Although later perceived as a “church in socialism”, it was a Church in opposition which understood itself as a fellowship of the Crucified, thus echoing Bonhoeffer’s words in The Cost of Discipleship: “Every call of Christ leads to death.” A key text for them was Bonhoeffer’s influential book Life Together, first published in 1939 and greatly influenced by his time at the Anglican Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in West Yorkshire.

What the Church achieved in East Germany before 1989 cannot be underestimated. Great sacrifices had to be made. There was no room for cheap grace; it was sacrifice lived as well as believed in. It was their network of contacts, which enabled them as a minority church to survive against a background of discrimination that was not always subtle. The University Church in Leipzig, for instance, had been pulled down by the communists and a bust of Karl Marx placed where the altar was.

However, during the 40 years of the German Democratic Republic the churches provided the forum where people could speak freely and democracy be exercised. Their strong pacifist emphasis was particularly inspired by the vision of Isaiah of turning swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.

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White House budget director Peter Orszag has his hands full these days trying to wrangle down a deficit that has ballooned to an estimated $1.4 trillion. Part of that borrowing was necessitated by the recession, while part of it was designed to shorten the economic crisis.

Orszag says the federal deficit needs to be cut to about 3 percent of economic growth in the coming years to reduce the sea of debt. At the same time, the U.S. has to guard against sending the economy into a tailspin by pulling back too soon on stimulus programs.

Striking a balance is “extraordinarily challenging,” Orszag tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep….

Orszag makes no apologies for not projecting a balanced budget anytime in the near-term: “You have to remember the situation that we inherited.”

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Speaking in support of new initiatives on Tuesday, Steven Berg of the National Alliance to End Homelessness said the problem shouldn’t be viewed as inevitable.

“We know a great deal about the pathways into homelessness,” he said in testimony to Congress, and also about “the interventions and program models which are effective in offering reconnection to community, and stable housing.”

Prevention efforts may be especially important for Americans who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, experts say, because the likelihood of vets being homeless is greatest about seven years after they leave military service.

Bills under review in Congress include a range of measures, such as 60,000 new housing vouchers from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), targeted at the number of vets estimated to be chronically homeless due to problems such as mental illness. Other provisions would target new money toward community or faith-based groups to provide support for homeless vets. One bill focuses especially on support for vets who are single parents.

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We ask for blessings on all those who have served their country in the armed forces.
We ask for healing for the veterans who have been wounded, in body and soul, in conflicts around the globe.
We pray especially for the young men and women, in the thousands, who are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with injured bodies and traumatized spirits.
Bring solace to them, O Lord; may we pray for them when they cannot pray.
We ask, echoing John Paul II, for an end to wars and the dawning of a new era of peace,
As a way to honor all the veterans of past wars.

Have mercy on all our veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan
Bring peace to their hearts and peace to the regions they fought in.
Bless all the soldiers who served in non-combative posts;
May their calling to service continue in their lives in many positive ways.

Give us all the creative vision to see a world which, grown weary with fighting,
Moves to affirming the life of every human being and so moves beyond war.
Hear our prayer, O Prince of Peace, hear our prayer.

(Thanks to the Springfield Franciscans)

Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy, the charismatic military chaplain universally known as ‘Woodbine Willie’, was one of those who tried to make sense of this. What he wrote can still shock and challenge in deep ways. One of his meditations on ‘God and Prayer’ begins by evoking a scene in the trenches: ‘I wish that chap would chuck his praying. It turns me sick. I’d much rather he swore like the sergeant.’ So is prayer useless? Is God truly absent and powerless? Studdert-Kennedy simply answers that prayer won’t save us from suffering any more than it saved Christ from his cross. But it is the only thing that makes us able to fight against evil in the only way that will actually transform the situation as Christ did ”“ by selfless compassion, with all the risk that carries.

In all his work, in his sermons, his meditations, his astonishing poems, so many of them cast in the voice of the ordinary soldier in the trenches, full of protest and apparent blasphemy, Studdert-Kennedy argues against the bland problem-solving God. His commitment is to the God who is discovered in the heart of your own endurance and pain ”“ not a solution, not a Father Christmas or a fairy godmother, but simply the one who holds your deepest self and makes it possible for you to look out on the world without loathing and despair.

