[KIM] LAWTON: Not everyone was happy about all the religion that was tied to the inauguration. A group of atheists launched an ultimately unsuccessful court battle to try and stop the official inaugural prayers. But as a recent poll for RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY found, the majority of all Americans say they believe God has uniquely blessed this nation, and many expect that God should be acknowledged at big national events.

Religious groups sponsored a host of unofficial events this week as well. Prominent black leaders celebrated at the African-American Church Inaugural Ball. Many saw Obama’s election as a direct result of the black church organizing first started by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. VINCENT HARDING (Veterans of Hope Project): There would be no point in trying to really speak to the beauty and the strength and the meaning of Barack’s inauguration without finding some way to speak to the strength and the beauty and the meaning of black religion as it inspired the people who opened the way for Obama.

Read it all.

In a watershed moment for one of the most contentious areas of science and American politics, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared the way for the first-ever human trial of a medical treatment derived from embryonic stem cells.

Geron Corp., a Menlo Park, Calif., biotechnology company, is expected to announce Friday that it received a green light from the agency to mount a study of its stem-cell treatment for spinal cord injuries in up to 10 patients. The announcement caps more than a decade of advances in the company’s labs and comes on the cusp of a widely expected shift in U.S. policy toward support of embryonic stem-cell research after years of official opposition.

Read it all.

NATIONAL and international dis­cussions about church unity have been largely replaced by local action, church leaders say this week. The Archbishop of Canterbury confesses that he “finds echoes” of impatience with national bodies within himself.

Five church leaders ”” Dr Willi­ams, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Dr Martyn Atkins (Meth­odist), the Revd Jonathan Edwards (Baptist), and the Revd Roberta Rominger (United Reformed Church) ”” responded to a set of four questions asked by the editors of the Baptist Times and the Church Times. Their replies are also published in the Methodist Recorder and Reform.

They acknowledge a loss of impetus in national efforts to bring about unity. Dr Atkins talks of “less enthusiasm for unity as an end in itself”; Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor speaks of “a slowing down of progress”, des­pite increased commitment; and Dr Williams says: “You won’t find much interest in what you might call the ”˜negotiating’ side of unity.”

Read it all.

Virginia Episcopal Bishop Peter J. Lee said Friday that he will retire three months early, on Oct. 1, in a bid to save money for his financially-strapped diocese.

“My resignation will occur several months earlier that I had originally anticipated,” he said to 700 Episcopalians gathered at the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia’s annual council at the Reston Hyatt, “but I believe it is an appropriate and necessary response to the realities we face.”

His early resignation will save the diocese $63,000, one-quarter of his salary package that includes housing, travel and other benefits, according to diocesan treasurer Mike Kerr.

Read it all.

Update: A chart of some of the diocese of Virginia Statistics is here.

Check them out.

But the central theme of this year’s convention is a little different.

“Our theme is ‘All Are Welcome’ and we’re passionately committed to being a church where all are welcome,” [Bishop Michael] Curry said.

A portion of the weekend’s convention focuses on proposed resolutions. And this year delegates are tackling a rather controversial subject.

“We’re vested with power by the state of North Carolina to act in the contract of marriage. On the other side as a church and the Episcopal Church, the other thing we do is to bless that union of people,” said Randall Keeney, priest at St. Barnabas church in Greensboro.

But Keeney is proposing a resolution that would encourage clergy to decline to act as agents of the state in the actual legal contracting of civil marriage.

Read it all.

Read it all.

But let us look for a minute at the extent of the loss in perceived wealth that is the main shock to our economic system. If in real terms we assume write-downs of 50% in U.S. equities, 35% in U.S. housing, and 35% to 40%
in commercial real estate, we will have had a total loss of about $20 trillion of perceived wealth from a peak total of about $50 trillion. This relates to a GDP of about $13 trillion, the annual value of all U.S. produced goods and services. These write-downs not only mean that we perceive ourselves as shockingly poorer, they also dramatically increase our real debt ratios. Prudent debt issuance is based on two factors: income and collateral. Like a good old-fashioned mortgage issuer, we want the debt we issue to be no more than 80% of the conservative asset value, and lower would be better. We also want the income of the borrower to be sufficient to pay the interest with a safety margin and, ideally, to be enough to amortize the principal slowly. On this basis, the National Private Asset Base (to coin a phrase) of $50 trillion supported about $25 trillion of private debt, corporate and individual. Given that almost half of us have small or no mortgages, this 50% ratio seems dangerously high. But now the asset values have fallen back to $30 trillion, whereas the debt remains at $25 trillion, give or take the miserly $1 trillion we have written down so far. If we would like the same asset coverage of 50% that we had a year ago, we could support only $15 trillion or so of total debt. The remaining $10 trillion of debt would have been stranded as the tide went out! What is worse is that credit standards have of course tightened, so newly conservative lenders now assume the obvious: that 50% was too high, and that 40% loan to collateral value or even less would be more appropriate. As always, now that it’s raining, bankers want back the umbrellas they lent us.

