As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tours East Asia this week, her first official trip as secretary of state, she may find something surprising: Respect for the United States remains strong. Unlike in the rest of the world, America’s reputation in Asia remains robust.

New evidence suggests that in East Asia, U.S. “soft power” – the power to persuade others to do what you want them to do by attraction rather than coercion – has actually increased over the past eight years. Despite China’s rise, the United States remains the leading source of soft power in the region.

This is one of the principal findings of a 2008 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on “Soft Power in Asia” (www.thechicagocouncil.org/softpowerindex). Extensive polling was done in the United States and the four nations Secretary Clinton will visit – Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and China, as well as in Vietnam. The survey produced some surprising and important findings.

Every country surveyed ranked the United States ahead of China in soft power….

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If you jumble together the five most popular American metro areas – Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando and Tampa – you get an image of the American Dream circa 2009. These are places where you can imagine yourself with a stuffed garage – filled with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots and boating equipment. These are places you can imagine yourself leading an active outdoor lifestyle.

These are places (except for Orlando) where spectacular natural scenery is visible from medium-density residential neighborhoods, where the boundary between suburb and city is hard to detect….

They offer at least the promise of friendlier neighborhoods, slower lifestyles and service-sector employment. They are neither traditional urban centers nor atomized suburban sprawl. They are not, except for Seattle, especially ideological, blue or red.

They offer the dream, so characteristic on this continent, of having it all: the machine and the garden. The wide-open space and the casual wardrobes.

I do not know how others will react to this, but it made me sad. Jesus came that we may have life, and have it abundantly (John 10). Somehow this version of the American “dream” gives too much emphasis to the pursuit of happiness defined in individual and materialistic terms. What about life and liberty? What about the common good and the importance of that critical word “we” in the Declaration of Independence? Just asking. In any event, read it all–KSH.

You can find all the links here.

Chinese police and officials from the State Administration of Religious Affairs (SARA) have tried to ban a conference of pastors in Shanghai, warning that it would be banned ”˜with coercive measures’.

According to the China Aid Association, on the morning of February 10, 2009, six Chinese police officers and visited the chief pastor Cui Quan of Wanbang Missionary Church of Shanghai and ordered him to cancel the fourth Seminar of Chinese Urban House Church Pastors Fellowship.

Pastor Cui Quan argued and claimed that the church has its rights. He also pointed out that as the authorities tried to ban the conference at the last moment when most attendants to the seminar had already arrived and checked into hotels, it was really impossible to cancel the conference by that time.

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An examination of how the economic stimulus plan will affect Americans–read it all.

President Barack Obama signed his $787 billion recovery package into law on Tuesday with a statement that it would “set our economy on a firmer foundation.” His press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said Obama has not ruled out a second stimulus package.

The president said he would not pretend “that today marks the end of our economic problems.”

“Nor does it constitute all of what we have to do to turn our economy around,” Obama said at the signing ceremony in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. “But today does mark the beginning of the end, the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the way of playoffs.”

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(ACNS) The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is pleased to appoint the Revd Canon Joanna Udal to serve as the Secretary for Anglican Communion Affairs, based at Lambeth Palace.

She said: “It’s an exciting time to be involved as we try to build on the positive encounters of the Lambeth Conference and to rebuild mutual trust and recognition. We’re challenged to keep uppermost that God’s mission is for the world, as together we seek to be conformed to Christ in our identity and in our common life.”

Since 2001, Canon Joanna has been serving in the Sudan as Assistant to the Archbishop of the Sudan, an appointment made jointly through the Church Mission Society and Lambeth Palace. In this work she has travelled widely in Sudan and internationally, supporting the Archbishop in his public ministry.

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The administration stepped back over the weekend from naming a “car czar,” as it had planned, to oversee the restructuring. But according to people familiar with the task force, it named former Lazard Freres & Co. investment banker Ron Bloom a key adviser. Mr. Bloom, who made a name advising U.S. steelworkers to accept major concessions in several bankruptcy cases, is expected to take the task force’s lead role, a senior U.S. Treasury official says.

People who know Mr. Bloom expect him to be tough on the auto makers, the United Auto Workers and other parties involved in their restructuring.

“The management of the Big Three are probably not going to like what Ron Bloom has to say; the UAW is not going to like what Ron Bloom has to say; and certainly the stockholders and creditors will not like what he has to say,” said Michael Psaros, a co-founder of private-equity group KPS Capital Partners, who has worked with Mr. Bloom in and out of bankruptcy courts. He adds that Mr. Bloom has “repeatedly shown an ability to transform struggling companies into profitable going concerns.”