Shocking and stark as it was, the way Studdert-Kennedy talked and wrote was pretty well the only religious response that was at all credible to those who were living through the daily nightmare.

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A handful of students in Rochester, New York, may well be prototypical of one way the church will train Episcopalians for ministry in the future. “We’re going to have to have some alternative delivery systems,” said Diocese of Atlanta Bishop Neil Alexander, who heads the House of Bishops Task Force on Theological Education.

Given changing enrollments and challenged finances, alternatives already in place involve distance learning and partnerships among the 11 Episcopal Church-affiliated seminaries and with other theological institutions.

For instance, four people ”“ and a few others “who are dipping their toes into the water” ”“ are enrolled in the new Certificate of Anglican Studies Program at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School (CRDS), said the Rev. Denise Yarborough, program director. They eventually will receive master of divinity degrees from the school, but their certificates in Anglican studies will come from the program run jointly with General Theological Seminary (GTS), the Episcopal Church-affiliated seminary downstate, and the Diocese of Rochester. Funding for the program comes largely from the diocese, which saw the need for continued access to local theological education when Bexley Hall, another Episcopal Church-affiliated seminary, decided in March 2008 to close its satellite campus in Rochester.

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Anthony T. Kronman, former dean of the Law School at Yale, makes a laudable attempt to revive this Great Conversation approach in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Kronman’s focus is on the humanities, and his appraisal is blunt: humanities professors in our finest colleges and universities have collectively blown it, cowering in the face of the German “research ideal”:

This damage was not the result of an attack from without. It was not caused by barbarians crashing the gates. It was a self-destructive response to the crisis of authority that teachers of the humanities brought down on their own heads when they embraced the research ideal and the values associated with it.

According to Kronman, the Academy is a mess, elevating what Max Weber dubbed the “Vocation of Scholarship” as the measure of all things. From graduate interns through veteran professors, specialized research has long since eclipsed the importance of teaching. Tenure and rank promotion are tied closely to peer-refereed publications in discipline-specific fields. While Kronman acknowledges great gains in the hard sciences, and much new knowledge in the humanities as well, he contends that the perennial questions of the human condition are relegated to the periphery in the university today. He supports this indictment with twenty pages of anecdotes.

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Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.

“The questions of life’s origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration,” said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.

Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results Tuesday of a five-day conference that gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology ”” the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos.

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Update: More here.

A Christian license plate in South Carolina has been ruled unconstitutional by a federal district court. The license plate showed a cross, stained glass window and the words “I Believe.”

The ruling overturned the state law known as the “I Believe” Act which gave the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) authority to issue the license plate.

U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie held that “such a law amounts to state endorsement not only of religion in general, but of a specific sect in particular.”

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Even as they agreed to postpone a planned face-to-face meeting that had been set for Thursday, Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas J. Tobin turned up the heat Monday on U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy over his “rejection” of church teaching on abortion, calling on him to enter into a process of conversion and repentance.

In a letter to Kennedy posted Monday on the Web site of the Diocese of Providence’s weekly newspaper, the bishop disputes Kennedy’s assertion that his disagreement with the hierarchy “on some issues” including abortion did not make him any less of a Catholic.

“Well, in fact, Congressman, in a way it does,” the bishop said in a letter issued just two days after Kennedy was among a group of minority lawmakers who attempted to block tough new restrictions on abortion that were added Saturday to the House’s health-care reform legislation.

“Although I wouldn’t chose those particular words, when someone rejects the teachings of the Church, especially on a grave matter, a life-and-death issue like abortion, it certainly does diminish their ecclesial communion,” the bishop declared.

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Media experts will join bishops from across Europe to tell them how best to communicate the Catholic Church’s message in the 21st century.

Steeped in history, the Church often struggles to explain its outlook and Pope Benedict XVI has in recent months been mired in controversy over remarks about the role condoms can play in halting the spread of Aids and his decision to rehabilitate a Holocaust-denying British bishop.

During a four-day conference which starts on Thursday, representatives from the social network Facebook, the search engine Google, the YouTube video sharing website and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia will explain the importance of “new media” in the lives of young people.

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Gay Episcopalians in central and southern Ohio can have their relationships blessed in church starting on Easter next year.

Bishop Thomas E. Breidenthal announced at the annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio on Friday that he would lift the prohibition on blessing same-sex unions.