[And as for our future expectations]….Under the shock of massive deleveraging caused by the equally massive write-down of perceived global wealth, we expect the growth rate of GDP for the whole developed world to continue the slowing trend of the last 12 years as we outlined in April 2008. Since this recent shock overlaps with slowing population growth, it will soon be widely recognized that 2% real growth would be a realistic target for the G7, even after we recover from the current negative growth period. Emerging countries are, of course, a different story. They will probably recover more quickly, and will continue to grow at double (or better) the growth rate of developed countries.

Read the whole sobering analysis.

The White House released new details of an $825 billion economic recovery package on Saturday as President Obama sought to broaden the plan’s appeal a day after stepping squarely into the fractious Congressional debate over the proposal.

In his weekly video address, Mr. Obama argued that the package of spending programs and tax breaks was critical not only to turn around the economy but to rebuild the nation for a new era.

In the address, posted for the first time on the White House Web site, Mr. Obama made the case that the package would help students go to college, protect workers from losing health care, lower energy bills and modernize schools, roads and utilities.

“This is not just a short-term program to boost employment,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s one that will invest in our most important priorities like energy and education, health care and a new infrastructure that are necessary to keep us strong and competitive in the 21st century.”

Read it all.

SCO Family of Services, a nonprofit agency based on Long Island, started the year with a $25 million credit line at its bank, which it planned to use to pay its bills while awaiting government reimbursements and donations.

Now, after its bank has cut its credit line twice and withdrawn a promise to support a critical bond offering, the organization is worried about whether it can pay its employees this month.

“I spend a good part of my day every day just trying to manage cash flow,” said Johanna Richman, chief financial officer at SCO, which provides services to children with developmental disabilities.

SCO is one of hundreds of charities caught in the credit crunch as skittish banks reduce their lines of credit or cut them off entirely at a time when the need for their services is climbing sharply, nonprofit leaders say.

Read it all.

Britain’s days as the fastest growing economy in Europe were officially declared over yesterday as the deepest recession in a generation saw consumers turning off the lights and Poles returning home.

While official figures showed the economy contracting at its fastest since 1980, National Grid said demand for electricity had fallen over Christmas at homes and factories across the land, and Poland confirmed that thousands of its citizens were coming home from Britain and Ireland.

National Grid said it was cutting its forecast for electricity consumption this year because of the recession. The thousands of people being laid off each week and the hundreds of firms cutting production are reducing demand.

Read it all.

This Monday, January 26th will mark the anniversary of my consecration. I have been here for a year and have now visited every parish at least once and all but a few of the missions of the diocese. It has been, for Allison and me, a year of total immersion. Or to mix the metaphor, when people have asked if it has been a steep learning curve I’ve answered, “No, not really-it has been a vertical ascent.”

It would have been challenging in a normal year of diocesan and church life. But when one considers we hosted the Presiding Bishop and several of her staff less than a month after my consecration, engaging in a challenging but, I believe, hospitable dialogue; I attended two gatherings of the House of Bishops where former bishops under whom I’ve served were deposed, and at each I spoke and wrote against their deposition; I attended the GAFCON gathering in Jerusalem, as well as participated at the once in-a-decade Lambeth Conference with its related events this summer; three diocesan conventions voted to join a fourth diocese in leaving The Episcopal Church and two of these departing dioceses I have served for 27 years of my ordained ministry, and many of the priests and deacons I’ve worked beside have subsequently been deposed; an aspiring new province in North America known as the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) has emerged; and the dissolving of the Anglican Communion Network (with whom many in this diocese have been substantially linked) is charted for the mid-point of this present year. This brings the picture of a constantly changing landscape to mind as a descriptive and understated metaphor. These are indeed hinge times and this for me has been a baptism of fire. Yet as I write this I am not discouraged-rather I believe I have seen more clearly in recent days the path we are called to take.

