently increased graduation rates. American workers do not have a credible safety net. Regulations and litigation have inflated the cost of business. Most important, there is no long-term economic strategy to organize responses to these problems.

I asked Porter how this short-term crisis might serve as an opportunity to address those long-term problems. First, he said, the Obama team will have to avoid a few temptations: Don’t just try to throw out money as fast as possible to stimulate demand. Don’t spread the spending around too thinly. Don’t try to save jobs that are going to disappear anyway.

Then he threw out a bunch of ideas that could be part of a stimulus package….

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency Monday and called lawmakers into a special session to address California’s $11.2 billion deficit.

The state’s revenue gap is expected to hit $28 billion over the next 19 months without bold action. The emergency declaration authorizes the governor and lawmakers to change the existing budget within the next 45 days.

Without quick action, the state is likely to run out of cash in February.

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In fact, far from being the demise of the GOP, the coming generation of evangelicals, Catholics and fellow travelers can be the seeds for the conservative movement’s intellectual rebirth.

A few years back, after I had published a National Review cover story about neo-traditionalism that would serve as the genesis for my book Crunchy Cons, I received an e-mail from a young Protestant seminarian. He had read the piece, he said, and finally his conservatism made sense to him. Progressive evangelical Jim Wallis had lectured his seminary class and talked about how they had a duty to help the poor, to build up communities, to care for the environment and suchlike.

The man told me that he and his classmates agreed with all of it, but when Wallis got to the part about why they should become Democrats, it ended that. The seminarians, my correspondent explained, all knew that they were conservatives and couldn’t accept liberal dogma on abortion and sexuality, nor statist solutions. Even so, these young conservative evangelicals were far more sympathetic to most of Wallis’ goals than their parents would have been.

And why not? Shocking as it might be to some, conservatism did not start with Ronald Reagan. There is a rich and varied library of postwar writing by men such as Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver and Robert Nisbet, who were part of the traditionalist conservative school. Traditionalist conservatives focused on questions of cultural and social health; libertarian conservatives were more concerned about the economy and the overweening state.

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The leader of the Episcopal Church arrives Friday in Riverside amid a debate on homosexuality that continues to tear the denomination apart.

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the 2.4 million-member denomination, will attend the annual meeting of the Diocese of Los Angeles on Friday and Saturday at the Riverside Convention Center. On the convention agenda is a resolution on whether priests in same-sex relationships should be consecrated bishops.

The Los Angeles Diocese includes San Bernardino County and west-central Riverside County.

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By: George Conger.

A “silent genocide” is unfolding in Central Africa, church leaders have warned, as soldiers loyal to rebel General Laurent Nkunda march upon government troops holding the city of Goma in the Kivu province of the eastern Congo.

In a statement released through the Congo Church Association, Bishop Bahati Balibusane of Bukavu warns that “over one million people” have been displaced by the fighting. “Men, women, children are living outside, in schools, in churches and in some hospitable families. They don’t have water, food, materials, clothes, utensils and latrines. These people living in hardship are exposed to hunger, illness and death of some fathers, mothers and children,” he wrote in a call for “urgent spiritual, material and financial support.”

Church aid agencies report the fighting between Congolese troops and the rebels has led to widespread atrocities. The Barnabas Fund reports “ young men [have been] killed, women raped by retreating government troops, children kidnapped and forcibly recruited as child soldiers to fight a war that is not their own, soldiers and militias [are] pillaging and looting, and hundreds of thousands of displaced people [are] fleeing for their lives.”

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A reflective stillness lies at the centre of Advent. Placed between Christ’s first and second coming, the rhythms of the liturgy measure our time. Quietly, but insistently, it awakens our hope and invites us to wait upon the Lord who will fulfil his promise. It assures us that we will not wait in vain. Advent calls us to renew and deepen our trust, while the world finds trust difficult, and “hope” is dismissed as naive. Now, in this season of Advent we come to know that this time, the time in which we live, whatever the time, is the time of our redemption.

The liturgy of Advent is not like the seasonal background music in the shops, designed to put us in the right mood for spending. It is the song of faith, which expresses the reality from which we live our lives, and that faith gives us a particular way of seeing the world, of living in it and for it. Without pretension, we might describe it as a prophetic perspective. The Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel calls it the “exegesis of existence from a divine perspective”. I think this is a good description of what we mean by discerning the “signs of the times”. Christ is the centre of our existence; he is the one who establishes our perspective. For this reason, the Christian way of seeing things is necessarily distinctive. To those who do not share this perspective, it will appear strange. Hence the problem and the puzzle that Christianity poses for a secular culture. The puzzle is not caused by a Christ-centred perspective alone, however. Where a post-Christian society has forgotten how to read the substance of Christian faith, there can be a genuine ignorance but also a cultivated misunderstanding among those who presume to know Christianity already. The old cliché about familiarity breeding contempt can be disconcertingly true. We live at a moment when our society is marked by deep struggles about its identity, values and purpose. The Church wants humanity to succeed, not fail. That is why it is passionately engaged in this struggle. It does not have any ambition to take away the legitimate independence of the secular but it does have a vision of what that might be.

