Read it all.

Worth the time.

In respect to this issue, a final comment is in order. If the Communion makes provision for individual dioceses to ratify the Covenant, it will prove easier for that to happen in TEC than in many other churches of the Anglican Communion. It will be easier because of the unique character of TEC’s constitution. TEC’s constitution makes no provision for a metropolitan bishop, givens no real authority either to its Presiding Bishop or its General Convention to impose its will on a diocese; and I am convinced it allows for a diocese to remove itself from TEC. If provision were to be made for ratification at the level of a diocese, individual dioceses within TEC would have a degree of freedom in this respect that dioceses in many other provinces would not.

So now we come to the question, “What then shall we do?” For many in TEC a covenant with any real consequences is out of the question. It is likely that they will answer the question “What then shall we do” by refusing to ratify the covenant and forming an alliance with other provinces of like mind. In all likelihood they will continue to claim membership in the Anglican Communion, seeking from within their diminished status, as they are want to say, “the greatest degree of communion possible.” It may well be, however, that in forming such an alliance, they in fact end up by creating another communion altogether. In any case, the forces at play in these circumstances will be centrifugal rather than centripetal.

For others of a more confessional frame of mind a covenant may be a part of their future, but, at present, they are skeptical that the final draft will have sufficiently clear commitments to shared doctrine and practice. For those who have cast their lot with ACNA, their future in relation to a covenant is at best uncertain. At present, only provinces can ratify the covenant. It is unlikely that ACNA will realize its goal of provincial status in the near future. Further, should there be an arrangement for individual dioceses to ratify, there are only three, perhaps four, dioceses now a part of the ACNA group. They might be given access to ratification, though that is doubtful. Even, however, if they were allowed to ratify the covenant as individual dioceses, the majority of ACNA’s membership would not be so allowed because it is unlikely that they would be able to establish diocesan status.

For my own part, these first two options appear fraught with difficulty. I believe that the present proposal of the Covenant Design Group, even though it is surrounded by questions, provides the best way forward for Anglicans if they wish to maintain both communion and catholic identity.

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Yesterday’s announcement ducked the central question of how to value the toxic assets. It is an issue that confounded Mr Geithner’s predecessor Hank Paulson, who ditched a plan for the government to buy assets directly, instead focusing on direct capital injections for the banks.

The Treasury said its programme would be “designed with a public-private financing component, which could involve putting public or private capital side-by-side and using public financing to leverage private capital”. The involvement of private-sector money would mean the government was not setting the price, it added. The exact mechanism, though, could take weeks to decide. Joseph Lavorgna, an economist at Deutsche Bank, said: “It is not big enough. There are few details. The administration is trying to buy time and they don’t get the fact that we need to get something yesterday.”

Tony Crescenzi, an analyst at Miller Tabak & Co, said: “It remains extremely uncertain how the Treasury will entice investors to do something they have been avoiding since the start of the crisis.”

The dilemma is that pricing the assets too low could make many big banks insolvent, while pricing them above market value means taxpayers handing a no-strings-attached subsidy to lenders.

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You can always tell a real friend: When you have made a fool of yourself, he doesn’t feel you’ve done a permanent job.

–Laurence J. Peter in the March 2009 Reader’s Digest, page 184

The Senate voted on Tuesday to approve an $838 billion economic stimulus plan that stands to become the most expansive anti-recession effort by the United States government since World War II.

Congressional leaders said they would immediately begin to work out the differences between the Senate measure and an $820 billion version passed by the House, with President Obama also likely to have a strong voice in the talks.

The timetable for the House-Senate negotiations remained indefinite, however. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said he and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “think we can get a lot of work done in the first 24 hours.”