During an interview for the Jubilate Deo with Joy Hunter in late 2007, shortly before I arrived in South Carolina, she asked, “Do you have a vision for how to proceed?” I said, “Stay close to God, meet often with the clergy, and love the people-then we’ll talk about vision.” I must say given the time demands I have had to scratch and claw for the space to stay close to God, and by his grace I believe I have-or rather he has kept me there in spite of myself. As for meeting often with the clergy, it has been more difficult than I anticipated, but I haven’t abandoned the commitment. I just could not have imagined the number of people who would want to meet with me and for reasons I could not have anticipated. In parish ministry I usually found the challenge was moving from prioritizing my schedule to scheduling my priorities. But this past year it often seemed I’ve been scheduled by other’s priorities and I’ve been left to scramble for time to even discover what my priorities should be. As for loving the people, yes I do and mostly have! So now, after a year, it is time to talk about vision.

Let’s begin with a question I asked myself before God in prayer. “What should a diocese do and more specifically-what should the Diocese of South Carolina do?”
.I believe we are to help shape the future of Anglicanism in the 21st Century through mutually enriching missional relationships with dioceses and provinces of the Anglican Communion (Romans 1:11-12; 2 Corinthians 9:1-15), and through modeling a responsible autonomy and inter-provincial accountability (Philippians 2:1-5; Ephesians 4:1-6) for the sake of Jesus Christ, his Kingdom and his Church.

We are to proclaim the gospel and make disciples for Jesus Christ and God the Father in the power of the Spirit who become responsible members of local parishes or missions and witness to the transforming power of Jesus Christ in their personal and corporate context. The diocesan structures and staff are to do this, specifically, by assisting our existing congregations so that they may grow in numerical and spiritual vitality and plant new congregations within the diocese in places where the church is inadequately present.

I have heard it said, and I believe it to be true, that one ought to be able to summarize one’s vision in a statement that can fit on a t-shirt. My summary of this, put succinctly is, God has called us-To Make Biblical Anglicans for a Global Age. This has been extremely focusing for me as I have met recently with the staff in making financial decisions, some of which have been difficult because of the need to cut back our diocesan budget due to loss of investment income as well as tightening budgets in some of our parishes. More importantly it has given clarity to how I foresee reshaping Diocesan Council and its various committees. As we draw closer to Diocesan Convention I plan to meet with clericus gatherings to begin to unfold how I see this vision implemented through strategy and from strategy to structure and from structure to involvement. I’ll be writing and talking about this often in the days and weeks ahead.

I recently received this:

I wanted to take a minute to say thank you for closing the comments on Bp Robinson…[recently]. I very much enjoy coming to the site to visit and find much of what I read by you and others enlightening, but the current state of affairs is such that passions are inflamed. The vitriol at times is breathtaking and depressing. One of the gifts of being a conservative is a certain amount of reserve when dealing with trying circumstances. That has been lost both in political and now church dialogue.

I thank you for trying to keep things at a level that is respectful but allows for a range of ideas and opinions to be expressed.

Please note that strictly speaking comments were not closed, but they were pre-vetted, which is sometimes necessary on certain topics. In any event respectful and on topic discussion is what we are after–KSH.

“The Italians, the Spaniards, the Greeks, we all have been living in happy land, spending what we did not have,” said George Economou, a Greek shipping magnate, contemplating his country’s economic troubles and others’ from his spacious boardroom. “It was a fantasy world.”

For some of the countries on the periphery of the 16-member euro currency zone ”” Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain ”” this debt-fired dream of endless consumption has turned into the rudest of nightmares, raising the risk that a euro country may be forced to declare bankruptcy or abandon the currency.

Read it all.

Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest who, virtually single-handedly, has undertaken the task of excavating the history of previously undocumented Jewish victims of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union, including an estimated 1.5 million people who were murdered in Ukraine. Father Desbois was born 10 years after the end of World War II — and yet, through his tireless actions, he exemplifies the “righteous gentile.” The term is generally used to recognize non-Jews who, during the Holocaust, risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. Father Desbois is a generation too late to save lives. Instead, he has saved memory and history.

How much he has accomplished since 2002 can be seen in “The Shooting of Jews in Ukraine: Holocaust By Bullets,” which runs until March 15 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The exhibit was created by the Memorial de la Shoah Paris in cooperation with Father Desbois’s organization, Yahad in Unum (the words for “together” in Hebrew and Latin). It follows the publication last August of his book “Holocaust By Bullets” (Palgrave MacMillan).

Read it all.

