Rick LaChappelle, owner of four pawnshops in Maine, calculates he has lent about 33% more money this year than last. “The banking industry is not giving out any money right now,” he said. “So people are relying on second-tier lending institutions.”

—From a front page WSJ article this morning entitled “People Pulling Up to Pawnshops Today Are Driving Cadillacs and BMWs”

Watch it all (about 47 1/2 minutes).

A painful reminder of the consequences of the current recession–watch it all.

So symbolic for the overall economy.

Sometime in November, as things now stand, the “Christmas season” begins. The streets are hung with lights, the stores are decorated with red and green, and you can’t turn on the radio without hearing songs about the spirit of the season and the glories of Santa Claus. The excitement builds to a climax on the morning of December 25, and then it stops, abruptly. Christmas is over, the New Year begins, and people go back to their normal lives.

The traditional Christian celebration of Christmas is exactly the opposite. The season of Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, and for nearly a month Christians await the coming of Christ in a spirit of expectation, singing hymns of longing. Then, on December 25, Christmas Day itself ushers in twelve days of celebration, ending only on January 6 with the feast of the Epiphany. Exhortations to follow this calendar rather than the secular one have become routine at this time of year. But often the focus falls on giving Advent its due, with the Twelve Days of Christmas relegated to the words of a cryptic traditional carol. Most people are simply too tired after Christmas Day to do much celebrating.

The “real” twelve days of Christmas are important not just as a way of thumbing our noses at secular ideas of the “Christmas season.” They are important because they give us a way of reflecting on what the Incarnation means in our lives. Christmas commemorates the most momentous event in human history””the entry of God into the world He made, in the form of a baby. The Logos through whom the worlds were made took up His dwelling among us in a tabernacle of flesh. One of the prayers for Christmas Day in the Catholic liturgy encapsulates what Christmas means for all believers: “O God, who marvelously created and yet more marvelously restored the dignity of human nature, grant that we may share the divinity of Him who humbled himself to share our humanity.” In Christ, our human nature was united to God, and when Christ enters our hearts, he brings us into that union.

Read it all.

Not since the days of Margaret Thatcher has the Church of England attacked a Government with such sustained venom. Over the weekend a phalanx of Bishops preached variations on an identical theme. The Bishop of Manchester, Nigel McCullough, described the New Labour administration as “morally corrupt… beguiled by money. The Government believes that money can answer all of the problems and has encouraged greed and a love of money that the Bible says is the root of all evil.”

The Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, fulminated that “While the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. When a big bank or car company goes bankrupt, it gets bailed out, but no one seems to be bailing out the ordinary people who are losing their jobs.” From the more prosperous Home Counties the Bishop of Winchester, Michael Scott-Joynt, declaimed that “The Government hasn’t done anything like enough to help those less well-off, particularly in terms of tax redistribution.”

Read it all.

The Church of England last night tried to avoid a split by watering down its plans for the consecration of women bishops, granting an opt-out to parishioners who refuse to accept the spiritual authority of female clergy.

Under the church’s proposals, parishes could bypass women bishops and women priests by taking their leadership from specially consecrated male “complementary” bishops.

Parents could elect to have their children confirmed and baptised by male clergy while congregations could seek to have sacraments and other divine service removed from the responsibility of a female bishop.

Read it all.

Israel continued airstrikes against Gaza Strip targets for a fourth day on Tuesday, destroying civic and other buildings linked to the militant Hamas movement in a campaign Israeli leaders say will continue until the group is crippled.

Diplomatic efforts to calm the situation are expected to accelerate this week, with European foreign ministers scheduled to meet in Paris today and Arab diplomats set to gather in Cairo on Wednesday.

In advance of the Paris session, the European Commission called for “an immediate halt to military hostilities” in order to spare Gaza’s civilian population, while demanding that Hamas also stop firing its rockets into Israel. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday had also called for a ceasefire.

Though the pace of bombing appeared to slow on Tuesday, Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit told Israel Radio that at this point “there is no room for a ceasefire,” according to news reports from the region. “The Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of the Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel.”

Read it all.

The members of Waterfront Community Church attend weekly services in a high school auditorium. Their contemporary Christian music rock band practices at someone’s home. And the pastor relies on a laptop and Starbucks for an office.

The nondenominational suburban Chicago church operates on a shoestring budget and under an unusual financial setup so it can stick to a mission: Give 100% of offerings gathered from the collection plate to those in need.

“We found how little we know about the people around us. We started asking around, ‘What are the needs of the community?”‘ said the church’s pastor and founder Jim Semradek. “When you present that need to people, they’re very responsive. People have very generous hearts.”

Read it all.

In what is believed to be a “first” in the modern era, two former Anglican priests, father and son, have become Roman Catholics and are now both serving as Catholic priests in the UK.

And in a further ecclesiastical twist, Father Dominic Cosslett, 36, and his father, Father Ron Cosslett, 70, are both serving in the same archdiocese under the leadership of Archbishop Vincent Nichols in Birmingham, the favourite to succeed Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor as Archbishop of Westminster when he steps down early next year.

Read it all.

There are five linked documents to ponder–read them all.

The General Synod will have its first opportunity to consider draft legislation enabling women to become bishops in the Church of England in February, having given in principle agreement to the shape of the legislative package in July. The Legislative Drafting Group on Women in the Episcopate, chaired by the Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, Bishop of Manchester, has today published its further report and drafts of a Measure and associated Amending Canon, together with an illustrative draft Code of Practice and an Explanatory Memorandum.

