I think that instead of seeking out new fads and revising liturgies to suit modern tastes, I think we ought to go back and take a good look at those old liturgical books, dogmatic theology books, and Bibles we traded in for shiny glossy hardcovers that talk about a Jesus that doesn’t require you to go to church or be part of a community, or a Jesus who didn’t rise from the dead, or a Gospel that behaves more like secular humanism than God’s direct intervention into human history. It is in these ancient tomes that we will find the key to the way forward. Using our Anglican ingenuity and fortitude and our firm grasp on tradition and innovation, we can forge a way forward that responds to the spiritual hunger of our society and present the Gospel in a way that makes sense.

While I believe that all the outreach we do is important, valuable and are actions that help us to fulfill the Great Commandments, I think we focus too much on the second one and lose focus on the first one. The Great Commandments are: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourselves.”

The second should be an outgrowth of the first. Notice that the Scriptures don’t phrase it as “Love your neighbor as yourself, and love God only if you feel you have to”. We need to love God first, we need to first hand over our whole existence to Him. We can never pretend nor presume that our reasoning or our thoughts on their own are ever perfect because of our innately fallen nature as children of Eve.

I think that it is time that we have a whole General Convention dedicated to doctrine and creating the foundation for our mission work in the world.

I applaud the focus on doctrine and its importance but General Convention, sadly, is not at all conducive to doing theology. Read it all–KSH.

The call for an Anglican Communion Covenant resulted directly from the Windsor Report (sec. 113-120), and the Windsor Report itself was a crisis response document. It is therefore not possible or desirable to evaluate any document that emerges from a drafting process without asking the question: “Will it address the crisis facing the Communion?”

That said, the crisis has also raised issues of the identity and governance of the Anglican Communion that have lain dormant for many decades. From time to time, the Lambeth Conference began to address these issues, but more often than not it punted them further down the field. Now many of us feel that the conflicts and contradictions of Anglican identity and governance must be squarely faced. A covenant could be just the sort of document to do this. Or not.

It is my contention in this essay that the official Anglican Covenant process under the direction of Abp. Drexel Gomez will not be able to produce an adequate document to meet the requirements of the hour. In the two years since the formation of the Covenant Drafting Group in September 2006, a new team has taken the field, the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. Meeting in Jerusalem in June 2008, the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) published a statement of identity ”“ “The Jerusalem Declaration” ”“ and formed a Primates’ Council claiming extraordinary authority to separate from a heterodox Province or to recognize an orthodox Province. It seems likely that this Council will soon recognize a North American Province separate from The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada.

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IT has been a hard year or so for writers. The world seems to grow emptier and emptier, depletion without replenishment, and now with the passing of John Updike at the age of 76, death has taken perhaps its biggest prize.

Literature, of course, is not a contest. Still, that Stockholm did not ultimately embrace Mr. Updike ”” a Nobel, why not? ”” seems too bad, as it probably would have meant a lot to him, and to us as well to have his erudition and hard work and enthusiastic witnessing of postwar America honored on such a stage. The news that he died in a hospice not far from his house, and the new ordinariness of this current manner of death, made me wonder what he would have noticed and written about it ””“I’m sure it will be discovered he was taking notes,” a friend said, hopefully ”” for he was gifted at describing everything.

Mr. Updike’s novels wove an explicit and teeming tapestry of male and female appetites. He noticed astutely, precisely, unnervingly. His stories, some of the best ever written by anyone, were jewels of existential comedy, domestic anguish and restraint.

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A day after President Obama’s special Middle East envoy called for a consolidation of the fragile Gaza cease-fire, the truce came under new strain Thursday when the Israeli military said Palestinians fired a rocket into Israel at dawn and Israel launched an air attack into southern Gaza.

On his first visit to the region in his new role, the envoy, George J. Mitchell, traveled to the West Bank to meet with Palestinian leaders on Thursday after discussions with Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert on Wednesday. In those talks, Mr. Mitchell said, he spoke of “the critical importance” of consolidating the cease-fire that ended Israel’s three-week offensive against Hamas.

As Mr. Mitchell prepared to travel to Ramallah, Israel said it launched an air attack in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis against a “known terrorist” accused by an Israeli military spokesman of being part of a squad responsible for a roadside bombing on Tuesday that killed an Israeli soldier on the Israeli side of the border.

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U.S. government guarantees on securities totaling $419 billion for bank bailouts provide an early test of President Barack Obama’s pledge to be open with taxpayers about what they have at risk in the credit crisis.

