Check it out.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Pope Benedict XVI, meeting with Jews in an effort to mend fences after lifting the excommunication of a schismatic bishop who has publicly denied the scale of the Holocaust, said Thursday that the Catholic Church was “profoundly and irrevocably committed” to rejecting anti-Semitism.

He also condemned Holocaust denial as “intolerable and altogether unacceptable,” especially to clergy, and said it should “be clear to everyone” that the Holocaust was “a crime against God and humanity.”

Addressing a delegation of 60 from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella group, the pope also said for the first time that he planned to visit Israel. The Vatican has not yet officially announced the trip, but Vatican sources said it was expected to happen in May.

Read it all.

The good bishop has it wrong. Or so I think. Which bishop, you ask? That’s the point. Which bishop indeed?

As one who is not a part of the Episcopal side of the Christian family, I look on as a concerned outsider. But perhaps that is the best vantage point to hold in the midst of a family squabble (See: “Reorganized diocese elects new bishop,” Feb. 8).

There is no doubt that the unity of the whole church includes both sides of this unhappy family, because our unity ”” not uniformity based on sameness ”” is based on God’s love manifested in our common life in Christ.

But after making this most basic of Christian affirmations, we must say that this dispute, as so many others, is not new to Christian history. In fact, it is not new to any other of the living religious traditions, either.

Read it all.

In stark contrast to the increasingly relational tone reflected in the Primates Communiqué, the Windsor Continuation Group has taken a step backward, issuing a report that yearns for greater ecclesial centralization achieved by concentrating power in the hands of bishops and archbishops, further marginalizing the laity and diminishing the influence of member churches in the common life of our Communion. The authors of the report””two retired primates, a primate, two bishops and a retired Cathedral dean””believe an “ecclesial deficit” exists within Anglicanism and propose to remedy it by strengthening three of the four “Instruments of Communion”, namely the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference and the Primates Meeting. The instrument they have overlooked is the Anglican Consultative Council; the only instrument that includes lay people, priests and deacons and that has a constitution that codifies its membership, procedures and authority. The ACC’s meetings have proven much less susceptible to outside manipulation than those of the Primates Meetings, as the machinations at Dromantine and Dar es Salaam made painfully clear.

Yet the Windsor Continuation Group argues that the Communion must receive statements from the Primates: “with a readiness to undertake reflection and accommodation,” while questioning whether the Anglican Consultative Council can “adequately” exercise the purely consultative function it currently serves. This illustrates a triumph of ecclesial ideology over common sense.

Read it all.

Meeting in special convention on Feb. 7, nearly 140 delegates in the Diocese of Fond du Lac ventured into the arena of online meetings in order to complete work on the budget left unfinished during the annual convention last fall.

“Trying something new is always a challenge, but using new technology can be downright scary for some people,” said the Rt. Rev. Russell Jacobus, Bishop of Fond du Lac. “Even so, we’ve had mostly positive response to the online meeting.”

The purpose of the special convention was to consider approval of a 2009 budget. The annual convention failed to approve it because of concerns about mission strategy and youth ministry. After receiving reports from task forces appointed to address those concerns, a line-by-line review of the budget was made by the finance committee. Delegates registered online, participated in practice sessions, and discussed issues during pre-convention meetings, held both in-person and online.

Read it all.

So the Church of England opted for safety when it met to discuss the next stage in the ordination of women bishops, avoiding the cataclysmic result of a ”˜no’ vote.

More than 280 members of the General Synod, or governing body, voted in favour of sending draft legislation and a code of practice to a revision committee, ensuring its continued progress.

The church will still take its time over the legislation, with no woman bishop likely to be installed before 2014.

But as Jonathan Gledhill, Bishop of Lichfield, said: “I believe we must go forward today however slowly the progress may be.”

Failure to have voted in favour would not have killed off the prospect of women bishops – as the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said on Tuesday, the issue will not go away – but it could have delayed ordination for many years.

Read it all.

Senior bishops have burst into song in protest at the plans of some English water companies to impose huge bills on churches and other community groups.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was among those who joined in a chorus of “the rains came down and the tax went up” at the Church’s annual general synod.