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In the old days — from the Venetian Republic to, oh, the Bear Stearns rescue — if you wanted to get rich, you did it the Warren Buffett way: You learned to read balance sheets. Today you learn to read political tea leaves. If you want to make money on Wall Street (or keep from losing your shirt), you do it not by anticipating Intel’s third-quarter earnings but by guessing instead what side of the bed Henry Paulson will wake up on tomorrow.

Today’s extreme stock market volatility is not just a symptom of fear — fear cannot account for days of wild market swings upward — but a reaction to meta-economic events: political decisions that have vast economic effects.

As economist Irwin Stelzer argues, we have gone from a market-driven economy to a politically driven economy….

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The church sits on 22 acres of former farmland, with a creek and about 12 acres of bottomland perfect for agriculture. While most of the Karen refugees now work at the Tyson poultry processing plant in Shelbyville, they had been farmers in Myanmar.

At the time, the All Saints property was for sale, and Spurlock told Win the timing was wrong for planting gardens. He feared the property might be sold before the refugees could harvest their crops. Still, the idea stuck with him.

One day in May, while working on a plan to restart the church, he took a walk on the church property, and the idea of starting a farm finally dawned on him. “God gave us this land for a purpose,” he said.

Longtime church member Mark Orr agreed. He and his wife, Landra, have been attending All Saints since its organizational meeting about 12 years ago.

“I’m ashamed to say it, but we had to wait until God slapped us on the head, and said, ‘I gave this land to you, put it to work.’ ”

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After a five-year spiritual and practical journey that has led them further and further away from the Episcopal Church, [the Rev. Ron] Gauss and his parish, Bishop Seabury Church, are now fully severed from the denomination they once proudly claimed as their own.

Gauss, who was suspended from the priesthood last May, was deposed ”” which means removed from the priesthood ”” by Connecticut Episcopal Bishop Andrew Smith on Nov. 20.

Smith said Gauss was suspended because he “abandoned the Episcopal Church” by aligning his church with the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), a mission of the conservative Anglican Church of Nigeria.

“Yes, there’s sadness. I never figured it would get to this point,” Gauss said. “But it’s not the same church I was ordained to, either.”

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Before I do so, however, there are other objections to my analysis that deserve a response. Bishop Whalon and others often argue that Dioceses are “created” by General Convention. This claim, however, is an example of wishful thinking that ignores the legal precision of Article V of TEC’s Constitution. This article is entitled “Admission of New Dioceses,” and not “Creation of New Dioceses.” The first sentence specifies General Convention’s role in the process. It is to “consent.” The wording indicates at the outset that the role of General Convention is secondary, not primary. It consents to actions initiated elsewhere.

The following sentences in Article V elaborate this process. The proceedings “originate” with a convention of “the unorganized area,” not with General Convention. It is the unorganized area that “duly adopts” its own constitution. Article V then describes the legal entity created by the duly adopted constitution not, as before, as an “unorganized area,” but as a “Diocese.” Then the “new Diocese” submits its constitution to the General Convention for consent; and upon receipt of this consent, it enters into “union with the General Convention.”

In this articulation of the steps involved in the creation of a new Diocese, Article V reflects the civil law. When an unorganized area adopts its own constitution, by definition it is no longer “unorganized.” It is a legal entity. In the terminology of Article V, this entity is called a “new Diocese.” This step, furthermore, occurs before the constitutional involvement of General Convention. What happens when the new Diocese obtains the consent of General Convention to its application is that it is “admitted” into union with the other dioceses in General Convention. The transformation from “unorganized area” to “new Diocese” occurs when the diocesan constitution is duly adopted. When General Convention gives its consent, another transformation occurs, but it is not the creation of a new Diocese. It is the transformation of unaffiliated “new Diocese” to member diocese of General Convention.

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In the past year, 30% of U.S. high school students have stolen from a store and 64% have cheated on a test, according to a new, large-scale survey suggesting that Americans are too apathetic about ethical standards.

Educators reacting to the findings questioned any suggestion that today’s young people are less honest than previous generations, but several agreed that intensified pressures are prompting many students to cut corners.

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When the officiant tells Claudaniel Fabien he can kiss his bride at the altar Saturday, no one will fault the couple for a little “should I tilt my head this way, or that way?” awkwardness.

It will be the couple’s very first kiss.

And that night could be their very first … uh, back to that kiss.

“I don’t know how long it’ll last, but it’ll be great,” says a confident Melody LaLuz, 28, who is marrying 30-year-old Fabien in Chicago after a yearlong courtship and two-year friendship.

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Health care reform in Massachusetts has led to a dramatic increase in the number of people with health insurance. But there’s an unintended consequence: A sudden demand for primary care doctors has outpaced the supply.

Kamela Christara appears at the triage window in the emergency room at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in western Massachusetts.

The 47-year-old single mother has advanced Lyme disease, and she can’t find a primary care doctor to oversee her care. She’s called half a dozen practices in three towns, and none are accepting new patients. So when problems come up, even routine ones, she comes to the emergency room. Each time, she goes through her medical history with the intake nurse.

Read or listen to it all from NPR.