Bloomberg News asked the Treasury Department Jan. 26 to disclose what securities it backed over the past two months in a second round of actions to prop up Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. Department spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said Jan. 27 she would seek an answer. None had been provided by the close of business yesterday.

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Update: There is more here also.

The Pope is preparing to offer the Traditonal Anglican Communion, a group of half a million dissident Anglicans, its own personal prelature by Rome, according to reports this morning.

“History may be in the making”, reports The Record. “It appears Rome is on the brink of welcoming close to half a million members of the Traditional Anglican Communion into membership of the Roman Catholic Church. Such a move would be the most historic development in Anglican-Catholic relations in the last 500 years. But it may also be a prelude to a much greater influx of Anglicans waiting on the sidelines, pushed too far by the controversy surrounding the consecration of practising homosexual bishops, women clergy and a host of other issues.”

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At the opening of Poverty and Homelessness Action Week, leaders of Christian churches in Scotland are calling for intensive investment in affordable housing.

The Rt Rev David Lunan, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, together with twelve other church leaders, today endorsed a call from Scottish Churches Housing Action for a return to post-war levels of affordable house-building as a way of avoiding the worst effects of the recession.

The call comes in a paper sent by Scottish Churches Housing Action to First Minister Alex Salmond MSP, Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling MP and other political leaders.

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Living in Las Vegas appeals more to men than women. Affluent adults are twice as likely as poorer folks to want to live in Boston. Young people like big cities such as New York and Los Angeles. More Americans would rather live in a place with more McDonald’s than one with more Starbucks.

Those are some of the findings of a Pew Research Center survey out today on where Americans would most like to live. Whether they favor cities, suburbs or the countryside, almost half wish they lived somewhere else, the report found. City dwellers are more likely to dream of living somewhere else, and men in rural areas are far happier living there than women.

“There are some more fundamental differences between men and women,” says Rich Morin, senior editor of the Pew Research Center survey. “Different cities seem to appeal to different partisan ideological groups. ”¦ People who are drawn to cities are typically younger people.”

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In a swift victory for President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled House approved a historically huge $819 billion stimulus bill Wednesday night, filled with new spending and tax cuts at the core of the young adminstration’s revival plan for the desperately ailing economy. The vote was 244-188.

“We don’t have a moment to spare,” Obama declared at the White House as congressional allies hastened to do his bidding in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The vote sent the bill to the Senate, where debate is expected to begin as early as this week on a companion measure already taking shape. Democratic leaders have pledged to have legislation ready for Obama’s signature by mid-February.

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Officials of Barack Obama’s administration have drafted a letter to Iran from the president aimed at unfreezing US-Iranian relations and opening the way for face-to-face talks, the Guardian has learned.

The US state department has been working on drafts of the letter since Obama was elected on 4 November last year. It is in reply to a lengthy letter of congratulations sent by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on 6 November.

Diplomats said Obama’s letter would be a symbolic gesture to mark a change in tone from the hostile one adopted by the Bush administration, which portrayed Iran as part of an “axis of evil”.

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Complaints of religious discrimination in the workplace are on the rise, but civil rights advocates say that may not be such a bad thing.

That’s because a likely reason for a steady rise in reported incidents has nothing to do with intolerant corporate cultures but rather religious minorities who are more aware of their rights and more willing to exercise them.

“Before, somebody might have prayed kind of quietly at work and hoped nobody would stop them and didn’t really want to ask permission,” says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). “Now they state openly: `Yes, I’d like permission. Is there an open room where I could pray?”‘

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Saying the U.S. Postal Service “is in a severe financial crisis,” Postmaster General John E. Potter is asking Congress to allow him to cut mail delivery from six days to five days a week.

In testimony prepared for a Senate hearing this afternoon, Potter said he needs “flexibility in the number of days we deliver mail.”

“The ability to suspend delivery on the lightest delivery days, for example, could save dollars in both our delivery and our processing and distribution networks, he said. “I do not make this request lightly, but I am forced to consider every option given the severity of our challenge.”

Ugh. Read it all.

Suggesting that the planet will soon reach an irreversible “tipping point” of damage to the climate, former Vice President Al Gore told members of Congress on Wednesday that the United States needs to join international talks on a treaty.

“This treaty must be negotiated this year,” Gore told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

During questioning, he acknowledged that any treaty must include mechanisms to ensure compliance with prospective limits on carbon dioxide emissions, which come primarily from burning fossil fuels for energy.