The synod voted to back campaigners who say the new “rain tax” has seen church drainage bills rise by up to 1,300%.

Water watchdog Ofwat says the charges are environmentally responsible.

Read it all.

Some, perhaps, hoped that official communion recognition could be bypassed altogether in favor of recognition by the GAFCON council. But the GAFCON primates themselves, in Egypt, have apparently decided that this route is premature. Instead, the primates at Egypt proposed that a professionally mediated discussion be initiated among all the concerned parties, with the goal of finding some sort of “provisional holding arrangement” that could have the blessing of the communion at large.

What of the “federal liberals,” particularly in the Episcopal Church? As has long been clear, it is unlikely that it will sign on for the sort of robust covenant and institutional reform that the emerging consensus is envisioning. The church’s Executive Council recently published its response to the proposed Anglican Covenant, more or less saying that it is not interested in any sort of covenant with consequences. Bonnie Anderson, the president of the church’s House of Deputies, has for her part signaled that at this summer’s General Convention she will push to move away from an earlier resolution that called for restraint on further consecration of gay bishops. Although the American church does not plan on taking up the covenant at its convention this summer, the arrows thus far point towards an effectual rejection of its terms.

Tellingly and worryingly, the Executive Council’s response also asserted that the proposed Covenant may only be adopted or rejected at the provincial level, rather than the diocesan. For many “communion conservatives” who still remain within the Episcopal Church, this will amount to a deep crisis of conscience, since in effect their church seems bent upon forcing them to choose between the Anglican communion and the Episcopal Church.

Read it all.

The ordination of women bishops has moved a step nearer after the Church of England’s General Synod voted to send draft legislation and a code of practice for further discussion.

But the two-hour debate yesterday once again revealed deep rifts in the church.

Anglicans opposed to women bishops have threatened to leave the church if adequate safeguards are not put in place to cater for them.

The compromise package being proposed is understood to include so-called “complementary bishops” who would minister to parishes which object to women bishops.

Read it all.

Yet even if President Obama gets the stimulus spending just right, the economy could still be sandbagged by a collapsed banking system. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan is far too complex, and too much of a gift to Wall Street. Judging by the initial verdict of Tuesday’s financial markets, the plan might well fall of its own weight.

Geithner’s plan basically tries to paper over the fact that several of America’s biggest banks are insolvent in the absence of taxpayer bailouts. It attempts to restart the same system of excessive loan securitization that caused the crash ”” this time with guarantees or loans by the Treasury or Federal Reserve. Many details have not been released, because the Treasury has not figured out how this can work.

The taxpayers have already effectively bought much of the banking system. It would be far cleaner and more efficient for government to acknowledge that, take over the large banks, clean out their balance sheets, and then sell healthy banks back to private industry.

Read it all.

The White House unveiled a sweeping proposal Tuesday to spend as much as $2 trillion in public and private funds to prop up the nation’s financial system as the Senate narrowly approved an $838 billion stimulus intended to jump-start the failing economy.

Even as President Obama and Congress worked to wrestle their way out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, stock prices plunged on Wall Street. Major indexes skidded by more than 4%, and the Dow Jones industrial average fell 382 points.

“It’s gotten worse,” Obama said in Fort Myers, Fla., the latest stop on a tour around the nation the president hopes will build support for the stimulus. “The situation we face could not be more serious.”

Read it all.

They have raised more than £1,000 for a mobile dental clinic delivering frontline medical aid around the bombed out streets of Gaza. The clinic, which has been funded totally by the Church in Wales since 2000, is part of the work of family health centres in Gaza run by the Near East Council of Churches.

Members of the Young Muslim Community Organisation in Newport, South Wales, held a bazaar to raise money following an appeal by the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, for urgent aid for the work of the NECC clinics. The appeal was intensified after a direct missile attack destroyed one of the family centres in Shij’ia last month.

Ifthir Ahmed, chair of the YMCO, said the group was pleased to support a Welsh appeal for humanitarian aid.

He said, “We read about the destruction of the family clinic and the invaluable service the mobile dental clinic provides for so many people in the strip. We felt that some of the money we raised had to go to this very noble cause.