The diocese includes Columbus and the lower half of the state, a territory of about 25,000 Episcopalians in more than 80 churches.

To allay the fears of some conservatives, Breidenthal added that no priest will be required to perform a same-sex blessing.

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[After the Fort Hood shooting eruption] a shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan ”” before the real evidence was in ”” of his responsibility. He didn’t have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

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Gunmen shoot a priest and two seminary students in the back. Federal police storm a Mass to capture a suspected drug kingpin. Priests pray with the families of murdered men, then face killers in the confessional.

Mexico’s Roman Catholic clergy, increasingly caught in the middle of the nation’s drug war, are meeting this week to draft a strategy for coping with the violence, aided by advice from colleagues who faced similar threats in Colombia and Italy.

“We have become hostages in these violent confrontations between the drug cartels living among us,” said Archbishop Felipe Aguirre, who works in Acapulco, located in Guerrero state where the priest and seminary students were killed in June.

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Comedian Jay Leno has gotten lots of mileage out of exposing general ignorance, including biblical ignorance. He’ll ask passersby a question such as “On the first day of creation, God said, ‘Let there be _____'” and people will respond: “Um, peace!” Or he’ll ask, “Who were Cain and Abel?” and get the answer: “Friends of Jesus?”

The Bible is the all-time best-selling book””according to a 2002 Gallup poll, nearly every American (93 percent) owns at least one””yet it seems people know little about it. A Kelton Research survey in 2007 indicated that people know more about what goes into a Big Mac than they know about the Bible and can name members of the Brady Bunch far better than they can name the Ten Commandments. A 1997 Barna survey showed that 12 percent of adults think that Noah’s wife was Joan of Ark, and about half don’t know that the book of Isaiah is in the Old Testament. Yet another poll (by Gallup in 2004) revealed that nearly one in ten teens thinks that Moses was one of the 12 apostles.

Americans are not alone in their ignorance. Earlier this summer, St. John’s University in Durham, England, released its biblical literacy report for the U.K. While 76 percent of respondents said that they owned a Bible, 79 percent couldn’t identify a single accurate fact about Abraham, and 60 percent had no idea what the parable of the Good Samaritan is about.

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What a joy and delight it was to participate in our diocesan convention this past weekend! I can tell you that after 35 years of ordained ministry, having attended annual conventions year after year, both here and in two other dioceses, seldom can they be described as joyful or delightful! Too often they are contentious, boring, and frustrating! But let the record show that this one was indeed very different! It was a great experience, and I think that everyone who attended will agree.

All six resolutions were adopted unanimously and without dissension! Gone were the contentious debates of the past between opposing sides! We spoke with one mind and one voice. Likewise, everyone was in agreement about the need for the proposed amendments to the diocesan Constitution and Canons. We even agreed on the adoption of a budget of over $1,981,000 and parish assessments to support it, without one dissenting vote!

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While authorities of the new church-within-a-church will abide by “the discipline of celibate clergy in the Latin Church, as a rule,” an “ordinary” (a bishop or former Anglican bishop) may also ask the pope for permission to ordain married men “on a case-by-case basis.” This could be a face-saving way to perpetuate the Anglican tradition of a married clergy without saying so, or it could be a warning that married Anglican laymen will be ordained only rarely. Either way, the new Anglican body within Catholicism will not have the autonomy enjoyed by the Eastern Catholic churches.

The more stinging rebuff to Roman Catholic advocates of married priests is this rather mean-spirited provision of a companion document: “Those who have been previously ordained in the Catholic Church and subsequently have become Anglicans, may not exercise sacred ministry in the Ordinariate.” In other words, if you left the Catholic Church and now want to return alongside other Anglican priests, you are treated worse than an Anglican priest who never belonged to the Catholic Church in the first place.

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The mural tells the story of a horrible day back in the spring. Fred was being transferred to a new hospital and Regina needed records of Fred’s many tests and treatments from the old hospital.

“I had gone down to medical records,” [Regina] Holliday says, “and they said, ‘That’ll be 73 cents a page and a 21-day wait.’ I said, ‘My husband is upstairs with Stage IV kidney cancer in your hospital and you’re telling me I have to wait 21 days? Everything’s on the computer. All you got to do is print it out and you’re going to make me wait 21 days?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s just the way it is.’ I was floored.”