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My first reading of the Communiqué left me rather disappointed. I wanted to ask, “Is that all there is?” After hearing some of the comments made about the Alexandria meeting by GAFCON Primates, I have come to the conclusion that reading the Communiqué is not sufficient for understanding what actually transpired during the course of the meeting itself. Evidently the document released by the Primates does not tell the whole story. If Archbishops Greg Venables and Henry Orombi are encouraged and hopeful about what will come of all this, then so am I. Time will tell.

My second and third readings of the Communiqué reinforced my initial impression that we had heard all of this before and that there was not much new in what was being proposed. The idea of mediated conversations has been tried before, but I suppose there is no harm in trying again. Yes, we know there are “difficulties” and “concerns” about the possibility of parallel jurisdictions, but new challenges call for new solutions, and it can be done. There are precedents. So let the “professionally mediated conversation” begin at the earliest opportunity. But let there also be a halt to the litigation and law suits against all parties at the same time. How can we expect to resolve the impasse we are in when TEC still seeks to use the civil courts to eliminate all opposition?

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Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed? In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times. They are times of great danger. Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it. Doing too little is now far riskier than doing too much. If he fails to act decisively, the president risks being overwhelmed, like his predecessor. The costs to the US and the world of another failed presidency do not bear contemplating.

What is needed? The answer is: focus and ferocity. If Mr Obama does not fix this crisis, all he hopes from his presidency will be lost. If he does, he can reshape the agenda. Hoping for the best is foolish. He should expect the worst and act accordingly.

Yet hoping for the best is what one sees in the stimulus programme and ”“ so far as I can judge from Tuesday’s sketchy announcement by Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary ”“ also in the new plans for fixing the banking system. I commented on the former last week. I would merely add that it is extraordinary that a popular new president, confronting a once-in-80-years’ economic crisis, has let Congress shape the outcome.

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In preparation for the meeting I asked The American Anglican Council to prepare the attached report on the continuing situation of The Episcopal Church to enable people in the wider Communion to have a fuller perspective of the circumstances in North America. I shared it with my colleagues in the Global South but did not release it more widely in the hope that we would receive assurances from the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church and the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada that they were willing to exercise genuine restraint towards those Anglicans in North America unwilling to embrace their several innovations.

Sadly that did not prove to be the case. Instead we were treated to presentations that sought to trivialize the situation and the consequences for those whose only offence is their determination to hold on doggedly and truthfully to the faith once delivered to the saints. In addition I have learned that even as we met together in Alexandria actions were taken that were in direct contradiction to the season of deeper communion and gracious restraint to which we all expressed agreement. For example, in the days leading up to our meeting, the Diocese of Virginia declared the “inherent integrity and blessedness” of same sex unions and initiated a process to provide for their “blessing”. While we were meeting, The Diocese of Toronto also announced that it will start same sex blessings within a year and The Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia filed further costly legal action appealing the court’s decision in twenty cases favouring nine Virginia congregations. These and many further actions are documented within the report.

Please read it all and the attachments in the pdf links underneath the letter.

The gravity of the financial crisis confronting the Obama administration will come into stark focus today when officials unveil a three-pronged rescue program that may commit up to $1.5 trillion in public and private funds, and possibly more, lawmakers and other officials said.

In announcing the plan, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner will not ask Congress for more funds than the roughly $350 billion that remain in the Treasury Department’s original rescue package for the financial system, though congressional sources said such a request could come later if the new programs are unsuccessful. The rest of the money would come from other government agencies, such as the Federal Reserve, as well as private-sector contributions.

A senior administration official warned last night that the ultimate cost to taxpayers has not been determined. Several of the programs have not been finalized, and most are designed to ultimately return money to taxpayers.

Geithner plans to announce a public-private partnership that would seek to finance the purchasing of toxic bank assets that are at the heart of the credit crisis, officials and congressional sources said. These sources briefed by Treasury officials said the program may initially raise $250 billion to $500 billion in public and private funds to offer low-cost financing to encourage investors to buy the toxic assets. An administration official said the proposal is still subject to a public review and may not take final shape for several weeks.

