James Mumford is a well-dressed 27-year-old from the posh London neighborhood of Pimlico. He holds degrees in philosophy from Oxford and Yale and, like many of Britain’s elite, spent a post-graduate stint working in London’s finance industry. But tonight he wants to talk about how he came to accept the Lord Jesus Christ into his heart. “I don’t mind talking about my faith,” he says, sheepishly. “But it’s a touch embarrassing. Just don’t brand me as a mindless evangelical.”

That peculiarly British reticence may be one reason that an unexpected spiritual awakening among London’s high society has gone unnoticed in recent years. Long considered an aggressively secular city, London has quietly become one of Britain’s most Christian areas, going from the least observant region in Britain in 1979 to the second most observant today. Much of that resurgence in piety is the result of the city’s expanding and devout immigrant population. But there is also a growing number of young, highly educated and moneyed Londoners ”” people such as Mumford ”” who are turning to the church.

The focal point for many of these new believers is Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), an evangelical Anglican church in plush Kensington. The church’s 4000-strong congregation has almost tripled in the past 15 years, and its average age is 27 years. While HTB does not keep records of these young converts’ wealth, a look at its bulging collection hat offers some clue: the church raised over $7 million from donations last year alone (An average London parish, by contrast, can expect to raise around $150,000, according to data provided by the Anglican church). The church has become so popular that it recently began encouraging hundreds of its congregation to attend dying churches around London ”” as much to ease its own congestion than anything else.

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A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.

—The Onion, and, yes, read it all

Whatever happened to the cost of doing business? There was a time when businesses bit the bullet and absorbed the ordinary cost of doing business. Them days are gone forever. Nowadays, the consumer gets stuck with those costs. Capital improvements? Raise prices. Upgrade computers? Raise prices.

I believe most consumers would agree that it was perfectly reasonable for businesses to charge higher prices to offset the skyrocketing cost of fuel which we experienced in recent months. But now that fuel prices have fallen back down, have businesses lowered prices accordingly? I don’t think so.

When it comes to screwing the consumer, CenterPoint Energy takes the prize.

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The Government cannot walk by on the other side when people are suffering, Gordon Brown told the Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday in an extraordinary tussle for the moral high ground.

The Prime Minister delved into the New Testament to deliver a surprising riposte to Dr Rowan Williams, who had likened the Government’s plans to boost spending to an “addict returning to the drug”.

The head of the Church of England had told the Today programme on Radio 4: “It is about what is sustainable in the long term and if this is going to drive us back into the same spin, I do not think that is going to help us.”

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It is a 48 page pdf file with material of interest.

Q My guest on Belief today is a religious figure, who’s featured prominently in the news throughout 2008. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali’s comments since the start of the year have startled many with their outspokenness. He spoke of ”˜no go’ areas, where extremists made non-Muslims unwelcome. He also spoke out against some of the current leadership of the Anglican Communion, siding with its traditional wing, and going as far as to boycott the Lambeth Conference, which every ten years brings the Anglican bishops to Canterbury. He speaks out because he sees the liberal leadership of the Church deviating from its age-old Christian faith and values.
As the youngest ever Anglican bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali was only thirty-five years old when he was appointed Bishop of Raiwind in his native Pakistan. In 1987 the then Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie invited him to set up, ironically enough, the Lambeth Conference for the following year. Michael Nazir-Ali became Bishop of Rochester in 1994, the first non-white diocesan bishop in the Church of England. He’s a Fellow of both his Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and Visiting Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Greenwich.
From 1997 until 2003, he chaired the Ethics and Law Committee of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. He is also a lover of cricket. Let’s start with cricket bishop, because I understand your sons cheer for England and you cheer for Pakistan.
A Well yes, and my wife supports the underdog, so we failed at the Tebbit test comprehensively in all sorts of ways.

Read it all on Ruth Gledhill’s blog.

His outspoken views on gay rights and the integration of Muslim communities have attracted vitriolic criticism and even earned him death threats from outside the Church of England.

Now the controversial Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, 59, has found himself the target of a scatological attack by an aide in the offices of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.

A confidential document sent from Lambeth Palace to No 10 Downing Street and the Church of England’s 43 diocesan bishops included the unclerical word “arsehole” appended to the name of Dr Nazir-Ali, Britain’s most senior Asian Anglican.