Read it all.

Watch it all, a completely heartwarming way to start the day. I just love the wagging tail–KSH.

Question 153: What does God require of us, that we may escape his wrath and curse due to us by reason of the transgression of the law?

Answer: That we may escape the wrath and curse of God due to us by reason of the transgression of the law, he requires of us repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, and the diligent use of the outward means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of his mediation.

Question 154: What are the outward means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of his mediation?

Answer: The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicates to his church the benefits of his mediation, are all his ordinances; especially the Word, sacraments, and prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect for their salvation.

–The Westminster Larger Catechism, and worth keeping min mind I think as Lent approaches in 2009

Back in the rest of the world, companies don’t need to cut benefits if workers do it for them. You can hear it when you talk to working moms, all the old theme songs played at twice the volume. Do I dare ask for flextime? Miss the meeting for the doctor’s appointment? Governor Palin made it sound as if it was all in a day’s work when she talked about juggling BlackBerry and breast pump. But as conditions get worse and 75,000 jobs turn to powder in a day, the strain on survivors can only grow. It doesn’t help that on TV every Tom, Dick and Suze keeps telling us that this is a good time to “dig in and show your boss how good you are. Take on extra projects. Shine at whatever you do.”

A job, like a marriage, has its honeymoon phase, its strengths and strains and things that make us crazy. But now as all our emotions are rewired, we are grateful for what we once just assumed and frightened of things we once ignored. It would be lovely to rely on the wisdom and benevolence of bosses everywhere to realize that when people are frightened about losing their job, loyalty, productivity and morale all plunge. If employers are tempted to exploit such fears, squeeze more work out of fewer people, roll back benefits because there are 100 people lined up for every job, they may find that as in so many things, the short-term fix is long-term dumb.

Read it all.

The moment holds a special place in the annals of Vatican history: On the afternoon of Feb. 12, 1931, Pope Pius XI launched Vatican Radio, declaring in an intercontinental transmission: “Listen, O heavens, to that which I say; Listen, O Earth, listen to the words which come from my mouth. … Listen and hear, O peoples of distant lands!”

Technology has aided evangelizing efforts ever since Johannes Gutenberg invented the mechanical printing press, and in the past 30 years the Vatican has added a television station and a Web site. So the Vatican’s recent launch of its own YouTube channel — a site better known for granting web immortality to dancing cats and amateur dance recitals — was not groundbreaking.

“YouTube is a contemporary means of communications, and the church has used whatever means of ommunications are available at the time,” said Monsignor Robert Wister, a church historian at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J.

Read it all.

The Church of England’s General Synod voted to a continue its work towards consecrating women bishops with an accompanying Code of Practice, as it voted on Wednesday to take the relevant Measure to revision in committee.

Despite being an unpopular middle ground at last July’s Synod, the Code of Practice Measure received 281 votes of support, against 114 with 13 registered abstentions. The Draft Amending Canon then received 309 votes of support against 79, with 14 registered abstentions.

This was after the Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, the chair of the Steering Committee for the draft legislation, had assured many of the options remained open. He also made clear the alternative, which would likely see the rescinding of the Act of Synod, would leave opponents of women in the episcopate even more vulnerable.

Read it all.

Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate ”” no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

While his tongue was slightly in cheek, Gupta and many other Indian business people I spoke to this week were trying to make a point that sometimes non-Americans can make best: “Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”

While I think President Obama has been doing his best to keep the worst protectionist impulses in Congress out of his stimulus plan, the U.S. Senate unfortunately voted on Feb. 6 to restrict banks and other financial institutions that receive taxpayer bailout money from hiring high-skilled immigrants on temporary work permits known as H-1B visas.

Read it all.

Read it all.

Final Approval of Draft Amending Canon No 28. This concerns Local Ecumenical Projects. At present a Bishop has to ensure that C of E worship is held ”˜reasonably frequently’ and also that communion must be celebrated at certain festivals. The proposed amendments removes the absolute requirement for the communions but not that relating to ”˜reasonable frequency’. Guidance is also to be offered to Bishops about what all this means in practice. Being final approval it required 2/3rd majority in each house. Bishops voted 19 to 2 in favour. Clergy 84 to 21 in favour and Laity 103 to 23 in favour. Therefore the amendment to the Canons was passed.

