“Our children deserve the best we can give them, and I hope this Report will stir us to action in the wide variety of areas it touches upon. The Report shows something of the energy, the good sense and the vision of so many of our young people. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the well-being of children and young people in this country is far from being the priority it should be, and this Report spells out in carefully researched detail some of the ways in which we are failing them. It is a clarion call for us as a society to do better.”

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[Rowan] Williams said it is important to remember that “the person praying next to me is a person in whom Jesus is praying” and to try to see “the force of energy of Jesus’ life in them. When I diminish them, I am in danger of destroying Jesus’ voice in them.”

The Most Rev. John Chew, primate of Southeast Asia, spoke during the service about the importance of the companion relationship between the dioceses of Singapore and Egypt. “When great civilizations come together a lot can happen,” he said, “especially when Christ is active in all this.”

The Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, under the leadership of President Bishop Mouneer Hanna Anis, is hosting the primates for their five-day meeting. The province includes four dioceses throughout Jerusalem, Iran, Egypt, Cyprus and the Gulf.

Alexandria, known as the Pearl of the Mediterranean, was founded around 334BC by Alexander the Great. Today, the city is the second largest in Egypt and serves as the country’s main shipping port.

Before the dedication service, the primates heard about the mission of the Alexandria School of Theology from its principal, the Rev. Emad Azmi Mikhail, who said that the institution’s primary goals were to facilitate the development of local full-time teachers and to reach a wide audience throughout the Arab-speaking world. Formed in 2005, the institution grew out of Anis’ vision to broaden theological education throughout Egypt.

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The 1998 Lambeth Conference further enhanced the role of the Primates’ Meeting asking that it intervene “in cases of exceptional emergency which are incapable of internal resolution within provinces, and giving of guidelines on the limits of Anglican diversity in submission to the sovereign authority of Holy Scripture and in loyalty to our Anglican tradition and formularies.”

A return now to the “talking-shop” model of the early 1980s would not work, one African archbishop told ReligiousIntelligence.com, while Archbishop Peter Akinola told his some of his colleagues on Feb 1 that the primates must be consistent in their actions and not walk away from the undertakings made at the last three meetings.

As the primates began to arrive at the Helnan Palestine Hotel on Alexandria ’s corniche, splinter groups on the left and right met to prepare strategies for the meeting. The larger conservative faction met on the afternoon of Jan 31. “Long distances” and “poor communications” in the developing world necessitated the pre-conference meeting, Presiding Bishop Maurice Sinclair, retired primate of the Southern Cone told us.

Bishop Sinclair, who after retirement served a term as Dean of the Anglican Cathedral in Cairo and as visiting lecturer at the Alexandria School of Theology, stated he had not been part of the strategy group for the Global South primates, but had been invited by the Bishop of Egypt, the Rt Rev Mouneer Anis to greet the primates on his behalf.

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With its towering stone steeple, marble steps and crimson doors, Pittsburgh’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral looks every bit a “mighty fortress” of faith.

But the 226-year-old cathedral is a house divided, like the denomination that built it.

Since October, Trinity’s priests have been saying Sunday Masses for two warring dioceses: the older one composed of 28 theologically moderate or liberal parishes, and one newly created of 66 breakaway conservative parishes. Each claims to be the true “Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh.” Each is dug in.

The cathedral parish has not taken sides. “They’re both in our prayers,” said the Rev. Canon Catherine Brall, Trinity’s rector.

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I am not a Catholic, and I agree with the church on only roughly half of its positions on such matters as war, abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment. So in some respects I have no standing here. But I have long valued the capacity of this 2,000-year-old institution to speak with moral authority on the social and political questions of our time ”” and to do so with a voice from the ancient of days. But this moral authority was badly eroded by the sexual abuse scandal of the past decade, and it is taking another hit by Benedict’s actions in this matter….

I would think we would be well beyond the point where Vatican spokesmen would need to inform us that the Holocaust did, in fact, happen.