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The recession and economic turmoil is creating a new class of casualties: Married couples who can’t afford to get divorced. In these tough times many people are finding it’s cheaper to stay together, even when they can’t stand each other.

“The reason that the economy has such an enormous impact on divorce is that most people in the middle-income brackets are getting by on whatever income they have. They’re just getting by,” said Bonnie Booden, a family law and divorce attorney in Phoenix.

A major factor in the divorce downturn, Booden said, is divorced couples have to establish two separate households with current funds — a prohibitive factor when you’re looking at divorce in tough economic times.

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While national leaders must set the proper tone, wars are won in the trenches. Local pastors, priests, imams and rabbis will be called upon to do much of the heavy lifting. For example, getting attached to one another might mean getting unattached to things. Clergy can remind us that the things that give our lives meaning rarely cost money. They do, however, cost. We will need to become better listeners. And less judgmental. We might even relax our grip on the notion that all of life must be adversarial. Perhaps cooperation, rather than competition, is the pathway to this new American dream.

But I would go beyond cooperation. This is really about forgiveness ”” a cornerstone of our Western religious traditions. I would ask parishioners to be big enough to forgive one another for their differing political and religious views. And in so forgiving, people would heal themselves. Withholding forgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping your enemy will feel sick.

This is not just about being nice. It’s about being “one nation” ”” the only way America really works.

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Each new meeting of the Communion now reinforces this impression that the ”˜schism’ has taken place, because complete sacramental communion is demonstrably no longer possible. The most recent news, of course, is that an alternative province is being formed across North America bringing together the various acronyms and groupings we are coming used to: the Network, CANA, dioceses linked to the Southern Cone, and parishes under the oversight of Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, together with traditionalist continuing churches which long ago broke away.

In the absence of any meaningful overtures from the official American and Canadian leadership, and no proposals for any effective alternative oversight, and amid a determination to press on with scandalous and acrimonious litigation, there is probably no option now other than a third North American province. Furthermore, the level of theological heterodoxy in the Episcopal Church is worryingly high. A number of dioceses have rejected the moratoria which were called for with impunity and it looks clear that at the next General Convention it will be business as usual in the liberal drift of the denomination.

Apart from the sexuality issue, relativism both morally and theologically is normal theology in TEC. Very few Episcopal leaders will say with any confidence that Jesus Christ is the only way to God; instead they apologise for missionary activity in the past, and proclaim a muted, stunted, deformed Gospel to the world.

Yet the formation of a third province is not universally favoured by those who otherwise reject North American innovation. The Gafcon route is an ”˜outside’ strategy that has given up on the ability of the Anglican Communion to discipline itself in accordance with Bible and tradition. There is however an insider’s strategy as well, which believes that the Windsor process is roughly the right direction for the Communion to go, that it will actually result in discipline.

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The selection of Robinson in 2003 set off a wide-ranging debate within the church, with conservative congregations saying that the Episcopal Church had abandoned historic doctrines and traditional teachings in a number of key theological issues ”“ including sexuality.

“While on paper this has been a battle about property, the division within our church has been caused by TEC’s decision to walk away from the teaching of the Bible and the unique role of Jesus Christ.,” Minns said.

“They are forging a prodigal path ”“ reinventing Christianity as they go ”“ which takes them away from the values and beliefs of the historical church here in the United States and the worldwide Anglican Communion as a whole.

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“See the USA in your Chevrolet!” trilled Dinah Shore week after week on TV.

Can you still see the USA in your Chevrolet? Through a windscreen darkly.

General Motors now has a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath & Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail. GM has a market capitalization of about $2.4 billion. For purposes of comparison, Toyota’s market cap is $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM). General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The UAW is AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as “workers” (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.

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With a record amount of commercial real-estate debt coming due, some of the country’s biggest property developers have become the latest to go hat-in-hand to the government for assistance.

They’re warning policymakers that thousands of office complexes, hotels, shopping centers and other commercial buildings are headed into defaults, foreclosures and bankruptcies. The reason: according to research firm Foresight Analytics LCC, $530 billion of commercial mortgages will be coming due for refinancing in the next three years — with about $160 billion maturing in the next year. Credit, meanwhile, is practically nonexistent and cash flows from commercial property are siphoning off.