Read it all.

I wish that those who are so adamant to pull away from TEC and align with the Southern Cone would realize the damage they do to people who simply want a place to worship God without controversy or involving themselves in any fight. The actions of the previous councils of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth affect us all, especially as we try to prepare people for membership in our parishes. Lay people struggle with whether to believe in a church of bishops, if bishops lead only to schism. People reject church experiences where there is fighting over anything, and rightfully so.

What I cannot agree with is the pretense that there are two Episcopal dioceses of Fort Worth. Bishop Iker needs to come to terms with the fact that his argument is an emperor without clothes. The historical position of all our bishops for centuries is that there cannot be two different ecclesiastical authorities over one geographical area. Bishop Iker knows that if an Episcopal priest failed to show up for services or at any diocesan function he would be compelled to remove that priest. Likewise it is the duty of the Presiding Bishop to remove any bishop who is not participating in the life of the Episcopal Church. There are priests in Texas who claim to be Anglican but not part of the Episcopal Church (TEC). I guess I could pretend to be Roman Catholic but it would not make it so. At the very best these congregations are “faux Anglican.” The Archbishop of Canterbury has never approved a separate Province inside the US. He cannot without violating all historical precedents and furthering schism. I do not doubt that Bishop Iker is a good man who has done wonderful things in his ministry. How sad, it is most likely that history will record him now solely as a schismatic bishop.

Read it all.

Leaders of the two main Israeli parties are seeking coalition partners to form a government after neither emerged the clear winner in early elections.

The governing centrist Kadima won 28 seats and the right-wing Likud opposition won 27 – both well short of the 61 needed to form a government.

The ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu came third with 15 seats.

Israel’s president is expected to begin consultations next week about which party to ask to form a government.

The election results – if confirmed – push the Labour party led by Defence Minister Ehud Barak into an unprecedented fourth place.

Read it all.

Jewish groups are mending ties with the Vatican following a dispute over a Holocaust-denying bishop.

Representatives of the World Jewish Congress said Monday they were optimistic about Vatican-Jewish relations after meeting with top Vatican officials. In addition, a group of American Jewish leaders will meet with Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday to commend him for his “firm stand” to end the dispute over Bishop Richard Williamson.

And Israel’s chief rabbinate, the Jewish state’s highest religious authority, confirmed that it would resume theological talks next month that had been suspended in the wake of the Williamson affair.

Read it all.

Watch it all–very touching.

“I don’t call this a plan; it’s a tease,” said Bert Ely, principal at bank consultant Ely & Co. Ely said that among other things, he was nervous about how the government will handle the sales of assets. “The devil’s in the details, but the details weren’t there.”

—From this morning’s USA Today

As legislative leaders Tuesday moved toward a deal that could wipe out the state’s $42-billion deficit with temporary tax hikes on retail sales, cars, gasoline and millionaires, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger threatened to lay off as many as 10,000 state employees if a new budget is not passed this week.

State workers will begin receiving pink slips Friday, absent a fiscal agreement by then, administration officials said. The layoff process generally takes about six months for state employees due to union rules and other considerations, such as bureaucratic procedures the state must follow. The move would save the state $750 million annually if the jobs are eliminated by July 1, according to Aaron McLear, Schwarzenegger’s spokesman.

“This is not a [negotiating] tactic,” McLear said. “This is simply out of necessity. The state is running out of money. The governor has very few options at his disposal that he can unilaterally use to cut back on state spending.”

Read it all.

The problem is that a significant portion of the very biggest banks are insolvent. And on top of that, most of them have very large capital markets operations which have bean the nexus of credit intermediation. The regulators spent the last decade plus being in studious ignorance of those businesses, at least the complicated ones where all the risk resided. The SEC never was very interested in bonds, and the Fed took a hands-off, “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to risk management, derivatives and what was called innovation. Author and market observer Martin Mayer warned “a lot of what is called innovative is simply a way to find new technology to do that which was forbidden with the old technology.”