Read it all from the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal. Note especially the section on “dentist-chair bargaining;” it sounds very painful to me.

The firefighter crawled on his stomach through the pitch-black apartment, the smoke so thick he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Somewhere inside was a baby and he had to find her.

A window broke, light filled the room, and he saw her lying in her crib, dressed only in a diaper, unconscious. Soot covered her tiny nose. She wasn’t breathing and had no pulse.

He grabbed her and breathed life into her as he ran from the apartment.

A newspaper photograph captured their image – a white firefighter from South Boston with his lips pressed to the mouth of a black baby from the Roxbury public housing development – at a time when riots sparked by racial tensions were burning down American cities.

But despite this most intimate of introductions, they remained strangers. William Carroll won a commendation for the rescue, stayed on the job another 34 years, and retired. Evangeline Harper grew up, lost her family to drugs and illness, had six children of her own, and became a nursing and teaching assistant. And through it all someone would often tell her the story about the day she almost died and the man who would not let it happen. She always wanted to meet him and say thank you.

Yesterday, more than 40 years after the fire, she finally did.

Read it all and watch the video.

It seems like politicians for months have been throwing around numbers in the billions and saying that unless the government acts right now everything will get worse. What is going on?

The economic system was hit was a flurry of crises at roughly the same time, and there isn’t a single solution to all of the problems, even though they are connected.

What is the housing crisis?

Both political parties have supported the idea that individuals should own their own homes. But in pursuing that goal, some financial institutions lent money to people who could not afford the long-term commitment, which often included rising interest rates after an initial period of low payments. Critics complain that a variety of financing vehicles snared people into impossible situations, especially as prices of homes fell and the monthly mortgage payment rose.

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Seattle Washington: In order to pay for a court ordered $22M rebate on water bills for illegal charges the city is adding a surcharge to water bill to pay for the rebate. The surcharge is expected to be a net gain for city of about $5M.

[Tim] Carson reveals an astounding ignorance of facts in his commentary, which is largely an attack on the Rt. Rev. Jack L. Iker, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.

First, he alleges that Iker “has withdrawn from the established Diocese of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A.,” and he challenges the legitimacy of the body of which Iker is chief pastor.

But Carson ignores the fact that at the November 2008 convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, a resolution to realign with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone was adopted by a 78 percent majority of the clergy voting and 80 percent of lay delegates. This was the second such vote in two years, as any amendment to the constitution of the Diocese requires a concurrent majority of the vote of both orders, clergy and lay, in two consecutive conventions.

This was not the unilateral action of the bishop. Nor was it the creation of a “newly founded” diocese, as Carson claims. It was, in fact, the constitutionally legitimate action of the diocese “that has been here all along” (to use, ironically, the words Carson intended as sarcasm).

Carson then alleges that “it only seems right to the good bishop [Iker] that all of the assets and congregations should stay with him, even if he cashes in his chips, leaves the mother ship and affiliates with an African one.”

Here again, Carson ignores facts.

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The national Episcopal Church has asked to join a lawsuit over who owns an estimated $20 million held in the name of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh.

Since Oct. 4, when the majority of the diocese voted to secede from the national church and realign with an Anglican province in South America, there have been two rival bodies called the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh.

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The Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee filed a lawsuit Monday against St. Edmund’s Church, an Elm Grove congregation that split from the Episcopal Church in December and claimed control of the church buildings and real estate.

The diocese contends that it is the rightful owner of the property and is asking a Waukesha County Circuit Court judge to order St. Edmund’s, church leaders and others named in the lawsuit to relinquish control of the property.

Eleven people and the church are named as defendants in the lawsuit.

“We are saddened to take this action, and it has not been taken lightly,” said Bishop Steven A. Miller in a statement issued by the diocese.

“It’s an unfortunate situation for all involved. But under our canon law, all parish property ultimately belongs to the diocese, and we have to enforce that law for the unity and well-being of the Church.”

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A wonderful piece from over the weekend, especially touching to me is the mother’s face as she describes what happened toward the end. Watch it all.

I recommend the video report, but if you do not have the capacity to view it read it all. I also recommend CNBC’s House of Cards which I managed to get to over the weekend.

The criminal part of this boondoggle is divided into two parts. The first is the Democrats promised to post the bill a full 48 hours before the vote was taken to allow members of the public to see what they were getting for their money. Both parties voted unanimously to do this … and they lied.

It didn’t happen. Why am I not surprised? Congress lying to the American people has become part of their job description. They can’t be trusted on anything anymore.

