Aslan, Ohio–As jobless numbers reach levels not seen in 25 years, another crisis is unfolding for millions of people who lost their health insurance along with their jobs, joining the ranks of the uninsured.

The crisis is on display here. Starla D. Darling, 27, was pregnant when she learned that her insurance coverage was about to end. She rushed to the hospital, took a medication to induce labor and then had an emergency Caesarean section, in the hope that her Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan would pay for the delivery.

Wendy R. Carter, 41, who recently lost her job and her health benefits, is struggling to pay $12,942 in bills for a partial hysterectomy at a local hospital. Her daughter, Betsy A. Carter, 19, has pain in her lower right jaw, where a wisdom tooth is growing in. But she has not seen a dentist because she has no health insurance.

Ms. Darling and Wendy Carter are among 275 people who worked at an Archway cookie factory here in north central Ohio.

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In the year after his return, Blaufus repeatedly enrolled in college classes and then dropped out. He got married four months after coming home, to a woman who left him shortly afterward. Looking back, Blaufus says the war changed everything.

“I understood I could die any day. So I was constantly doing stuff that a 24-year-old shouldn’t be doing. I bought a house ”” I didn’t even look at the house before I bought it. When my marriage ended, the need for everything ended along with it.”

That house has now fallen into foreclosure.

Blaufus has been hospitalized twice since he got back for acute post-traumatic stress disorder.

The list of things he can’t do is long: sleep, eat in front of other people, go running or hiking. He even had to re-learn his favorite thing: playing the guitar.

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Christian Aid partner organisations in Zimbabwe are responding to the cholera outbreak which is now affecting the entire country.

According to the World Health organisation more than 12,000 cases have been reported and 565 people have died.

In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, the Dabane Trust, a Christian Aid partner which specialises in drought recovery programmes, is providing an emergency response in both the city and in the outlying rural areas.

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The most vocal statement against the resolution came from the Rev. Roberts Smith, rector of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Riverside.

The resolution states that the moratorium violates church canons, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Smith said he agreed with the canons, but he said the moratorium correctly barred from the office of bishop people in same-sex relationships.

“What the Scriptures consistently condemn is homosexual sex, the practice of homosexual sex,” Smith said. “If you read the Scriptures, you’ll see it there again and again. It’s not a matter of orientation. It’s a matter of practice.”

St. Michael’s illustrates how the debate over homosexuality has caused deep fissures in the denomination.

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Driving your car may take on a new and larger meaning ”” for your wallet.

To fix its crumbling roads and bridges and rescue the state’s financially challenged public transit system, a draft report made public yesterday says the state should consider charging tolls at the state line on every interstate highway and creating a new tax for each mile a vehicle is driven.

The report calls for tolls on a new Sakonnet River Bridge, increasing the state gas tax and a long list of other things related to using the roads. One proposed tax would apply to anything made from petroleum, from paint to detergent to plastics.

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Father Hawkins is Dean of Cathedral Church of St Alban the Martyr, Prince Albert.

Retired Milwaukee Bishop Roger White said the convention would disrupt the global Anglican Communion and severely harm relations with other churches.

White said he believed at least 50 percent of the Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is the U.S. member, would cut off relations with the Episcopal Church and declare it out of communion.

White also said theology took a back seat at the convention. The House of Bishops has not adopted a theological paper on sexuality drafted by the Committee on Theology, and the convention ignored the paper by taking action on two specific cases, he said.

“My personal feeling, as far as the polity of the church is concerned, is that is doing things the wrong way around,” White said. “I feel that is a very dangerous way to live, and it’s certainly not the way that we’re supposed to do it.”

–From a 2003 AP story about the aftermath of the 2003 General Convention

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From here:

“The formation of a parallel province is aspirational claim at this point. While the Archbishop [of Canterbury] has made clear his displeasure with the Episcopal Church, he has made clear his equal displeasure with these attempts to reorder traditional Anglican polity,” Henry D.W. Burt, secretary of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, said in a statement yesterday.

“He did so not only by not inviting Bishop [V. Gene] Robinson of New Hampshire to the Lambeth Conference, but also by excluding those bishops irregularly consecrated under the auspices of overseas provinces….”