But the history of major banking crises unambiguously shows that insolvent financial institutions need to be resolved. There are variations on the theme: the government can take them over and recapitalize them, clean them up and re-sell them, a la Sweden; you can wipe out equity investors and bondholders; you can try new twists, like various good bank proposals that have surfaced lately (making new entities out of the deposits and good assets and leaving the dreck with the existing bond and shareholders). While there would be many important details to be sorted out, this is not path breaking, except in the scale at which it needs to occur. And now, having had four actute phases of a credit crunch, the Fed and other central banks have plenty of liquidity facilites ready to deal with any initial overreaction. Rest assured, although radical measures would not be pleasant or easy, there are plenty of models and precedents.

But…here we have another scowling Treasury secretary, with a bit more hair than his predecessor, serving up the same fatally flawed approach as before: let’s just throw money at the banks and hope they get better. This is tantamount to using antibiotics to treat gangrene.

Read it all.

First of all it is necessary to rediscover the positive capacity that in principle every human person has to marry by virtue of his very nature as man or woman. Indeed, we run the risk of falling into a form of anthropological pessimism which, in the light of the cultural situation today, considers marriage as almost impossible. Besides the fact that such a situation is not uniform in the various regions of the world, one cannot confuse the real difficulties confronting many, especially young people who conclude that marital union is normally unthinkable and impracticable with the true incapacity of consent. Rather, reaffirming the innate human capacity for marriage is precisely the starting point for helping couples discover the natural reality of marriage and the importance it has for salvation. What is actually at stake is the truth about marriage and about its intrinsic juridical nature (cf. Benedict XVI, Address to the Roman Rota, 27 January 2007), which is an indispensable premise if people are to understand and evaluate the capacity required to wed.

In this sense the capacity must be associated with the essential significance of marriage, that is “the intimate partnership of life and the love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws” (Second Ecumenical Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium et spes, n. 48), and, in a particular way, with the essential obligations inherent to it, that must be assumed by the couple (can. 1095, n. 3).

Read it all.

Lengthy television viewing in adolescence may raise the risk for depression in young adulthood, according to a new report.

The study, in the February issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry, published by the American Medical Association, found a rising risk of depressive symptoms with increasing hours spent watching television.

There was no association of depression with exposure to computer games, videocassettes or radio.

Read it all.

This is only one example of what people do not want to lose in the life of the Communion. And it is a good Pauline principle, if you read II Corinthians, that we should be glad of the honour of being able to support other churches in their need. Who knows whether some other structure than the Communion as we know it might make this possible? But the bare fact is that what now, specifically, makes it possible is the Communion we have, and that is not something to let go of lightly. Hence the difficult but unavoidable search for the forms of agreed self-restraint that will allow us to keep conversation alive ”“ the moratoria advised by Lambeth, very imperfectly observed yet still urged by the Primates as a token of our willingness not to behave as if debates had been settled that are still in their early stages at best.

The Communion we have: it is indeed a very imperfect thing at the moment. It is still true that not every Primate feels able to communicate at the Lord’s Table alongside every other, and this is indeed a tragedy. Yet last week, all the Primates who had attended GAFCON were present, every one of them took part in daily prayer and Bible study alongside the Primates of North America and every one of them spoke in discussion. In a way that I have come to recognise as very typical of these meetings, when talk of replacing Communion with federation of some kind was heard, nearly everyone reacted by saying that this was not something they could think about choosing. We may have imperfect communion, but we unmistakably want to find a way of holding on to what we have and ‘intensifying’ it ”“ to use the language I used last summer about the proposed Anglican Covenant. Somehow, the biblical call to be involved with one another at a level deeper than that of mere affinity and good will is still heard loud and clear. No-one wants to rest content with the breach in sacramental fellowship, and everyone acknowledges that this breach means we are less than we are called to be. But the fact that we recognise this and that we still gather around the Word is no small thing; without this, we should not even be able to hope for the full restoration of fellowship at the Eucharist.

Read it carefully and read it all.