Unfortunately, we are not.

My only hope is that this unfortunate incident cracks open Benedict’s study a bit to the world, and to the ecumenical spirit of John Paul II.

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Read it carefully and read it all.

Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and her staff have attempted to aid the four dioceses in which the leadership and a majority of members have left the church with a combination of “guidance, support and pastoral care.”

So says an eight-and-a-half page memo Jefferts Schori gave the Executive Council during its winter meeting here. The memo was written by Mary Kostel, the recently appointed special counsel to the Presiding Bishop for property litigation and discipline. Kostel has worked closely with David Beers, who is chancellor to the Presiding Bishop.

While the situations in San Joaquin, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh and Quincy are all different, there are similarities in their experiences and in the way Jefferts Schori has worked with them, Kostel wrote. Those efforts usually begin with the Presiding Bishop encouraging the formation of a steering committee of Episcopalians from across the diocese who are committed to remaining in the church “and who represent a broad spectrum of views in the diocese on issues such as human sexuality and the ordination of women.”

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As the Obama administration prepares its strategy to rescue the nation’s banks by buying or guaranteeing troubled assets on their books, it confronts one central problem: How should they be valued?

Not just billions, but hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake.

The Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, is expected to announce details of the new plan within weeks. Administration and congressional officials say it will give the government flexibility to buy some bad assets and guarantee others in an effort to have a broad impact but still tailor the aid for different institutions.

But getting this right will not be easy. The wild variations on the value of many bad bank assets can be seen by looking at one mortgage-backed bond recently analyzed by a division of Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency.

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Despite signs of a new season of hope on the horizon in Iraq, the vast majority of Iraqi Christian refugees will probably not return to their homeland, said two U.S.-based Chaldean Catholic bishops.

“No one in the United States will go back to Iraq or the Middle East because the future for children, (opportunities for) education and life are better here,” said Chaldean Bishop Ibrahim N. Ibrahim.

Also, experience has shown that once people have overcome the initial difficulties of adapting to a new culture, “no one will convince them to change it again” and rip up those freshly laid roots, said Chaldean Bishop Sarhad Y. Jammo.

Bishop Jammo heads the Eparchy of St. Peter the Apostle of San Diego, Calif., and has under his care Chaldean Catholics in the western U.S., while Bishop Ibrahim heads the Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle of Detroit, the diocese for Chaldean Catholics in the eastern United States.

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Like thousands of other Californians, Marcus Sanders would like a tax refund to help his family as recession tightens its grip on the economy and while he looks for full-time work.

When California’s state government will release its refunds, however, is uncertain.

The payments were due to start on Monday but State Controller John Chiang has said he will hold back the refunds for at least 30 days because the state must close a $15 billion shortfall in its current budget and needs its dwindling cash for more pressing payments, including debt service.

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Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert threatened on Sunday a “disproportionate response” to the continued firing of rockets into Israel from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

There have been sporadic rocket attacks by militants on southern Israeli communities and several Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip since a truce came into effect on Jan. 18 following a 22-day Israeli offensive in the territory.

At least two rockets struck southern Israel on Sunday, causing no damage or casualties. A wing of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group belonging to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, claimed responsibility.

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In two days, her new roommate will be here, moving into this cramped and once decrepit rowhouse in Shaw, unpacking belongings into half of the skinny closet that Laura is now clearing out. For the last year and a half, this small room bisected by bunk beds has been Laura’s private enclave. The bookshelves, the dresser, the floor space were hers alone. In the evenings, when she spoke on the phone, no one could walk in with equal claim to her domain. In two days, all that will change.

And that’s good, Laura tells herself. She’s glad the ministry is growing: It’s exactly what she and Clark Massey hoped for six years ago, when they were plotting the details of A Simple House, their Catholic lay ministry devoted to the poor of Southeast. She knows you can’t take a rowhouse with two female missionaries — plus Lucy, the 72-year-old homeless schizophrenic who came with the house when it was donated — and add four more women and expect it to be easy. After all, the four-bedroom house has only one full bath.