I’m sure part of the reason there was no time for the public to read the bill was the 11th-hour internecine warfare between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

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Check it out.

The religious order banning women from dressing like tomboys was bad enough. But the fatwa by this country’s leading clerics against yoga was the last straw.

“They have never even done yoga,” said Zainah Anwar, a founder of a Malaysian women’s rights group called Sisters in Islam.

Anwar argues that the edict, issued late last year by the National Fatwa Council of Malaysia, is pure patriarchy. Islam, she says, is only a cover.

It was frustrations like those that drew several hundred Muslim women to a conference in this Muslim-majority country over the weekend. Their mission was to come up with ways to demand equal rights for women. And their tools, however unlikely, were the tenets of Islam itself.

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Close on the heels of the pope’s rehabilitation of a group of schismatic bishops, including one who denied the Holocaust, a second scandal has compounded a debate within the church over whether Pope Benedict XVI’s focus on doctrine and his perceived insensitivity to political tone are alienating mainstream Catholics and undermining the church’s moral authority.

On Sunday, a priest known for such provocative statements as blaming the sins of New Orleanians for Hurricane Katrina asked the pope to rescind his appointment as an auxiliary bishop in Austria.

The affairs have engendered a storm of criticism of the church hierarchy and led to frantic efforts to mollify angry and confused parishioners around the globe, while the latest controversy has raised concerns that the actions could be part of a disturbing pattern.

The Vatican expert George Weigel, in a recent essay in First Things, an American religion journal, criticized the Vatican for its “chaos, confusion and incompetence.”

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When G. K. Chesterton died in 1936, the obituary in the Manchester Guardian dismissed the description of him as a philosopher as “very ill-chosen”. He had, rather, “a profusion of fresh and original ideas, but they owed more to the spontaneous inspirations of an enormously zestful temperament than to continuous or connected thought”. To this anonymous obituary, his friend Hilaire Belloc replied six days later in the Observer, with the view that “The intellectual side of him has been masked for many and for some hidden by his delight in the exercise of words and especially in the comedy of words”. The most sustained defence of “the intellectual side” of GKC remains Hugh Kenner’s classic short exposition, Paradox in Chesterton (1948). Since then, there has been a steady stream of books, usually by Roman Catholics, more or less ploddingly demonstrating Chesterton’s orthodoxy ”“ which is a different exercise from winkling out the peculiar charms of his playful mind.

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy painstakingly follows the development of GK’s ideas from the schoolboy poet and debater of the 1880s to the author of Orthodoxy in 1908. William Oddie’s book demonstrates, sometimes with a little too much bluster, that although Chesterton did not actually become a Roman Catholic until 1922, his “position” as a robust defender of Catholic Orthodoxy was well in place fifteen years earlier. It is also Oddie’s intention to demonstrate that Chesterton absorbed many of his Catholic ideas not, as might previously have been supposed, from his friend Belloc, nor from Fr O’Connor, the model for Father Brown, but from his Anglo-Catholic wife Frances Blogg, and from some of her high-church heroes, most notably Charles Gore, Conrad Noel and Percy Dearmer.

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Blogs ”” an ugly word, but now unavoidable ”” were born with the internet. As soon as people started to use the technology that would link computers, they started leaving messages. In the 1980s, these were “pinned” on virtual “bulletin boards”. Then, in the early 1990s, online diaries appeared, personal journals to be seen by the entire online world. As internet use spread, people were dazzled by their power to connect and communicate. But they didn’t just want to stare at pages. They wanted, above all, to make their mark on the explosively expanding world of cyberspace. So, in the mid-1990s, the online diary became the web log, or blog.

Blogs let you jot down what you think, feel or know and, at the speed of light, publish it to the world. They now cover everything from quantum theory to politics to low-life celebrity gossip and intimate personal confessions. They can be vast publications written by teams of writers, or fragmented jottings from a student pad. They are the most successful, addictive, potent and radical application of all the new technologies and applications spawned by the personal computer.

The total number of blogs is thought to be approaching 200m, 73m of them in China. I can see no reason why there shouldn’t be hundreds of millions more, because, you see, blogging is like smoking or gambling ”” hard to give up.

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Income tax refunds and state employee paychecks could be late after Republican leaders and the Democratic governor clashed Monday over how to solve a cash-flow problem.

Payments to Medicaid providers and schools also could be delayed.

“We are out of cash, in essence,” state budget director Duane Goossen said.

