In case you haven’t noticed, the U.S. economy today is actually being hit by two tsunamis at once: The Great Recession and the Great Inflection.

The Great Inflection is the mass diffusion of low-cost, high-powered innovation technologies ”” from hand-held computers to Web sites that offer any imaginable service ”” plus cheap connectivity. They are transforming how business is done. The Great Recession you know.

The “good news” is that the Great Recession is forcing companies to take advantage of the Great Inflection faster than ever, making them more innovative. The bad news is that credit markets and bank lending are still constricted, so many companies can’t fully exploit their productivity gains and spin off the new jobs we desperately need.

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Pakistani authorities on Saturday were searching for an insurgent figure believed to have aided five Northern Virginia men who allegedly tried to join al-Qaeda, saying the case could help unravel a growing network of terrorist recruiters who scour the Internet for radicalized young men.

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With a sputtering economy and widespread budget crises, many states have decided that reducing their prison populations is a good way to save money.

Illinois is one of the latest examples. Under its new early release program, as many as 1,000 nonviolent offenders will be able to finish their sentences at home or at other locations approved by prison officials.

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Mark Ingram dabbed his eyes, took a deep breath and tried to steady himself. All set, he accepted the Heisman that completes Alabama’s trophy case.

The tough-running tailback turned tearful after winning the Heisman Trophy on Saturday night in the closest vote in the award’s 75-year history. Next, he’ll try to lead the most storied program in the South to a national championship.

Ingram finished 28 points ahead of Stanford running back Toby Gerhart.

The sturdy, 212-pound Ingram took a moment to get composed before starting his speech. Dressed in a dark suit with blue pinstripes, his voice wavered throughout.

“I’m a little overwhelmed right now,” he said. “I’m just so excited to bring Alabama their first Heisman winner.”

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A Minnesota rector with Deep South roots was elected Saturday the eighth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina.

The Rev. W. Andrew Waldo, pastor of Trinity Episcopal Church in Excelsior, Minn., emerged as the winner on the third ballot, defeating five other candidates. Among the six vying for the post were three South Carolinians, including the dean of Columbia’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, the Very Rev. Philip C. Linder.

“I’m so happy to be returning to the South, and coming to South Carolina,” Waldo said by telephone from his Shorewood, Minn., home. He said his first task will be to learn about the diocese in all its joys and struggles.

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The United States has begun talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting military use of cyberspace.

American and Russian officials have different interpretations of the talks so far, but the mere fact that the United States is participating represents a significant policy shift after years of rejecting Russia’s overtures. Officials familiar with the talks said the Obama administration realized that more nations were developing cyberweapons and that a new approach was needed to blunt an international arms race.

In the last two years, Internet-based attacks on government and corporate computer systems have multiplied to thousands a day. Hackers, usually never identified, have compromised Pentagon computers, stolen industrial secrets and temporarily jammed government and corporate Web sites. President Obama ordered a review of the nation’s Internet security in February and is preparing to name an official to coordinate national policy.

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December 12, 2009

The Rev. W. Andrew Waldo elected eighth bishop of Upper South Carolina

The Rev. W. Andrew Waldo was elected eighth bishop of Upper South Carolina by the 87th Diocesan Convention meeting today at Trinity Cathedral, Columbia. Fr. Waldo was elected on the third ballot.

The Rev. W. Andrew Waldo has been rector of Trinity Church, Excelsior, Minnesota, since 1994. He was born in Douglas, Georgia, and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, the second of six children in an Episcopal clergy family. He received his M.Div. from Sewanee, M. Mus. from the New England Conservatory of Music, and B.A. from Whittier College, and is a graduate of Indian Springs Preparatory School, Helena, Alabama.

Previous clergy positions include curate, Grace Church, Manchester, New Hampshire and rector, St. Mark’s, LaGrange, Georgia. He currently serves on the Minnesota Diocesan Council and Constitution and Canons Committee. His previous service includes Standing Committee, Liturgy and Music Commissions (Minnesota, Atlanta, and New Hampshire), and Diocesan Board of Examining Chaplains. He is a member of the Spiritual Faculty of CREDO, a national clergy wellness initiative of the Church Pension Group.