Unlike home loans, which borrowers repay after a set period of time, commercial mortgages usually are underwritten for five, seven or 10 years with big payments due at the end. At that point, they typically need to be refinanced. A borrower’s inability to refinance could force it to give up the property to the lender.

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Dr Rowan Williams risks causing a new controversy by inviting a comparison between Gordon Brown’s response to the economic downturn and the Third Reich.

In an article for The Daily Telegraph, he claims Germany in the 1930s pursued a “principle” that worked consistently but only on the basis that “quite a lot of people that you might have thought mattered as human beings actually didn’t”.

Dr Williams, the most senior cleric in the Church of England, then appears to draw a parallel between the Nazis and the UK Government’s policies for tackling the downturn, which he says fails to take account of the “particular human costs” to the most vulnerable in society.

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Karl Barth was, by any standards, one of the most deeply principled intellectuals of the age, someone who was quite ready to pay the price of conscience in an insane and tyrannical state. It was probably only his Swiss citizenship that saved his life. So it’s all the more surprising to read some of his words in a Christmas sermon preached in 1931, where he says that the real good news of Christmas is that we are given permission to be free from our principles. We need, he says, “to be able to live with principles, but we must also be able to live without them”.

Why is this good news ”“ and what has it got to do with Christmas, with this Christmas in particular and our current anxieties and hopes?

What Barth saw beginning to take its grip on Germany in 1931 was a system of “principle” that worked quite consistently once you accepted that quite a lot of people that you might have thought mattered as human beings actually didn’t. As the nightmare decade unfolded, the implications of this became clearer and clearer. And what he was warning against was the temptation of unconditional loyalty to a system, a programme, a “cause” which was essentially about “me and people like me”. It’s about the danger of my agenda, our needs, the programme of this particular group, its safety and prosperity.

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Worship services may still be the USA’s most segregated hour, but fewer congregations are now completely white, finds a study comparing churches, synagogues and mosques last year with a decade ago.

The National Congregations Study says 14% of primarily white congregations reported no minorities in their midst last year, compared with 20% in 1998.

Such steep change in a short period is noteworthy because “religious traditions and organizations are widely considered to be remarkably resistant to change,” says sociology professor Mark Chaves of Duke University School of Divinity, the lead researcher. “There’s movement in the right direction.”

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Do check it out.

Under fire for opposing gay marriage, influential evangelical pastor Rick Warren said Saturday that he loves Muslims, people of other religions, Republicans and Democrats, and he also loves “gays and straights.”

The 54-year-old pastor and founder of Saddleback Church in Southern California told the crowd of 500 that it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to agree on everything all the time.

“You don’t have to see eye to eye to walk hand in hand,” said Warren.

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Even before the job fair opens, the line snakes into the parking lot of the state fairground, a muted parade of lives derailed by layoffs.

“It kills me, it eats me up inside,” said Raymond Vaughn, who has been out of work for seven months, since he lost his job as a window installer. His fiancée now pays the bills. “I go into this fantasy world where I’m like, I’m in the wrong life and I’m actually a millionaire. It really bothers me I can’t do the things I’d like for her. Sometimes you get where you feel less than a man.”

As the American economy sinks deeper into one of the more punishing recessions since the Depression, frustration and fear color the national conversation.

This city in the center of South Carolina is an ideal listening post. According to a range of indicators assembled by Moody’s Economy.com ”” from job growth to change in household worth ”” this metropolitan area came closer than any other to being a microcosm of the nation over the last decade.

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UNFORTUNATELY, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. has turned this old song into the unofficial theme of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the $700 billion bailout. His frequent changes of direction are not only embarrassing, they also upset the very markets this program was designed to calm.

It pains me to say this, because I was among the first to call upon Congress to create two institutions to deal with the financial crisis: one to buy and refinance home mortgages, the other to buy what came to be called “troubled assets.” The legislation signed in October empowered the TARP to do both. Sadly and amazingly, it has done neither.

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In one of the most holy weeks in the Christian calendar, a report says that in just over a generation the number of people attending Church of England Sunday services will fall to less than a tenth of what they are now.

Christian Research, the statistical arm of the Bible Society, claimed that by 2050 Sunday attendance will fall below 88,000, compared with just under a million now.