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The primates’ letter had received the unanimous endorsement of the primates, Archbishop Williams said. However, the WCG’s communication was a report prepared by a committee appointed by Archbishop Williams and presented by him to the primates as a resource document; it was not submitted to a vote. Many parts of the communiqué refer to passages from the 17-page WCG report. Other sections of the communiqué refer to the document on gracious restraint. The sections mentioned in the communiqué indicate broader support among the primates.

This communiqué, perhaps to a more significant degree than others in recent years, attempts to look to doctrine rather than legislation or political solutions. The primates pick up a theme from the Windsor Report, which questioned whether the Communion suffered from an “ecclesial deficit, in other words, do we have the necessary theological structural and cultural foundations to sustain the life of the Communion? We need to address divisive issues in a timely and effective way, and to learn the responsibilities and obligations of interdependence.”

The Episcopal Church and the proposed Anglican Church of North America both received support, as well as pointed but fair questions about their conduct and objectives. For instance, The Episcopal Church was praised for its efforts to date to exercise “gracious restraint” in not consecrating any additional openly gay bishops. The proponents of the proposed new parallel province in North America were reassured that they were Anglican, and that they were deserving of some measure of protection from legal attacks, at least in the short term.

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Mary E. Kostel has been named special counsel to the Presiding Bishop for property litigation and discipline, according to an announcement by the Rev. Canon Charles Robertson of the Presiding Bishop’s office.

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As credit markets have imploded, triggering a global economic crisis, Islamically correct investors have seen a change of fortune: The conservative principles this small group of devout Muslims clung to during the economic heyday has insulated them from the worst of the past year’s suffering.

Their renunciation of the interest-based economy kept them away from investments in financial services companies, whose stocks have collapsed, and out of traditional mortgages.

“There was a time two or three years ago that Islamic finance was considered simply too conservative,” said Professor Ibrahim Warde, author of “Islamic Finance in the Global Economy” and an adjunct professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “Right now, many people are recognizing that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing.”

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AFTER a couple of weeks in which his presidency seemed to have got off to a bumpy start, Barack Obama at last received some good news. On the night of Monday February 9th a stimulus package worth a whopping $838 billion over the next two years passed a crucial test in the Senate. There are several procedural hurdles still to clear but the vote, which required at least 60 senators to agree to end the debate (which can otherwise be talked out indefinitely, in a process called filibustering), went Mr Obama’s way.

The stimulus bill is not entirely out of the woods yet. The substantive Senate vote (which requires only a simple majority, now that the “cloture” vote has gone through) should be a formality when it takes place later on Tuesday. But there is still some hard work to be done reconciling the House and Senate versions. Although the two overall sums of money sound similar, this masks some important differences.

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Another meeting of Anglican Primates has come and gone, nothing of substance has been done or decided. The problem the Communion faces is not with one or two individuals such as Gene Robinson who unfairly has become the focus of our problems, but rather with false teaching. Those who teach that sexual immorality is acceptable are leading people to destruction. But this is true of more than one or two of the Anglican Primates there are several Primates, including Rowan Williams who appear to hold to such false teaching. Turkeys are not going to vote for Christmas. There are a number of Primates who have taken a lead including those associated with last year’s GAFCON gathering. Yet even they have seemed unwilling publicly to admit that the problem stretches to more than just one or two of their fellow Primates. But they are probably influenced in this by the fact that they are a minority and there are many more who whilst being genuinely outraged by what has happened in the US and Canada, seem temperamentally incapable of taking action. In the Anglican Way part of the task of Bishops is “to drive out strange and erroneous teaching” (Book of Common Prayer Ordinal) yet in much of what passes as Anglicanism today this part of their role is sadly neglected.

There was a brief time when combined outrage might have translated into action but Rowan Williams headed this off and now it seems that the body of Primates as a whole will not do anything.