Still, when Clark suggested a couple of weeks earlier that maybe they could eliminate clutter in the bathroom by having everyone use shower caddies, Laura recoiled. “I don’t want,” she enunciated, uncharacteristically fierce and emphatic, “a shower caddy.”

“Maybe you all need one,” Clark persisted. “There’s no way six women’s shampoo, et cetera, will fit in the bathroom.”

But shower caddies? Icky, slimy, always-wet-and-dripping shower caddies? Already, Laura had been weighing how much longer she wanted to remain at Simple House. Now her uncertainty was being aggravated by her impending loss of privacy.

Read it all from the Washington Post magazine.

Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that euthanasia is a “false solution” to suffering, adding his voice to a bitter debate in Italy over the fate of a comatose woman whose father wants to remove her feeding tube.

During his Sunday blessing, Benedict said that love can help confront pain and that “no tear, from those who suffer and those who are with them, is lost before God.”

Benedict didn’t mention Eluana Englaro by name, but it was clear he was referring to her case, which has made headlines in Italy for months.

Englaro has been in a vegetative state since 1992 after a car accident. She was 20 at the time.

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Signs abound that the battered economy is causing serious damage to the mental health and family lives of a growing number of Americans.

Requests for therapists have soared, Americans say they’re stressed out, and domestic-violence and suicide hotlines are reporting increased calls.

“I’ve never seen this level of anxiety and depression in 22 years of practice,” says Nancy Molitor, a psychologist in Wilmette, Ill. “The mental health fallout has been far worse than after 9/11.”

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Some might argue there have been better Super Bowls. Legendary quarterback Joe Willie Namath, who handed the Lombardi Trophy to Steelers owner Dan Rooney after the confetti fell last night, played in a pretty remarkable one in Super Bowl III, leading the New York Jets past the ridiculously favored Baltimore Colts. Much more recently, the New York Giants stunned the world by upsetting the unbeaten New England Patriots last year in Super Bowl XLII.

But this one beat ’em all.

Four scores in the final 7 minutes, 33 seconds? Arizona going from 20-7 down to 23-20 ahead in — what — a blink of the eye? Roethlisberger leading the Steelers 78 yards in the final two minutes-and-change to win it on wide receiver Santonio Holmes’ fabulous 6-yard touchdown catch with 35 seconds left?

You gotta be kidding.

Certainly it was one of the best, anyway. Read it all.

Wow. My heart is in my throat. What a catch by Santonio Holmes!

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Bishop Ted Gulick of the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky will likely serve as caretaker of a Texas diocese following the decision by that diocese’s bishop and many of its members to leave the denomination for a more conservative Anglican province.

Gulick was nominated by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church to be “provisional bishop” of the Diocese of Fort Worth. If approved at a special meeting of what remains of the Fort Worth diocese on Feb. 7, Gulick would serve until this summer while continuing to lead the Kentucky diocese.

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At its monthly meeting of the Diocesan Council, held on January 29, 2009, the bishops outlined their proposal. The bishops plan to engage in a consultation process in order for the pastoral care of all Anglicans to be strengthened. They will implement their response when the bishops discern that it is appropriate.

The bishops’ proposal in offering a pastoral response is as follows:

* Episcopal permission be given to a limited number of parishes, based on Episcopal discernment, to offer prayers and blessing (but not the nuptial blessing) to same-sex couples in stable, long-term, committed relationships, as an extension of the current pastoral norms.
* Episcopal guidelines on the nature of the prayers/blessing will be established. A particular rite will not be authorized.
* Episcopal permission for blessings will be required.
* Evaluation of this pastoral response will be undertaken after one year.
* No parish or clergy will be required to participate.
* A Bishop’s Commission will be formed to create the guidelines, monitor activity and review.