It’s been a long time since we Americans have celebrated Christmas and Epiphany in a time of want. Even if our personal circumstances were a bit tight, the country around us, our neighbors, seemed to be enjoying a continual season of prosperity. So our personal celebrations, such as they were, took place against the bright canvas of life in the wealthiest nation on earth.

No more. There is no hiding from the crash of overinflated values and overinflated expectations. As it always does, the capitalist system is finding the bottom, the place where market values and real values meet. The harsh realities of life defined by economic values can’t be ignored. And the continuing decline in the banking industry and the credit markets make it clear that our economic struggles will continue for much of 2009 and, perhaps, longer.

Our churches are responding to the recession in a variety of ways. Some of us have had very strong annual giving campaigns. Many of us are struggling. Some of us have increased our outreach to the community. Many of us are worried about how we will meet our expenses and pay our clergy. And all of us are recognizing the ways this recession is impacting not only our members, but also our communities. Perhaps, feeling our own needs, we may be more sensitive to the needs of those around us. Perhaps these hard times can ignite in us the flame of compassion, can remind us what it is we are called to do and be as the body of Christ.

Read it all.

The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

Read it all.

Discussing relations with other Christian confessions, Metropolitan Kirill said: “unfortunately, differences in religious doctrines and practices have increased between orthodoxy and other confessions.”

“With some Protestant communities, such as the Lutheran Church of Sweden and the Episcopal Church of the United States, we have come to a complete break, due to the official recognition of homosexual relations,” he continued.

Read it all.

Anglican Covenant

The Churches of the Anglican Communion were asked in March 2008 if they were able, in principle, to commit to the Covenant process and to say if there were any elements which in their view would need extensive change in order to make viable the process of adoption by their Synods. The General Synod will consider a take note motion, moved by the Bishop of Rochester on behalf of the House of Bishops, on a report from the House, to which is attached a draft Church of England response to these questions. The draft response welcomes the direction of travel of the Covenant while flagging up a number of points which still require attention.

Read it all.

Financial services firm Morgan Stanley has frozen the accounts of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh because it is unsure who should be allowed to access them.

In a letter Jan. 13, the firm said it would not allow any further distributions until it received a court order listing those authorized to use the accounts.

Read it all.

It will be a “bottom-up” General Synod meeting in February, William Fittall, the secretary general, said at Monday’s briefing for the press.

The agenda contains an unpre­cedented eight motions from the grass roots of the Church: five from the dioceses (two of which are jointly from two dioceses), and three from private members. They are varied, and some are likely to be contentious. The meeting is to start on the after­noon of Monday 9 February, and last until the Friday lunchtime.

Other debates will include whether to take moves towards the ordination of women as bishops a step further and put draft legislation to the detailed consideration of a revision committee; two considera­tions of the present financial crisis; and a further consideration of the draft Anglican Covenant.

Read it all.

The Bush presidency had its failures too, of course. Perhaps the saddest – and most ironic – is reflected in the hyper-partisan shrillness of America’s national politics.

It is hard to remember now, but Bush originally ran for president on an agenda of restoring courtesy and goodwill to the political sphere. He promised to end the “arms race of anger” in Washington, and pointed to his record of bipartisanship in Texas. “I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years,” Bush told the 2000 Republican convention. “I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect.”

Needless to say, things didn’t work out that way….

But it’s also true that many of Bush’s bitterest foes, including some in the media, never gave him a chance. It became commonplace to describe the 2000 election as “stolen” and the Bush presidency as illegitimate. Democratic candidates vied to outdo each other in anti-Bush invective. For many, “Bush hater” became a label to wear with pride.

Read it all.

A large credit union in Seattle has started an ad campaign that stresses its nonprofit bona fides. Sprint advertises calling plans that are right “for these times.” Does austerity sell? Or is that a ridiculous contradiction?

Listen to it all from NPR.

Rejecting protests by Christian groups, Britain’s advertising watchdog agency has given the go-ahead to a campaign to plaster atheist signs on hundreds of buses and other vehicles across the country.

The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the campaign, which uses the slogan “There’s probably no God,” was unlikely to mislead or “cause serious or widespread offense.”

Read it all.

We are confronted by a seemingly global objection to the biblical plan for sexuality, marriage and family. Monsignor Tony Anatrella’s research, which was given to the speakers in preparation for this congress, provides a well-thought and highly useful summary of this subject….How should we react in the face of this phenomenon?