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A panel of three federal judges, saying overcrowding in state prisons has deprived inmates of their right to adequate healthcare, tentatively ruled Monday that the state must reduce the population in those lockups by as many as 57,000 people.

The judges issued the decisionafter a trial in two long-running cases brought by inmates to protest the state of medical and mental healthcare in the prisons.

Although their order is not final, U.S. District Court Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt effectively told the state that it had lost the trial and would have to make dramatic changes in its prisons unless it could reach a settlement with inmates’ lawyers.

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President Barack Obama had it both ways Monday when he promoted his stimulus plan in Indiana. He bragged about getting Congress to produce a package with no pork, yet boasted it will do good things for a Hoosier highway and a downtown overpass, just the kind of local projects lawmakers lard into big spending bills.

Obama’s sales pitch on the enormous package he wants Congress to make law has sizzle as well as steak. He’s projecting job creation numbers that may be impossible to verify and glossing over some ethical problems that bedeviled his team.

In recent years, the so-called Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska came to symbolize the worst excesses of congressional earmarks, a device that allows a member of Congress to add money for local projects in legislation, practically under the radar.

Nothing so bold, or specific, as that now-discarded bridge project is contained in the stimulus package. That’s not to say the package steers clear of waste or parochial interests. Obama played to such interests Monday, speaking at one point as if he’d come to fill potholes.

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The announcement in church bulletins and on Web sites has been greeted with enthusiasm by some and wariness by others. But mainly, it has gone over the heads of a vast generation of Roman Catholics who have no idea what it means: “Bishop Announces Plenary Indulgences.”

In recent months, dioceses around the world have been offering Catholics a spiritual benefit that fell out of favor decades ago ”” the indulgence, a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife ”” and reminding them of the church’s clout in mitigating the wages of sin.

The fact that many Catholics under 50 have never sought one, and never heard of indulgences except in high school European history (Martin Luther denounced the selling of them in 1517 while igniting the Protestant Reformation), simply makes their reintroduction more urgent among church leaders bent on restoring fading traditions of penance in what they see as a self-satisfied world.

“Why are we bringing it back?” asked Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn, who has embraced the move. “Because there is sin in the world.”

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President Obama took his case for his $800 billion economic recovery package to the American people on Monday, as the Senate cleared the way for passage of the bill and the White House prepared for its next major hurdle: selling Congress and the public on a fresh plan to bail out the nation’s banks.

Warning that a failure to act “could turn a crisis into a catastrophe,” Mr. Obama used his presidential platform ”” a prime-time news conference, the first of his presidency, in the grand setting of the White House East Room ”” to address head on the concerns about his approach, which has by and large failed to win the Republican support he sought.

“The plan is not perfect,” Mr. Obama said in an eight-minute speech before taking reporters’ questions. “No plan is. I can’t tell you for sure that everything in this plan will work exactly as we hope, but I can tell you with complete confidence that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis.”

The news conference was the centerpiece of an intense and highly orchestrated campaign by the administration to wrest control of the stimulus debate from Republicans and reframe it on Mr. Obama’s terms.

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The Obama administration’s new plan to bail out the nation’s banks was fashioned after a spirited internal debate that pitted the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, against some of the president’s top political hands.

In the end, Mr. Geithner largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, according to administration and Congressional officials.

Mr. Geithner, who will announce the broad outlines of the plan on Tuesday, successfully fought against more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid.

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All through our gathering at the recently concluded Primates’ meeting I kept wondering whether we were the ones to whom John was writing. We have a glorious reputation ”“ a worldwide communion of millions with a glorious history and beautiful heritage, fluid structures, grand cathedrals, “infallible” canons, historical ecclesiology and ”˜flexible’ hermeneutics ”“ but we are in danger of forgetting what we have received and heard and replacing it with the seemingly attractive gods and goddesses of our age. We are in danger of becoming the ”˜living dead’ by giving the outward appearance of life but in reality we are no more than empty and ineffective vessels. In parts of our Communion some have merged the historical gospel message of Jesus the Christ with seductive ancient heresies and revisionist agendas, which have resulted in an adulterated and dangerous distortion of the gospel. The call to obedience and repentance is one that we must declare but we refuse and instead we replace it with a polite invitation to empty tolerance and endless conversation. Sometimes we think that we can replace the need for repentance with activities, programmes, endless meetings, conventions and communiqués — we are wrong!