Fr. Waldo is married to a Minnesota native, Mary Halverson Waldo, a musician and teacher. They have three sons: Jonathan (Amber); James; and Benjamin. They reside in Shorewood, Minnesota. His recreational interests include biking, music, history, and model trains.

Bougainvillea shade the pathways at the Cementerio General del Sur, where the mausoleums of statesmen and movie stars stand next to the graves of aristocrats and thousands of commoners. Sculpted lions gaze down from sepulchers. Elegance, not anarchy, once defined this resting place.

No longer.

Now, crypts for once-feared military rulers have been ransacked. Coffins, twisted open with crowbars, lie strewn under samán trees. Cages with padlocked gates surround the burial sites of some families, as if that might protect them from a disturbing reality: not even Caracas’s city of the dead is safe.

Accompanying Venezuela’s soaring levels of murders and kidnappings, its cemeteries are the setting for a new kind of crime wave. Grave robbers are looting them for human bones, answering demand from some practitioners of a fast-growing transplanted Cuban religion called Palo that uses the bones in its ceremonies.

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Democrats plan to allow the government’s debt to swell by nearly $2 trillion as part of a bill next week to pay for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The amount pretty much equals the total of a year-end spending spree by lawmakers and is big enough to ensure that Congress doesn’t have to vote again on going further into debt until after the 2010 elections.

The move has anxious moderate Democrats maneuvering to win new deficit-cutting tools as the price for their votes, igniting battles between the House and the Senate and with powerful interest groups on both the right and the left.

The record increase in the so-called debt limit – the legal cap on the amount of money the government can borrow – is likely to be in the neighborhood of $1.8 trillion to $1.9 trillion, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Friday.

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Tim Fountain has a comment also:

Episcopalians are embracing stasis – which in a declining denomination means decline. Folks who mouth revisionist slogans and whose congregations have declined keep being elevated to diocesan leadership, while people like them take their place at the congregational level. This means death by attrition given every current membership and participation marker of the denomination: Episcopalians are older than the U.S. church average, and there is no growth by birth, evangelism or transmission from parents to kids.

This comment from Deacon Tim is of interest as well:

The problem with this entire process has been our (the people of this Diocese) inability to get our minds wrapped around who these candidates are. As a result, opinions are being formed based on what people have written in the past or upon what they said in two minute responses to questions from delegates and interested members. We have had virtually no real interaction with these candidates in the form of thoughtful, nuanced and well-articulated dialogue. Which is a pity, really, since we are going to live with one of them for a very long time.

To that end, Pope Benedict XVI is setting up Personal Ordinariates across the world. Fr. Phillips says an ordinariate resembles a diocese, and will provide a system where incoming Anglican priests can retain their priestly duties and their families, for those who have one.

And the pope has indicated he’ll use San Antonio’s Anglican-rite parish as the model for the rest of the English-speaking ordinariates to follow.

“The pope’s simply saying, ”˜Look, this place is good, I’m going to give a place in the Church where it can thrive,’” Fr. Phillips said.

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“I would guess that the papal announcement had some impact on the way some people thought and voted on the committee,” concedes Dr Williams. “But actually I don’t think it is a solution. A great many Anglo-Catholics have good reason for not being Roman Catholics. They don’t believe the Pope is infallible. And that’s why they’re still pressing for a solution in Anglican terms, rather than what many of them see as a theologically rather eccentric option on the Roman side.”

Significantly, he still wants formal protection in the Anglican Church for those who can’t accept women priests. I put it to him that ordained women believe that idea has been thrown out. “Well, we’ll see,” he responds. “We’re still halfway through our process.” But whatever the differences with Rome, Dr Williams was anxious to stress that a third round of ecumenical talks, the “Arcic” initiative, for next year was nailed down in Rome. He calls that a “small miracle”.