The first error we should avoid, in my opinion, is spending the whole time fighting contrary theories, in the end giving them more importance than they deserve. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagita noted a long time ago that the exposition of one’s truth is always more successful than rebutting the errors of others (Letter VI, in PG 3, 1077A). Another error is to focus all efforts on the laws of country to defend Christian values. The first Christians, as we have seen, changed the laws of the state through their lifestyle. We cannot do the contrary today, hoping to change lifestyles with the laws of the state.

The Council opened a new method, that of dialogue, not confrontation with the world: a method which does not even exclude self criticism. One of the Council documents said that the Church can benefit even from the criticism of those that attack it. I believe that we should apply this method also in discussing the problems of marriage and the family, as “Gaudium et Spes” did in its own time.

Read it all.

Q: It is a fact that there are divided families: divorced couples who have remarried, single-parent families, and other situations. What are the paths to strengthen the family institution?

Cardinal Ouellet: It seems interesting to me what the president of Mexico said in the inauguration [of the theological congress]: that the state should support and consider the family a very important patrimony. He also said that not everyone has the opportunity or the joy of having a family, with a father and a mother and children and a good education. In this case, Christians are not indifferent regarding these difficult situations.

Today, the family must be strengthened in itself, and not only strengthening it in an individual way, as a family, but in stirring up associations of families so that they have public strength, such that they are more listened to by the state, and recognized as a social subject, because not just individuals have rights. If we want to resolve long-term the problems of single-parent families and all of this, the best strategy is prevention, better said, to help families to have consistency, stability and thus we will help to diminish these particular factors and phenomena.

Read it all.

The economic stimulus bill that Congress is debating with the Obama administration could reach $850bn or more.

That is a lot of money to spend, and there is an understandable fear that much of it could be wasted. From New Orleans to Iraq, the Bush administration showed that without oversight, even well-financed federal programmes can flounder. A government history of the American-led reconstruction in Iraq is calling the effort a $100bn failure.

But we should not assume that failure is inherent in any large government programme. The New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), which spent over $11bn from 1935 to 1941, and the Truman administration’s Marshall Plan, which spent over $13bn between 1948 and 1952, might have easily been riddled by corruption. Yet, they never were because Congress built in checks and balances for these programmes, which in today’s dollars would amount to roughly $100bn each.

Read it all.

Just days after taking office vowing to end the political era of “petty grievances,” President Obama ran into mounting GOP opposition yesterday to an economic stimulus plan that he had hoped would receive broad bipartisan support.

Republicans accused Democrats of abandoning the new president’s pledge, ignoring his call for bipartisan comity and shutting them out of the process by writing the $850 billion legislation. The first drafts of the plan would result in more spending on favored Democratic agenda items, such as federal funding of the arts, they said, but would do little to stimulate the ailing economy.

The GOP’s shrunken numbers, particularly in the Senate, will make it difficult for Republicans to stop the stimulus bill, but the growing GOP doubts mean that Obama’s first major initiative could be passed on a largely party-line vote — little different from the past 16 years of partisan sniping in the Clinton and Bush eras.

“Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters yesterday, saying Republicans were not being realistic in their expectations.

Read it all.

The tears are finally drying ”“ the tears of the Bush years, and the tears of awe at the sight of a black President of the United States. So what now? The cliché of the day is that Barack Obama will inevitably disappoint the hopes of a watching world, but the truth is more subtle than that. If we want to see how Obama will affect us all ”“ for good or bad ”“ we need to trace the deep structural factors that underlie United States foreign policy. A useful case study of these pressures is about to flicker on to our news pages for a moment ”“ from the top of the world.

Bolivia is the poorest country in Latin America, and its lofty slums 13,000 feet above sea level seem a world away from the high theatre of the inauguration. But if we look at this country closely, we can explain one of the great paradoxes of the United States ”“ that it has incubated a triumphant civil rights movement at home, yet thwarted civil rights movements abroad. Bolivia shows us in stark detail the contradictions facing a black President of the American empire.

Read it all.

As Barack Obama begins his tenure as the first U.S. president with Muslim ancestry, a group of 300 young Muslim activists from 76 countries has asked him to promote policies that can help peacefully curtail religious extremism.

The Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow, a grassroots movement aiming to foster a new generation of civic engagement, issued the open letter after convening the group’s first international conference last weekend (Jan. 16-19) in Doha, Qatar.

Participants, all between the ages of 20 and 45, included artists, academics, religious leaders and business owners. About 40 came from the U.S., including comedian Azhar Usman, journalist Souheila Al-Jadda and faith-based activist Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur, who recently wrote the book “Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak.”

Read it all.