The controversial forecast, based on a “snapshot” census of church attendances, has been seized upon by secular groups as proof that the established church is in decline. But the Church of England has rejected the figures, saying they were incomplete and ignored new ways of worshipping outside the church network.

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The BBC blurb:

A large majority of people in Britain do not believe the Biblical story about the birth of Jesus to be a reliable historical account, a survey suggests. New Testament scholar Simon Gathercole, of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, discusses the survey carried out by religious think tank Theo, which also suggests almost a quarter of those describing themselves as Christians share this scepticism.

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There’s a curious non-sequitur running through all this. Everyone ”“ agony aunts, civil servants, government ministers ”“ agrees that parental break-up has profound, damaging effects on children. Everyone agrees that a great deal of money must be spent on providing some sort of panacea for those children.

But no one at any point addresses the notion that the underlying causes of the problem should be dealt with. Or indeed that there is an underlying cause.

In fact, the underlying premise of the Cabinet Office report is simply untruthful. The legal form of the relationship in which children grow up does matter, very much.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, today condemned the prime minister’s response to the economic crisis, describing his efforts to boost spending in a downturn as like “the addict returning to the drug”.

Williams said the credit crunch had been a “reality check” in a climate of unsustainable greed, and it should be used to provoke a fundamental rethink of the pursuit of wealth. It demonstrated that the country had been “going in the wrong direction” by relying on financial speculation rather than “making things”, he said.

It was “a reminder that what I think some people have called fairy gold is just that ”“ that sooner or later you have to ask: ‘What are we making or what are we assembling or accumulating wealth for?’.”

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It is more than ever the task of the little teams and small flocks, to struggle most effectively for man and the spirit, and, in particular, to give the most effective witness to those truths for which men so desperately long and which are, at present, in such short supply. For only the little teams and small flocks are able to muster around something which completely escapes technique and the process of massification, and which is the love and wisdom and of the intellect and the trust in the invisible radiation of this love. Such invisible rays carry far; they have the same kind of incredible power in the realm of the spirit that atomic fission and the miracles of microphysics have in the world of matter.

–Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), p.172

The BBC blurb:

In a wide-ranging interview, he gives his views on the economic downturn, the invasion of Iraq and the disestablishment of the Church of England.

Listen to it all (a little over fifteen minutes).

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A new religion course taught in schools across Quebec was intended to improve inter-cultural understanding, but so far it is generating deep division as hundreds of parents pull their children out of class.

A high school in Granby, Que., has in the past week handed one-day suspensions to seven students boycotting the Ethics and Religious Culture course on the grounds that it violates their freedom of conscience. In nearby Drummondville, a couple will be going to court next spring with a constitutional challenge to the mandatory course.

The course “is forcing children to learn the content of other religions,” Jean Morse-Chevrier, president of the Quebec Association of Catholic Parents, said yesterday. “Therefore it is the state deciding what religious content will be learned, at what age, and that is totally overriding the parents’ authority and role.”

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St Paul’s Cathedral in Dunedin has elected a new dean, the Ven Dr Trevor James, of Waitotara, Taranaki.

The announcement Dr James would be the 12th dean was made at a 10am service at the cathedral yesterday.

The dean’s warden, Hugh Campbell, said Dr James (62) would move to the city with his wife Christine, and would be installed as the dean on March 15.

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Whether it is viewed with sympathy or suspicion, there is no doubt that the new Anglican Church in North America changes the Anglican map. To be more accurate, it lays a new map (a relief map, perhaps?) on top of the old one, so that in his otherwise factual article the new Archbishop, the Most Revd Bob Duncan, can say artlessly that the charge of boundary-crossing, condemned by the Windsor report, “is most effectively and completely addressed by general acceptance of the new province”. Although territorial confusion matters less where a church is defined more by congregational membership than place of abode, the parish ideal is none the less strong.

When a new state declares independence, the international community decides whether or not to recognise it by measuring it against a set of standards. In this instance, does the new Church have integrity? On the subject of territorial dis­tinctiveness, as we have seen, the jury is still out. Is it Christian? Undoubtedly: it is as faithful a realisation of Christ’s will as any Church manages to be. Is it Anglican? Yes and no: its worship is, but its formation without any reference to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Consultative Council, or the Primates’ Meeting suggests otherwise.

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