“I think reports of the death of Arcic have been much exaggerated,” says Dr Williams with a rare laugh. “There are a lot of Roman Catholics who want a chance to talk. They need an ecumenical forum to do that.”

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Discontented Anglicans who convert must not become a “sect” within the Roman Catholic Church, a senior Catholic clergyman dealing with church unity has warned.

Anglicans who object to plans for women bishops are considering the Vatican’s invitation to become part of a special section – an “ordinariate” – within the church in England and Wales.

Monsignor Andrew Faley, Assistant General Secretary of the English and Welsh Catholic bishops’ conference, told the BBC News website that ordinariate members would be expected to co-operate with their local bishop and the life of their local Catholic parish.

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Towering eight stories over wheat fields, the Golden Lamp Church was built to serve nearly 50,000 worshippers in the gritty heart of China’s coal country.

But that was before hundreds of police and hired thugs descended on the mega-church, smashing doors and windows, seizing Bibles and sending dozens of worshippers to hospitals with serious injuries, members and activists say

Today, the church’s co-pastors are in jail. The gates to the church complex in the northern province of Shanxi are locked and a police armored personnel vehicle sits outside.

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In the space of a week, Mary Glasspool has gone from being an obscure priest in Baltimore to the emblem of a growing international tempest over gay bishops in the Episcopal Church.

The lesbian priest with salt-and-pepper hair — one of two newly elected suffragan, or assistant, bishops in Los Angeles — has become a potent symbol of hope for gays in the national church but a portent of doom for traditionalists worried about their denomination unraveling.

Ask Glasspool, 55, about her central role in the turbulence that has drawn the disapproving eye of the archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the global Anglican Communion, and she offers a lament: The struggle for gay rights in the church has never been her primary mission, she says, even as she speaks proudly of her 22-year relationship with her partner, social worker Becki Sander.

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Find them here and please join me in praying for the election.

Update: here is the proposed schedule

Reconvening for the Election of the 8th Bishop of Upper South Carolina
December 12, 2009
Averyt Hall, Trinity Center for Mission and Ministry
Host ”“ Trinity Cathedral, Columbia
9:00 am Registration
10:00 am

Mission and Ministry ”“ Session I
Check in for registered delegates closes for the 1st ballot
The Holy Eucharist
The First Ballot
Check in for registered delegates reopens after the 1st ballot is closed.
Continuing prayers, meditations, hymn singing
Check in for registered delegates closes for the 2nd ballot
Results of the 1st Ballot announced
The Second Ballot
Check in for registered delegates reopens after the 2nd ballot is closed.
Continuing prayers, meditations, hymn singing

The process continues until there is an election.
12:30 pm Lunch
The Next Ballot
Check in for registered delegates reopens after the next ballot is closed.
Continuing prayers, meditations, hymn sing

The process continues until there is an election.
The Song of Praise
Concluding Prayers
The Blessing
The Dismissal
All delegates proceed to check-in tables to sign the testimonial of election.

From here:

Statement of the Holy See

Mr. Moderator,

Thank you for convening this panel discussion and for providing the opportunity to hear some very serious concerns raised this afternoon. My comments are more in the form of a statement rather than a question.

As stated during the debate of the General Assembly last year, the Holy See continues to oppose all grave violations of human rights against homosexual persons, such as the use of the death penalty, torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. The Holy See also opposes all forms of violence and unjust discrimination against homosexual persons, including discriminatory penal legislation which undermines the inherent dignity of the human person.

As raised by some of the panelists today, the murder and abuse of homosexual persons are to be confronted on all levels, especially when such violence is perpetrated by the State. While the Holy See’s position on the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity remains well known, we continue to call on all States and individuals to respect the rights of all persons and to work to promote their inherent dignity and worth.

Thank you, Mr. Moderator.

The president of the U.S. bishops’ conference is calling the Senate’s move to table an amendment that would prevent federal money from funding abortion “a serious blow” to health care reform.

Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago, said this today after the Senate voted 54-45 on Monday to kill the Nelson-Hatch-Casey Amendment proposed by senators Ben Nelson, Orrin Hatch and Robert Casey.

A similar measure was passed in the House of Representatives, paving the way for the passage there of the “Affordable Health Care for America Act.”

“The Senate is ignoring the promise made by President Obama and the will of the American people in failing to incorporate longstanding prohibitions on federal funding for abortion and plans that include abortion,” Cardinal George said.

“While we deplore the Senate’s refusal to adopt the Nelson-Hatch-Casey amendment, we remain hopeful that the protections overwhelmingly passed by the House will be incorporated into needed reform legislation,” he added. “Failure to exclude abortion funding will turn allies into adversaries and require us and others to oppose this bill because it abandons both principle and precedent.”

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About 400 Episcopal clergy and lay delegates will come to Columbia on Saturday to elect a bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina.

The election to find a successor to retiring Bishop Dorsey F. Henderson Jr. comes at a time when the U.S. church and the worldwide Anglican Communion are roiled in controversy over the role of gay and lesbian clergy.

Six candidates are on the ballot, including the dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Columbia, the Very Rev. Philip C. Linder. He had removed his name from consideration, shortly before nine candidates were winnowed to five, but agreed to resubmit it after a petition drive.

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Jenny Sanford made it clear Friday: She isn’t standing by her man.

Stung by a cheating husband, South Carolina’s first lady filed for divorce on grounds of adultery because of Gov. Mark Sanford’s affair with his Argentine mistress.

Friends, political observers and media experts said the move separates Jenny Sanford, a former Wall Street vice president, from a string of other jilted political wives because she opted to dissolve a 20-year marriage.

“She impeached him when the Legislature wouldn’t,” veteran University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said of the Sanford scandal.

“In the future you will have people asking whether the wronged spouses will follow the Hillary Clinton example, or the Jenny Sanford example.”

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So where does the Anglican Communion go from here? The Archbishop of Canterbury’s relatively mild reaction to Mary Glasspool’s election is a recognition that this appointment could still be halted if the bishops and dioceses of The Episcopal Church fail to confirm her election. However, it remains a highly unlikely prospect.

The problem that the Archbishop of Canterbury faces is that the Anglican Communion will continue to fragment. The Covenant which he believes is a centre of unity around which the vast majority of provinces can coalesce is not even yet in its final form. Such is the polarisation of the Church of England, as a result of the Anglican Communion crisis, that there is now no guarantee that it can pass in the General Synod let alone in other more liberal western provinces.

It seems likely that any Anglican future worth having will be radically different from the current shape of things. The so-called instruments and international meetings will become largely a thing of the past, replaced by networks, regional conferences and some tangential relationships to the Canterbury primate. It is a fragmented and difficult future, but one preferable to a constant state of hysteria and schism.

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The word “evangelical,” as the bishop notes, is in danger of being lost to us because of its almost daily use in the media to denote fundamentalists and others on the Christian Right who insist on “born-again” experiences as the hallmark of the true believer. These Christians are typically identified with three issues above all others””abortion, same-sex marriage, stem-cell research””and vote Republican in overwhelming numbers.

The word is also used within the historic Protestant (mainline) denominations to identify parties within the church, usually in a political context with regard to hotly debated issues such as same-sex marriage. Rarely are the deeper theological issues addressed or even acknowledged. Part of the frustration of being evangelical in the Episcopal Church today is the near-impossibility of getting a discussion going about foundational issues””Christology, Scriptural interpretation, the doctrine of revelation, the divine agency. The last is the most important of all, as F. F. Bruce clearly outlines in the quotation above, which is taken from a 1989 interview with W. Ward Gasque, a professor at Regent College.

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Generations of Sunday school teachers have turned Hanukkah into the story of unified Jewish bravery against an anti-Semitic Hellenic empire. Settlers in the West Bank tell it as a story of how the Jewish hard-core defeated the corrupt, assimilated Jewish masses. Rabbis later added the lamp miracle to give God at least a bit part in the proceedings.