Bishop Johnson said that it is too early to say what form the proposed prayers or blessings in the diocese will take. However, he emphasized that the bishops’ pastoral response does not include the provision for a marriage rite. He was clear in saying that any movement towards the recognition of same-sex unions as marriage or the approval of authorized liturgical rites would fall under the purview of General Synod and not diocesan authority. The Bishop emphasized that no parish or priest would be asked to act contrary to their conscience, and that pastoral generosity must also be extended to those who would oppose this proposal.

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Toronto Anglicans will start blessing same-sex relationships within a year, the Toronto Star has learned, a move that puts local churches at the forefront of the issue but could inflame an already divisive debate within the church.

“One of the chief purposes of the church is to provide care for people who come to the church in a particular need,” Toronto Bishop Colin Johnson told the Star in an exclusive interview.

The move, a first for any diocese in Canada, brings Toronto churches closer than any others in the country to allowing same-sex marriage blessings ”“ the most contentious issue facing Anglicanism today.

It stops just short, however, of offering blessings to gay marriages, offering them instead to couples in “stable long-term committed relationships,” according to a policy paper approved by the executive council of the diocese this week and obtained by the Star.

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Charlie Masters, general secretary of Duncan’s new church and its spokesperson in Canada, says the intention of setting up the Anglican Church in North America was to offer an alternative entity operating parallel to the established churches of Canada and the United States.

Breaking away was the first step. Being recognized as a province in the communion is the next. “We have organized ourselves as an Anglican province and are operating as a province,” says the soft-spoken Masters, who is also executive archdeacon of the Anglican Network in Canada.

The primates attending this week’s five-day meeting will be told about the constitution and canons of the new church in hopes they will support it being made the communion’s 39th province, with Duncan as primate. (Duncan could not be reached for comment.)

Masters believes the new church can bring unity to the communion. By providing a theological alternative to the liberal Canadian and American churches, he says, conservative Anglicans will no longer feel the need to break away.

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The staff of the Anglican Communion Office here quite outnumbers the accredited press and the lobby groups from both the right and left are nowhere to be seen. Have we reached a point in the life of the Communion where weariness and frustration over sexuality issues has run its course? Have people simply stopped coming because they know that nothing will change and that opinions are locked in no matter or how many more studies are mandated?

The primates’ four-day agenda has a few critical issues before it including discussions on Zimbabwe, global warming and a Christian response to the current crisis in the world economy. Other issues such as Gaza and other wars, violence, HIV/AIDS, human rights violations in many of the Communion’s provinces — one Primate was denied a visa to travel here — have not made it to the agenda.

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(ACNS) Following a private meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, His Holiness Pope Shenouda III, the Coptic Pope, received the Primates of the Anglican Communion at the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate in Alexandria on Saturday evening, 31 January. The Primates are meeting in Alexandria in the latest of their series of regular meetings.

In thanking Pope Shenouda for his warm welcome and hospitality the Archbishop of Canterbury drew attention to the significance of meeting together in the city where many of the universal doctrines of the Christian faith were formed and where the seeds of the Christian monastic movement had been sown in the fourth century.

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Archbishops of the Anglican Communion worldwide will tomorrow discuss a proposal that will allow the church to remain united as one body in spite of schismatic differences over the ordination of homosexuals and the blessing of gay marriages.

Archbishops of the 38 provinces worldwide are beginning a week-long meeting in Alexandria, Egypt where they will discuss a proposal to allow Anglican churches to remain “in communion” with other provinces that refuse to sign up to a new “covenant” or unity document.

Discussions to draft the new covenant, which sets out sanctions for provinces that breach accepted Anglican norms on issues such as gay consecrations, are expected to be complete by the summer with the covenant signed up to by provinces and ready for implementation within five years.

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African-Americans surpass others in the U.S. in a range of expressions of faith, from praying more to attending religious services more frequently, a new report shows.