The Rev. Canon Robert G. Hetherington, retired rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, reacted to yesterday’s announcement by saying, “I think it’s too bad. It’s something that’s been coming.” He added that he thinks the Rt. Rev. Peter James Lee, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, had “bent over backwards to be helpful and try to accommodate some of [the breakaway congregations’] views, to be inclusive of them … I have tremendous respect for his leadership.”

Hetherington added, “In my view, the great thing about the Episcopal Church is we’re not a doctrinal church. You’re not a member based on some narrow set of beliefs. It’s a place where divergent views can be expressed and held and you’re still part of the same body. That’s the sadness of this group leaving, that they just don’t want to be part of the family anymore.”

Rector Gregg Riley of Grace Episcopal Church in Monroe said the beginnings of the separation surfaced in July of this year when conservative Episcopalians met in Jerusalem for the Global Anglican Future Conference.

Riley, who attended the conference, said archbishops, bishops and laity from 17 of the church’s provinces met to “determine the way forward for conservative Episcopalians in North America who felt like the Episcopal Church was going in a different theological direction ”” away from Scripture and away from the teachings of the Church.”

Riley, who described Grace Episcopal Church as a conservative congregation, said he would wait three to six months to consider affiliating his church with the breakaway group.

“Individual parishes will wait and see what the constitutions and canons are like,” Riley said. “We’ve got to wait to see as far as the particulars: who’s the leader, how an individual would affiliate with it.”

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Organizers of the new Anglican Communion in North America include leaders of the Reformed Episcopal church, which has churches in Deming and Los Lunas with a total membership of about 200, said the Rev. Win Mott, pastor of the St. Augustine Anglican Church in Deming.

The new denomination is an attempt to reunite conservative churches that have splintered from the U.S. Episcopal church over the years, Mott said. “The Anglican movement in the United States is fragmented,” said Mott, who is also assistant bishop for the 11-state Diocese of the West for the Reformed Episcopal Church. “Now we’re trying to glue it back together.”

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Realistically, how viable is the new denomination?

Historically, in the Anglican Communion, to form a new province required four existing dioceses to organize it and put forward a constitution. We have those four dioceses in Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, [San Joaquin, Calif.; and Quincy, Ill.]. ”‚.”‚.”‚.

I think the figure they were using [Wednesday] is .”‚.”‚. 100,000 average Sunday attendance. So it’s certainly viable financially, and it’s certainly viable in terms of number of dioceses involved because there are four already existing dioceses.

What do you foresee, legally and financially, for the local congregations that want to remain in Episcopal Church? Are lawsuits likely?

The congregations in this diocese that want to remain in TEC [Episcopal Church] will have to organize a new diocese or join an already existing diocese such as our neighboring Diocese of Dallas. I have offered my assistance to help them achieve this, as has the bishop of Dallas.

I certainly hope that lawsuits over property will be avoided and that a negotiated settlement will satisfy the interests of all parties. Sadly, the TEC authorities have been all too eager to litigate in disputes like this. However, unless the local churches want to litigate against the Diocese of Fort Worth, there isn’t much that the TEC leaders can do about it. Charity and forbearance are required on both sides.

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St. Paul’s Episcopal Church long has been known as the historic Capitol Square church with a socially relevant ministry.

In time, it also will be known for “doing brave, bold things,” said the Rev. Canon D. Wallace Adams-Riley, the church’s new rector.

The church has a rich legacy of “real flesh-and-blood ministries that stretch back to the 19th century with the orphanage. It’s always been a part of who we are and there’s a sense we want it to be even more so,” said Adams-Riley, 37.

He will be formally installed tomorrow as the 15th rector in the church’s more than 160 years. The Rt. Rev. Peter James Lee, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, will preside over the service.

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Norway officials are considering disbanding the town’s police department.

Mayor Brad Fogle, in presenting the town’s proposed 2009 budget for first reading at Monday night’s Norway Town Council meeting, said the police department is currently costing the town more money than it’s generating.

Norway currently does not have a full-time police department and is not seeking a full-time officer at this time, Fogle said. The town’s proposed spending plan for 2009 allocates $152,500 for the police department.