Our world is in turmoil desperately looking for hope and we have been given that hope in the life and person of Jesus the Christ who sets us free from the slavery of sin to the new life of the Spirit — that is our message, that is our assurance, that is the holy life to which we have been called. It is a life of costly commitment where we reject the false gods and promises of this present age and embrace the one true God and His righteous claims upon our lives. It is a life of obedience to the revealed Word of God which must never be compromised. It is a gospel message which is to be fully proclaimed unfettered and undiluted. It is a life worth living and a life worth dying for. It is a life of true freedom that was birthed in this land and one we dare not forget.

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For a country steeped in Catholic tradition, these are alarming times.

Public schools are being told by judicial order to pull crucifixes from their walls. City buses with billboards espousing atheism have been rumbling through the streets here, prompting yowls of blasphemy from Catholic leaders.

“Probably God Doesn’t Exist,” bleated an ad plastered last month across Bus 14, a normally sunny mode of transport past this city’s harbor. “So Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life.”

The so-called godless buses ”” which copy a campaign begun in Britain ”” have appeared in Madrid and Malaga, Spain, and are planned for elsewhere in Europe. For Spain, the stunt is a provocative sign of the times.

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Later in the debate, The Rev Canon Professor Marilyn McCord Adams, of Christ Church, Oxford, asked if the Church of England had “lost its nerve” by concentrating on other denominations in its Synod discussions.

She also claimed a report on relations between Anglicans and Catholics “soft-pedalled” on the “harsh elements of Roman-Catholic piety”, and did not mention that some Anglican provinces have “dared to ordain women”.

But the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Tom Wright, claimed it was “characteristically Anglican” for the C of E to try to find a way forward with Catholics rather than concentrating on their differences.

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The Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor today spoke of his regret at the divisions in the Anglican Communion that have taken it to the brink of schism.

Addressing the General Synod in Church House, Westminster he said the Anglican Church’s struggles affected all churches or “ecclesial communities”, as the Pope has instructed Catholic bishops to refer to non-Catholic and non-Orthodox churches.

“Divisions within any church or eccclesial community impoverish the communion of the whole Church,” he said. “We Roman Catholics cannot be indifferent to what is happening to our friends in the Anglican Communion and, in particular, in the Church of England.

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His voice shaking at times, Alex Rodriguez met head-on allegations that he tested positive for steroids six years ago, telling ESPN on Monday that he did take performance-enhancing drugs while playing for the Texas Rangers during a three-year period beginning in 2001.

“When I arrived in Texas in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure. I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day,” Rodriguez told ESPN’s Peter Gammons in an interview in Miami Beach, Fla. “Back then, [baseball] was a different culture. It was very loose. I was young, I was stupid, I was naïve. I wanted to prove to everyone I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time.

“I did take a banned substance. For that, I’m very sorry and deeply regretful.”

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I don’t need to believe that my church is perfect. But I have learned that my personal response to stories of child abuse is so strong that it prevents me from seeing any other truth. As a Catholic, I kept telling myself that the evil of some priests and bishops does not obviate the church’s teaching. But the deeper I immersed myself in details of the crimes and the stories of the victims, my grief and fury distorted and overwhelmed logic.

The fault was mine. But any institution ”” sacred or secular ”” that has to depend on deception, and the willingness of its people to be deceived, to maintain its legitimacy will not get away with it for long. These days, the attempt to withhold or suppress information doesn’t work to protect authority, but rather to undermine it….