But there is no erasing the complex ironies of the events, the way progress, heroism and brutality weave through all sides. The Maccabees heroically preserved the Jewish faith. But there is no honest way to tell their story as a self-congratulatory morality tale. The lesson of Hanukkah is that even the struggles that saved a people are dappled with tragic irony, complexity and unattractive choices.

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To a Catholic boy like Tim Dolan, growing up in the heartland when Protestant neighbors still made casual jokes about the “papists” next door, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen rode into town in the 1950s on the new main street of the United States, the television set, like a true-blue American hero.

“He showed the broad American public that the truths of our faith were consonant with the highest values of the society: patriotism, God, family and the struggle against Communism,” said that boy, now known as Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York.

Archbishop Dolan led a memorial Mass on Wednesday evening at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Bishop Sheen. An auxiliary bishop of the New York Archdiocese from 1951 to 1965, the man whom the Rev. Billy Graham called “the greatest communicator of the 20th century” is buried in a crypt under the cathedral altar, which was open for public viewing before the Mass.

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Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellphone, recalled testifying before a Michigan state commission about the risks of talking on a phone while driving.

Common sense, said Mr. Cooper, a Motorola engineer, dictated that drivers keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel.

Commission members asked Mr. Cooper what could be done about risks posed by these early mobile phones.

“There should be a lock on the dial,” he said he had testified, “so that you couldn’t dial while driving.”

It was the early 1960s.

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Guests:

Rt. Rev J. Jon Bruno, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles

Rev. Canon Mary D. Glasspool, Suffragan bisop-elect, Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles

Rev. Canon Diane M. Jardine Bruce, Suffragan bishop-elect, Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles

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There has been new controversy across the worldwide Anglican Communion since the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles elected Rev. Mary Glasspool, a lesbian, as assistant bishop. If her election is confirmed by a majority of dioceses within the Episcopal Church, she would become the second openly gay bishop in the denomination, which has been wracked with division over homosexuality. The Episcopal Church is the US branch of the 77-million-member Anglican Communion. In July 2009, the Episcopal General Convention overwhelmingly approved a measure affirming that gays and lesbians are eligible to become bishops.

After the vote, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton asked Los Angeles Episcopal Bishop Jon Bruno how he would explain the vote to Anglicans around the world who oppose gay bishops, and what message he hoped it would send to gays and lesbians.

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The main objection to a Tobin tax, however, is that it will not work. Taxes that do not work are worse than a waste of time. They have a cost, if only by diverting the energies of public servants into impracticable byways and clever bankers into tax avoidance schemes, with no compensating benefit in financial stability. The tax will not work because it is impossible to administer. Traders in, say, London could evade it by booking the transaction in other financial centres that are not covered by the tax. To be effective, the tax would have to be implemented globally.

That is unlikely but not impossible. Perhaps the catastrophic experience of the credit crisis might create agreement among governments. Perhaps all the main financial centres would sign up to the tax. But that still leaves the offshore financial centres. It is difficult to see what possible incentive they would have to implement a tax when it would plainly be in their financial interest to attract business from international banks.

Bad taxes can have far-reaching consequences. One of the reasons that London is so prominent a financial centre dates back to US regulations adopted in the 1960s that limited the amount of interest that banks could pay on deposits. US banks moved to London to get round them, and the huge eurobond market developed as a result.

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A so-called “Tobin Tax” has been pushed by France and the UK, but is less popular in the US.

The leaders called on the IMF to look at a range of options to ensure that banks do not take excessive risks that could lead to another financial crisis.

The call comes in a draft statement expected to be approved later.

“The European Council emphasises the importance of renewing the economic and social contract between financial institutions and the society they serve, and of ensuring that the public benefits in good times and is protected from risk,” the draft statement said.

Speaking at a conference in Brussels, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: “We need a better relationship between the banks and the people they serve.

“There has been a growth in support in recent weeks for this idea and many, many countries are looking at it.”

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