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Israel’s chief rabbinate severed ties with the Vatican on Wednesday to protest a papal decision to reinstate a bishop who publicly denied 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

The Jewish state’s highest religious authority sent a letter to the Holy See expressing “sorrow and pain” at the papal decision. “It will be very difficult for the chief rabbinate of Israel to continue its dialogue with the Vatican as before,” the letter said. Chief rabbis of both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews were parties to the letter.

The rabbinate, which faxed a copy of the letter to The Associated Press, also canceled a meeting with the Vatican set for March. The rabbinate and the state of Israel have separate ties with the Vatican, and Wednesday’s move does not affect state relations.

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There are 26 bishops in the Lords (the ”˜Lords Spiritual’) who, as well as reading prayers at the start of each day’s meeting, play a full and active role in the life and work of the Upper House. They provide an independent voice, a spiritual insight and a regional perspective in their contributions to the House, which is informed by their work in the dioceses. They regularly speak on a wide range of subjects and are active on committees and in all party groups.

This month in the Lords, the Archbishop of York challenged the Government about lifting the ban on the short selling of shares in the current financial crisis, while the Bishops of Chelmsford and Manchester voiced concerns about the use of violence in and around Gaza and the humanitarian response.

The new website section is designed for those who want to discover more about the bishops’ past and current contributions in the Lords, as well as providing helpful information about the bishops’ present and historic role in the Upper House.

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The economic stimulus plan that Congress has scheduled for a vote on Wednesday would shower the nation’s school districts, child care centers and university campuses with $150 billion in new federal spending, a vast two-year investment that would more than double the Department of Education’s current budget.

The proposed emergency expenditures on nearly every realm of education, including school renovation, special education, Head Start and grants to needy college students, would amount to the largest increase in federal aid since Washington began to spend significantly on education after World War II.

Critics and supporters alike said that by its sheer scope, the measure could profoundly change the federal government’s role in education, which has traditionally been the responsibility of state and local government.

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Christopher Kennedy Lawford’s first book was about his recovery from alcohol and heroin.

Now, Lawford has a new book out, Moments of Clarity: Voices From the Front Lines of Addiction, a compilation of 42 essays by ordinary people and celebrities including Martin Sheen, Susan Cheever, Alec Baldwin and Judy Collins, describing moments that led them to reach out for help.

In it, he describes his own “moment of clarity” on Feb. 17, 1986. He was standing at the windows of a brownstone in Boston and realized his addiction had reached the point of hopelessness.

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The news Wednesday that Israeli warplanes bombed Palestinian supply tunnels running into the Gaza Strip again is more than a predictable hiccup in Israel’s self-declared cease-fire. A Palestinian bomb had killed an Israeli soldier on Tuesday. Israel responded with airstrikes the same day, and followed up Wednesday with air attacks on tunnels in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, on the Egyptian border. There were no reported casualties, but residents fled their homes in panic.

The raid underlines – if any underlining was needed – that any lasting truce is going to hinge on the question of what is allowed into Gaza and how.

Since Israel stopped allowing much except humanitarian supplies into Gaza two years ago, in a bid to undermine the strip’s Hamas rulers, Gazans have depended on a warren of tunnels from Egypt for everything from AK-47s to cheese. If they couldn’t get even legit stuff in through the Israeli-controlled border points, Gaza’s merchants have been bringing it in underground. And Hamas’s rocket builders have been bringing their weapons in that way, too.

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Russia held out an olive branch to President Barack Obama today by suspending plans to deploy missiles in Europe, according to a report in Moscow.

An official from Russia’s General Staff in Moscow told Interfax news that the move had been made because the new United States leadership was reconsidering plans to establish a missile defence shield in eastern Europe.

Deployment of Iskander short-range missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads, was being suspended in Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad in response, the unidentified official said.

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An article that appeared on Episcopal Life Online on January 23, 2009 reported that Bishop Henry Scriven, the former Assistant Bishop for the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, had renounced his orders and that the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, had accepted that renunciation. Although the article may suggest otherwise, the Standing Committee understands that this action was not in any sense a disciplinary action or an action taken because of Bishop Scriven’s support for the attempt to realign the Diocese with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone.

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The Presiding Bishop of the US Episcopal Church has announced that she has deposed a bishop of the Church of England from the ordained ministry.

On Jan 23, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori announced that she had accepted the voluntary renunciation of ministry given to her by the Rt Rev Henry Scriven, Mission Director for South America of the newly merged South American Mission Society (SAMS) ”“ Church Mission Society (CMS) and removed him from the ranks of the ordained ministry.

Under the terms of American Canon law Bishop Scriven is now “released from the obligations of all ministerial offices, and is deprived of the right to exercise the gifts and spiritual authority as a minister of God’s word and sacraments conferred in ordination.”