“We have published our further report at the earliest opportunity to give everyone the chance to study it before debate. We finished our discussions only just before Christmas,” said the Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, Bishop of Manchester.

Read it all.

The Church of England has reached an historic agreement on the consecration of women bishops.

After years of struggle to avoid schism, bishops have agreed a formula that enshrines the principle of equality for male and female bishops while appeasing opponents of women’s ordination. The first women bishops could take their place in the Church of England within three years.

The deal, published in a new report yesterday, provides for a class of “complementary” traditionalist bishop for parishes that refuse to accept a woman diocesan bishop. Such “flying” bishops would have to abide by the authority of the woman bishop, according to the accompanying code of practice.

Read it all.

One of the lessons of the present turmoil is the recognition of our interdependence upon each other. It is a lesson that is at odds with the mindset of speculative profiteering, but it is a lesson that bears repeating in times of crisis.

Am I my brother’s keeper? Yes I am. The impact of what happens with a sub-prime mortgage in America has an impact upon my brother employed in Newcastle working for Northern Rock.

Am I my brother’s keeper? Yes I am when speculation leads to mergers, with redundancies for thousands of my brothers and sisters.

Am I my brother’s keeper? Yes I am, because the systemic risk of allowing a bank to fail makes sense only when it is translated into the thousands of individual stories of hardship that flow from its collapse.

Read it all.

9. Half of all retail stores
Many retail stores are obsolete and will be replaced by online competitors. Entire malls will become ghost towns. By this time next year, most video game stores, book stores and toy stores — as well as many other categories — will simply vanish. Amazon.com will grow and grow.

10. Satellite radio
I’m sorry, Howard Stern. It’s over. The newly merged Sirius XM Radio simply cannot sustain its losses. The company is already deeply in debt and would need to dramatically increase subscribers over the next six months in order to meet its debt obligations. Unfortunately, new car sales, where a huge percentage of satellite radios are sold, are in the gutter and stand-alone subscriptions are way down.

Read it all.

Too many people don’t get the proper treatment. Every day, as I drive in Los Angeles, I see people who need help and aren’t getting it.

Partly this is because of the costs and limitations of healthcare. I once gave a talk to a self-help group in Pasadena, and was approached afterward by a recent high school graduate who had been kicked out of his house by his parents. He was living with his grandmother, who told me that he had exhausted the number of therapy sessions his insurance allowed. She didn’t know how he could get affordable help in the future.

Other people are too sick to know they need help. It’s hard to know how much of the region’s homelessness problem is because of mental illness. But a 2007 count of the homeless by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority found that of the county’s 68,608 residents identified as homeless in the study, 52% suffered from depression and 31% reported experiencing more serious mental illnesses.

Many mentally ill people living on the streets have refused treatment. I understand this. When I was on my trek, if a doctor had come up to me, I would have been terrified that he was going to harm or even kill me.

It is much better to encourage, rather than force, the mentally ill to get treatment. But what if they don’t respond?

A long time ago in a land far away I served a chaplaincy internship at the second largest VA hosptial in the country. A number of the patients on the floors I worked on were like this man. These are troubling questions, but they have to be faced. Read it all–KSH.

For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument — that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. — very seriously. Now he’s found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he’s been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. “It’s a record,” says Prof. Panarin. “But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger.”

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it’s his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis.

Read it all from the front page of this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

If you believe that Scripture, or Scripture and the institutional Church, is the Authority for deciding questions of meaning and morality, then you are far more likely to fall on the traditionalist side of these questions. If you believe that individual conscience is the Authority, then you are likely to be a progressive.

I don’t see how the two can be reconciled, unless it is agreed by a majority that the church in question doesn’t really stand for anything beyond itself. If you really do believe that Scripture and Tradition are wrong about same-sex relationships, and that it is a matter of basic justice that the teaching be changed, then you aren’t going to stop fighting for that change within the church. If you believe that we are not free to throw off the authority of Scripture (and Tradition) in such matters, then to have your church declare these matters open to negotiation would be to hollow out the meaning of what the church is supposed to stand for, all for the sake of a superficial unity.

Read it all.

…the game now is going to change from now on. The object has shifted from trying to reform the old Communion (by supplanting the liberals in the US) to forming a new one. Rowan’s task in the year ahead will thus change, too, from trying to hold together two disputatious groups in the same Church to trying to hold together two Churches. It can’t be done, especially now that he has lost the respect of the conservatives.

So, schism in 2009? It certainly looks like it, and then the numbers belonging to each side start to matter. The conservatives in the US are in a clear minority, but when allied to the millions of Anglicans in, say, Nigeria or Uganda, they become a force to reckon with, however much the liberals would like us to ignore them.

There are many things to like in this piece, but it is significantly marred by the fact that he gets wrong what happened in 2006 at the General Convention. There was no agreement on the bishops matter in the terms requested, and on blessings what was requested was clearly not agreed to. Since the Convention, there has been an increase in same sex blessings against the teaching and practice of the Anglican Communion. So it is simply nonsense to talk of a moratorium being lifted which doesn’t exist in practice throughout various parts of TEC. In any event, read it all–KSH.

An Episcopal church vacated by its congregation in a theological dispute has been put on sale by the Jacksonville-based Diocese of Florida.

Bishop Samuel Johnson Howard said he hopes the 5.3-acre All Souls Episcopal campus in Mandarin will become the eventual home of a ministry or school instead of being sold for the current $2.8 million asking price.

Read it all.