“Compared with other racial and ethnic groups, African-Americans are among the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation, with fully 87 percent of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another,” states “A Religious Portrait of African-Americans,” released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life on Friday (Jan. 30.)

The analysis finds that:

— 79 percent of blacks say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 56 percent of all U.S. adults

— 76 percent say they pray on at least daily, compared to 58 percent of the total U.S. population

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T he new administration’s projected $825 billion stimulus package should create jobs not only in traditional ways, like infrastructure improvements on roads, bridges and school construction. It should also focus on offsetting the sharp rise in hunger and homelessness among the nation’s rapidly growing number of poor people.

Already, low-income advocates predict that people in deep poverty, that is, those with incomes of less than half the poverty line of $21,200 for a family of four, will increase by between five and six million if unemployment reaches 9 percent. Barbara Sard, a policy analyst at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, has said that such an increase would put as many as a million families at risk of housing instability and homelessness. Even those not yet in deep poverty could face homelessness because of home foreclosures that have already pushed many into the rental market, which, because of competition for affordable rental housing, has experienced an increased demand that in turn has caused rents to rise.

And yet, precisely at a time when help is most needed because of the escalating rate of unemployment, homeless prevention programs in some areas are being cut back because of state and local budget shortfalls.

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On the final day of its three-day meeting here, the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council passed a draft budget for the 2010-2012 triennium that reflected the effects of the world’s financial crisis.

The draft budget calls for increasing the draw on endowment income from 5 percent to 5.5 percent, deferring debt repayment, freezing church center salaries in 2010, cutting most non-personnel church center costs by 9 percent and slightly reducing personnel costs.

Episcopal Church Treasurer Kurt Barnes told the council January 30 that the world economy has not been in this sort of financial crisis “since the time of the Depression,” and thus the council “must take very, very serious action. We are not forgetting the concept of abundance, but we also cannot forget the concept of being good stewards for all those who come after us.”

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It was not quite another tennis masterpiece. The much-anticipated rematch between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer lacked the consistent quality and, above all, the crescendo finish of their five-act drama in fading light at Wimbledon last year.

But this Australian Open final was certainly epic entertainment, too. It also lasted five sets and more than four hours. It also featured plenty of abrupt reversals of fortune and unexpected breaks of serve, and it also ended with Nadal triumphant and Federer devastated.

Federer, the 27-year-old Swiss star, needed just one more victory to match Pete Sampras’s all-time record of 14 Grand Slam singles titles. But he faded badly in the final set on Sunday night and was then unable to keep his composure after Nadal’s 7-5, 3-6, 7-6 (3), 3-6, 6-2 victory.

In the post-match ceremony, Federer choked up after receiving the runner’s-up plate from one of his idols, Rod Laver, and was unable to get more than a few sentences into his speech to the crowd before he began to cry in earnest.

I ended up only catching part of it this morning on the early run before I had to leave the house. What a rivalry. Congratulations to nadal. Read it all

The lessons for today? So far, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have done a good job of consolidating the commercial and investment banking sector into four giants: Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. But based on those banks’ continued depressed stock prices and the high cost of credit they are being forced to pay, it is clear that the market is not yet convinced of their health.

Instead of printing up money to create a huge, unwieldy “bad bank,” I would recommend creating separate bad banks for each of these four institutions (and perhaps some others), and financing them by having the government assume an amount of each good bank’s corporate debt equal to the value of the troubled assets put into the bad banks.

It would work this way: The managements of each of the four banks would be given a one-time opportunity to sell any assets (from vanilla domestic corporate bonds to the most exotic foreign derivatives) to a new bad bank owned entirely by the government. The only condition would be that the four big banks would have to convey the assets at year-end, audited book values, not at some guess of what they might be worth down the road.

While these assets are “toxic” to the banks right now because they are illiquid, volatile and at depressed prices, the government can hold on to them until they regain value, making it an investment for the taxpayer that could pay off handsomely in the end. The public would have transparency, as it would know what the assets are and how they are liquidated over time.

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