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Members of Christ Church, Moline, Ill., narrowly defeated a proposal to remain with The Episcopal Church during the annual meeting on Jan. 25. The Rev. Canon Ed den Blauwen, the church’s rector, is president of the standing committee and vicar general of the Diocese of Quincy which voted to join the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone on a temporary basis during the annual synod last fall.

Members voted 80-59 to remain with The Episcopal Church, but failed to achieve the required two-thirds approval the diocese established in order to be released from the diocese. The vestry was divided, but not so bitterly that its members were unable to work together prior to the annual meeting, Canon den Blauwen said.

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Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike ”” who died on Tuesday at 76 ”” was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.

It is as a novelist who opened a big picture window on the American middle class in the second half of the 20th century, however, that he will be best remembered. In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave “the mundane its beautiful due,” as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the 50’s and early 60’s of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns, radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of the 70’s and 80’s, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns and sexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis.

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President Obama is not going to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, crush the Taliban, end Iran’s nuclear intransigence, get Syria to stop interfering in Lebanon or end the fighting in Iraq overnight — or next week, or possibly ever. Yet his interview Tuesday with the Al Arabiya satellite channel laid a foundation for better U.S. relations with the Arab world than we’ve had in many years.

Obama’s savvy diplomacy started before he even opened his mouth, with his selection of Al Arabiya to air the first official television interview he has granted since taking office. Not only did this signal a new level of involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, but it gave a boost to a Saudi-owned news channel founded in 2003 to present a more balanced view of regional conflicts than was being produced by the more Islamist-leaning Al Jazeera network. The latter has since become more objective in its coverage, possibly because it was losing viewers to Al Arabiya. Now it has even more incentive to play fair: the chance of landing the next Obama exclusive.

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The wave of foreclosures, which began in early 2007, was initially triggered by falling home values and resets on adjustable-rate loans. But lenders and industry analysts say the trend is now being exacerbated by rising unemployment, which has shot up to 9.3% in California.

“The people who are defaulting now are not really people who recklessly got into loans they never could have afforded,” said Evan Wagner, the communications director for IndyMac Federal Bank, a big mortgage lender that, having collapsed last year, is being bought by private investors. “These are people who have lost their jobs or who have had their hours cut back at work.”

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The interim leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, seen as a modernizer who could seek a historic reconciliation with the Vatican and more autonomy from the state, was overwhelmingly elected patriarch Tuesday.

Metropolitan Kirill received 508 of the 700 votes cast during an all-day church congress in Moscow’s ornate Christ the Savior Cathedral, the head of the commission responsible for the election, Metropolitan Isidor, said hours after the secret ballot was over.

Kirill defeated a conservative rival, Metropolitan Kliment, who received 169 votes, Isidor said. Another 23 ballots were declared invalid.

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Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to rehabilitate four excommunicated bishops ”” including a Holocaust denier ”” has caused dismay among Jewish leaders. But the move also has shocked many Roman Catholics, who fear it may point to a repudiation of the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

Just days before the pope revoked the excommunication of the four bishops, one of them, Richard Williamson, again denied the Holocaust.

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Loath to criticize a president who enjoys stratospheric approval ratings and the good tidings of most Americans, Republicans on the Hill are instead framing their overwhelming opposition to the stimulus bill as a vote against a congressional Democratic leadership that is far less popular than Obama.

“It’s not so much his effort, it’s what the House has done with this bill, what Pelosi has done with this bill,” explained Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), a veteran member of the Appropriations Committee.

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a young conservative firebrand, was more blunt when asked what happened to Obama’s honeymoon: “Ask Pelosi.”

Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), a senior appropriator, said that “several people” registered complaints to Obama that the GOP had not been consulted in the development of the bills now being marked up in the Finance and Appropriations committees.

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He has written one of the best-selling books in history. But can pastor Rick Warren sell a magazine?

The test starts this week, with the debut of Purpose Driven Connection, a quarterly publication from Reader’s Digest Association to be sold as part of a bundle of multimedia products its backers hope will connect Christians to each other and God. A subscription includes access to a Facebook-like Christian social-media Web site and DVD guides for leading a prayer group.

In some respects, the venture represents a sweet spot for publishers, who often think of their brands not as magazines but as tools to unite a community around a shared interest. The new publication has a headliner with legions of loyal disciples linked by their devotion to a subject far more profound than home furnishings or celebrity gossip.

Yet Mr. Warren and Reader’s Digest, partners in the project, would be hard-pressed to choose a tougher time to launch a magazine.

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