I did not agree with the way Father Neuhaus answered that question when faced with the American Catholic Church’s worst-ever crisis. But he was not wrong to ask it.

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Mr. Naughton, someone with whom I am in frequent disagreement on some Episcopal Church issues, nonetheless correctly assesses the significance of the Alexandria Primates Communique:

The Episcopal Church is going to have to make a decision this summer on whether to remove impediments to the consecration of gay bishops put in place at our last General Convention.

Now there are all sorts of problems with this. He doesn’t mention blessing of noncelibate same sex partnerships, which are also against the teaching and practice of the Anglican Communion and whihc need to be explicitly stopped. And he doesn’t mention that the “impediments” placed were not placed in the way in which they were asked to be placed, nor has restraint been shown by TEC in its practice since (one need only give evidence from the finalists in several dioceses for the post of bishop). He is also quite wrong to say this is about doing the “conservatives” bidding or playing into “their” hands. This is about submitting one to another in the body of Christ, and doing what the Anglican Communion has repeatedly asked us to do.

The key point Mr. Naughton and other activists have grasped is this: Lambeth 1998 1.10 has once again been affirmed. This is where the Communion is, and this is our communal standard. All the pressure is on the leadership of the Episcopal Church to agree to abide by this standard in 2009.

I was asked at a dinner party why I had not made a comment about the new ”˜Anglican’ province being formed in North America and claiming 100,000 members. I really don’t have anything to add to what I have already said. The Archbishop of Canterbury has met, eaten and prayed with some of the leading schismatics and appears to be open to the process of this new province seeking recognition through formal channels. Martyn Minns, the Nigerian bishop, originally from Nottingham, England, now residing in New Jersey, has made some comments to the effect that the new province really doesn’t need to operate according to the rules of an English charity (under which the Anglican Consultative Council operates), and suggests that the Archbishop of Canterbury would ”˜clarify’ things for Anglicans if he would get behind this innovation. I’m tired of it all and continue to suspect that The Episcopal Church will continue to be marginalized, –or at least those parts of the church that are willing to move beyond tolerance of GLBT people to affirmation.

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The newly elected provisional bishop of the reorganized Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth said Saturday that he will work to “make the wide embrace of Christ’s love available” in the wake of a bitter split between two factions of the diocese.

The Rt. Rev. Edwin F. “Ted” Gulick Jr. made his remarks during a news conference at Trinity Episcopal Church after his nearly unanimous election, with 80 of 81 delegates voting for him and one delegate abstaining.

He will lead a group that chose to remain with the Episcopal Church after a majority of delegates in the 24-county diocese voted in November to leave the church.

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The logic is simple. Many (probably most, possibly all but a handful) high-profile, large border-crossing universal banks in the north Atlantic region are dead banks walking – zombie banks kept from formal insolvency only through past, present and anticipated future injections of public money. They have indeterminate but possibly large remaining stocks of toxic – hard or impossible to value – assets on their balance sheets which they cannot or will not come clean on.

This overhang of toxic assets acts like a tax on new lending. Banks are required, by regulators or by market pressures, to hoard capital and liquidity rather than engaging in new lending to the real economy. The public financial support offered in the form of capital injections (in the US mainly through preference shares and other non-voting equity), guarantees for assets and for liabilities (old and new), insurance of toxic assets (as provided to Citigroup by the US sovereign) and possibly in the future through direct purchases by the state of toxic assets (using TARP money in the US) and the creation of one or more publicly owned ”˜bad banks’ has been a complete failure.

The bad bank proposals the Obama administration and other governments are considering are non-starters, for the simple reason that they require the valuation of assets whose true value (even on a hold-to-maturity basis) can only be guessed at. The good bank proposal only requires the valuation of those assets on the balance sheets of the existing banks that are easy to value: transparently valued assets. The toxic stuff is left on the balance sheet of the existing banks, which become the legacy bad banks.

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