This is a must-listen-to piece. If you listen to this and do not understand why Health Care reform is crucial, something is not right..

How much do crooked politicians and others steal every year?

Nobody really knows, of course, but as the BBC reports today, the UN estimates that $1.6 trillion each year is stolen each year and moved across national borders. Tragically, much of this money is stolen from poor countries. It is bread taken out of the mouths of the poor.

Don’t expect this figure to drop any time soon. Led by Russia, China and Iran, a large group of countries are fighting efforts to crack down.

This money is significantly greater than the value of all foreign development aid. It is more than the ten year cost of the health care bill that just passed the House. It would be enough to fund a worldwide basic health system and provide basic primary education to every child on earth. Over the next fifty years it will cost the world much more than climate change.

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President Obama is to ask members of Nato to provide up to 4,000 more troops to help to break the deadlock in Afghanistan.

Mr Obama is poised to confirm a surge of more than 30,000 US combat troops, according to senior military sources. He will also urge the rest of Nato to provide thousands of soldiers to train new recruits to the Afghan National Army (ANA).

His appeal is set to be largely ignored, however. At present only two Nato members have offered more troops ”” Britain and Turkey ”” and no other country is expected to come up with any, according to alliance sources. Such a response would threaten the credibility of the alliance in Afghanistan and represent a considerable snub for Mr Obama, who was viewed as a welcome change after the administration of President Bush.

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Abdi Akgun joined the Marines in August of 2000, fresh out of high school and eager to serve his country. As a Muslim, the attacks of Sept. 11 only steeled his resolve to fight terrorism.

But two years later, when Mr. Akgun was deployed to Iraq with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, the thought of confronting Muslims in battle gave him pause.

He was haunted by the possibility that he might end up killing innocent civilians.

“It’s kind of like the Civil War, where brothers fought each other across the Mason-Dixon line,” Mr. Akgun, 28, of Lindenhurst, N.Y., who returned from Iraq without ever pulling the trigger. “I don’t want to stain my faith, I don’t want to stain my fellow Muslims, and I also don’t want to stain my country’s flag.”

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President Obama suggested Monday that he was not comfortable with abortion restrictions inserted into the House version of major health care legislation, and he prodded Congress to revise them.

“There needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we’re not changing the status quo” on abortion, Mr. Obama said in an interview with ABC News. “And that’s the goal.”

On the one hand, Mr. Obama said, “we’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions.”

On the other hand, he said, he wanted to make sure “we’re not restricting women’s insurance choices,” because he had promised that “if you’re happy and satisfied with the insurance that you have, it’s not going to change.”

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Injecting itself aggressively into the health-care debate, the Roman Catholic Church in America has emerged as a major political force with the potential to upend a key piece of President Barack Obama’s agenda.

Behind-the-scenes lobbying, coupled with a grassroots mobilization of Catholic churches across the country, led the House Saturday to pass an amendment to its health-care bill barring anyone who receives a new tax credit from enrolling in a plan that covers abortion, a once-unthinkable event in Democrat-dominated Washington.

The restriction would still have to be accepted by the Senate, where it will likely face a tough fight. The issue could sink the larger health legislation if the chambers fail to reach agreement, or if any consensus language leads supporters to defect.

The House vote, and the central role played by one of the country’s biggest religious denominations, stunned abortion-rights groups that had worked hard to elect Mr. Obama and expand Democratic congressional majorities. Activists on the left had thought social issues would take a back seat to economic concerns.

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For three decades, a succession of conservative bishops here barred women from being ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church.

But the conservatives went their own way last fall, forming the Anglican Church in North America. And so on Sunday, exactly one year after that schism, Susan Slaughter will become the first woman in the Episcopal Church’s Forth Worth diocese to don a red stole for ordination to the priesthood.

“God works in mysterious ways,” Ms. Slaughter said, “and this is one of those.”

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THE Grahamstown community is reeling in shock at the mystery murder of an Anglican priest who survived a gruesome attack by two men on a countrywide killing spree in 1991.

Clive Newman, 45, a lecturer at the College of the Transfiguration in Grahamstown for the past four years, was found murdered in his room at the college residence yesterday morning.