“We have been discussing the possibility of not having a police department for several months. Right now, we only have a part-time officer and although he works very hard, the police department is actually costing the town at this point. I prepared this proposed budget, but I want everyone to understand that we may decide to disband the department completely,” Fogle said. “And, if we approve the budget tonight, it is with the understanding that we may amend this budget during the second reading in January, or we may decide not to have a police department at all.”

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Almost one in 10 S.C. homeowners was behind on mortgage payments or in foreclosure at the end of September.

And the state’s high unemployment rate indicates more people will have trouble making payments next year.

In South Carolina, 9.4 percent of homeowners were at least 30 days past due or in the process of foreclosure in the third quarter,according to data released Friday by the Mortgage Bankers Association. That is up from 8.1 percent in the same period last year.

Of the 666,729 mortgages serviced in the state, 7.4 percent were delinquent and 2 percent were in foreclosure, the MBA reported.

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To portray his thinking demands getting behind Dr Williams’s seemingly careful obscurity and (in the words of an academic mentor, Donald MacKinnon) his “tendency to substitute revery for hard analysis”.

The private man has now also to uphold public policies with the making of which he might not have agreed. As Lord Harries, the former Bishop of Oxford, told him: “God has given you all the gifts and, as your punishment, he has made you Archbishop of Canterbury.”

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Here is one:

Re “Auto Executives Face a Hard Sell on Capitol Hill” (front page, Dec. 5):

I am one of those skeptics who believe that no amount of money will effect changes in businesses that keep their leadership in place. Promises aside, they’ve led their companies into the fix they’re in. A structured Chapter 11 is the way to go.

Also, I strongly suggest to the president-elect to institute a $1 tax on every gallon of gasoline on the day he takes office. With it, he can finance the desperately needed rebuilding of our infrastructure and create jobs. We Americans must have a powerful incentive to give up our wasteful, lazy ways ”” buying big cars, spending and driving unnecessarily.

Barack Obama must be honest with us; it’s not the economy of the country that is in peril, it’s the economy of the earth ”” and all its inhabitants.

Lawrence Holofcener

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As bad as the headline numbers in Friday’s employment report were, they still made the job market look better than it really is.

The unemployment rate reached its highest point since 1993, and overall employment fell by more than a half million jobs. Yet that was just the beginning. Thanks to the vagaries of the way that the government’s best-known jobs statistics are calculated, they have overlooked many workers who have been deeply affected by the current recession.

The number of people out of the labor force ”” meaning that they were neither working nor looking for work and that the government did not consider them unemployed ”” jumped by 637,000 last month, the Labor Department said. The number of part-time workers who said they wanted full-time work ”” all counted as fully employed ”” rose by an additional 621,000.

Take these people into account, and the job market may be in its worst condition since the early 1980s. It is still deteriorating rapidly, too.

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The Rt. Rev. Charles Jenkins, Bishop of Louisiana, has announced plans to retire at the end of 2009. He informed the diocese’s standing committee of his decision Dec. 4, according to a letter published on the diocese’s website.

“This move is based on issues of health and a concern for the mission strategy of the diocese,” Bishop Jenkins said. “To that end, I now call for the election of the eleventh Bishop of Louisiana.”

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President-elect Barack Obama added sweep and meat to his economic agenda on Saturday, pledging the largest new investment in roads and bridges since President Dwight D. Eisenhower built the Interstate system in the late 1950s, and tying his key initiatives ”“ education, energy, health care ”“back to jobs in a package that has the makings of a smaller and modern version of FDR’s New Deal marriage of job creation with infrastructure upgrades.

The president-elect also said for the first time that he will “launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen.”

“We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms,” he said in the address.

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This week’s announcement that breakaway Episcopal churches around North America are forming their own province prompted sharply contrasting reactions among San Diego-area worshippers. Members of the independent churches in San Diego County said this is a momentous shift, and a recognition that the Episcopal church has strayed too far from the faith’s core principles.

But the Right Rev. James R. Mathes, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of San Diego, said there is no official recognition of the new province, or governing unit, and therefore no real change. “You can say you’re a province, but that doesn’t make it so,” Mathes said. “It doesn’t affect us.”

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