Newman was attacked in his car in Bluewater Bay 18 years ago. His throat was slit and one of his vocal chords was severed. His testimony helped convict Antonie Wessels, 31, and his 16-year-old homosexual lover, Jean Havenga. Newman was the fourth and final victim of the pair and the only one to survive.

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The Anglican Church of Kenya has created its 31st diocese, raising its Chaplaincy to the Armed Forces to the status of a “Military Episcopate”.

At a service at St Paul’s Garrison Church at the Kahawa army barracks outside Nairobi, the Protestant Suffragan Bishop for the Armed Forces, Colonel the Rt Rev Peter Wanyonyi Simiyu was enthroned as Bishop-in-Ordinary for the Armed Forces.

A former British Army Garrison chapel, St Paul’s will serve as the pro-Cathedral of the new diocese, the ACK reports.

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Members of Congress are putting pressure on U.S. intelligence agencies to say what they knew about Nidal Hassan’s alleged radical views and whether they shared that knowledge with local Army and law enforcement agencies in the weeks and months before the Fort Hood, Texas, shootings.

In response, U.S. investigative officials acknowledged Monday that Hasan, the only suspect in last week’s deadly shootings at Fort Hood came to their attention last December, when they learned he was in contact with an individual “espousing radical views.” Other reports have identified the individual as Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical imam in Yemen who once presided at a mosque in Falls Church, Va., that Hasan attended.

Awlaki, who was released from a jail in Yemen last year, writes a blog that denounces U.S. policies as anti-Muslim. He was a spiritual leader at two mosques where three Sept. 11 hijackers worshiped.

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We need to rededicate ourselves to the work of Christian charity and the Catholic soul of our insti­tutions. Charity is a duty for the whole believing community. But it is also an obligation and privilege for every individual member of the Church, flowing from our personal encounter with the mercy of Jesus Christ.

Government cannot love. It has no soul and no heart. The greatest danger of the modern secularist state is this: In the name of humanity, under the banner of serving human needs and easing human suffering, it ultimately, ironically””and too often tragically”” lacks humanity. As Benedict foresees in his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est:

The state which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person””every person””needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a state that regulates and controls everything, but a state that, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces: She is alive with the love enkindled by the Spirit of Christ. This love does not simply offer people material help, but refreshment and care for their souls, something that often is even more necessary than material support.

In the face of modern critics who would crowd out the Church’s ministry of love, American Catholics must reclaim the vision Benedict speaks of here. We need to insist on the guarantees promised by the founders at the beginning of the American proposition: autonomy and noninterference from civil authorities.

But a more important task also remains. Catholics must come to a new zeal for that proposition, a new faithfulness to their own Catholic identity as they live their citizenship, and a new dedication to renewing the great public philosophy implicit in America’s founding documents.

Read it carefully and read it all.

For a person with old-fashioned values, and an old-fashioned sense of English word meanings, the reports of the Fort Hood massacre were almost as provoking as what happened there. In the larger view of things, they may be more consequential….

Falsehood has more consequences than the revelation of personal insincerity. What happened at Fort Hood was no kind of “tragedy.” It was a criminal act, of the terrorist sort, performed by a man acting upon known Islamist motives. To present the perpetrator himself as a kind of “victim” — a man emotionally distressed by his impending assignment to Afghanistan or Iraq — is to misrepresent the reality.

This man was a professional psychiatrist, assigned to help soldiers cope with traumas. Is this the profile of a man with no control over his own emotions? It appears he had hired a lawyer to get him out of the military before his deployment overseas. Is this consistent with spontaneity?

He reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before opening fire on American soldiers. Would that perhaps offer a little hint of the actual motive? He shot about 40 people, over 10 minutes, with two pistols, neither of them military issue. Might that perhaps suggest premeditation?

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Liberals furious over a last-minute deal that secured passage of healthcare legislation in the House by restricting abortion coverage threatened Monday to derail the massive overhaul bill.

At least 40 House members pledged to reject the final bill if the abortion provision survives in the Senate and the conference that joins the Senate and House versions into a single piece of legislation.

At issue are the insurance policies offered in a new “exchange,” or marketplace, where many people would use federal subsidies to buy coverage.

The House measure bars any insurance policy from covering abortions if it was purchased with a federal subsidy.

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