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On the plaza in front of Higgins Hall at Boston College, there is a new oversized statue of St. Ignatius of Loyola, robes flowing and his hand over his heart. For the university’s nearby Newton campus, a large statue of St. Thomas More is being designed.

On each side of the foyer in Lyons Hall is a new mosaic, one depicting Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic worker movement, and the other Pedro Arrupe, a former superior general of the Jesuit order.

And suddenly, in all 151 classrooms, there is a Catholic icon, in most cases, a crucifix above the lintel.

Students and faculty returned to campus after winter break to find that Boston College had quietly completed, without announcement or fanfare, an eight-year project to dramatically increase the presence of Roman Catholic religious symbols on campus. The additions are subtle but significant, as the university joins other Catholic institutions around the nation in visibly reclaiming its Catholic identity.

“The Christian art reflects our pride in and commitment to our religious heritage,” said Jack Dunn, BC’s spokesman.

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Reality check: The “stimulus” that President Obama will sign Monday is a band-aid. If Irving Fisher, who by some accounts was our finest American economist, was right, such a stimulus is useful in that it helps those who are unemployed and replaces some lost consumer spending; but the real work that must be done is to get the credit system flowing again. I don’t have the space to go into that economic debate tonight, but it is at the core of the problem. It is Keynes vs. Fisher, von Mises vs. Friedman. It is, as Lacy Hunt says, “The Grand Experiment.” After 70 years, we are going to see who is right. My money is on Fisher. It is not an experiment that is going to be fun to live through; but when we have the next debt deflation in 70 years or so, our grandchildren may know what to do.

We will see another stimulus package, probably by the end of the year. This time it will hopefully provide real stimulus. Much of the current version is simply an increase in federal spending that will be hard to rein in. And please, I am not being partisan. That is the analysis of many of Obama’s advisors. And it goes back to the debate I mentioned. Keynes would argue that it is in fact stimulus. The other three economists would have differing views. And like I said, in a few years we are going to know who was right.

But the heavy lifting is going to be done by the Fed. Watch their balance sheet expand. And watch Treasury and the FDIC come back and ask for massive amounts of money to take over very large insolvent banks. Stay tuned.

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Human Rights Watch is reporting that the rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) brutally slaughtered at least 100 Congolese civilians in the Kivu provinces in the east between January 20 and February 8.

According to reports, HRW researchers interviewed dozens of victims and witnesses who recently arrived at camps near Goma, the capital of North Kivu. Their accounts are the first reports of killings of civilians by the FDLR since joint operations between Rwandan Defence Forces and the Congolese army against the group began on January 20.

“The FDLR have a very ugly past, but we haven’t seen this level of violence in years,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, the senior researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch. “We’ve documented many abuses by FDLR forces, but these are killings of ghastly proportions.”

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I keep bumping into people who haven’t seen this–take a look. Before you do, take a guess at the percentage of the Midwest population that claims affiliation with mainline Protestantism.

If mishandled by the world policy establishment, this debacle is big enough to shatter the fragile banking systems of Western Europe and set off round two of our financial Götterdämmerung.

Austria’s finance minister Josef Pröll made frantic efforts last week to put together a €150bn rescue for the ex-Soviet bloc. Well he might. His banks have lent €230bn to the region, equal to 70pc of Austria’s GDP.

“A failure rate of 10pc would lead to the collapse of the Austrian financial sector,” reported Der Standard in Vienna. Unfortunately, that is about to happen.

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As Chair of the House of Bishops Theological Group, I am glad to reaffirm the biblical teaching on the utter uniqueness of the God who reveals himself to Israel but also on the universal significance of this one God, the source and ground of all that exists, for all peoples and the whole world. The New Testament tells us, and the Catholic Creeds declare, that, in Jesus Christ, God himself has entered into human history and we encounter him in this human person. But because it is God who is encountered, the particular becomes full of universal significance.

Of course, it can be shown from Scripture that God reveals something of himself through the created order, in conscience and in the spiritual awareness of which everyone is capable. But we should note that such knowledge cannot save of itself not least because it is affected by human sinfulness and rebellion. The early Apologists for the faith believed that, even in midst of falsehood and superstition, people could know something of God because they were made in the divine image, because the Logos, the Eternal Word, incarnate in Jesus Christ, illuminates the minds and hearts of all (John 1:9), even if they turn away from this illumination, and because the Holy Spirit is everywhere and always convincing people of sin and righteousness and judgement (John 16:8-11). For the Apologists, however, such knowledge pointed to and was fulfilled in Jesus Christ; his Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection.

We recognise God’s presence and work in our world precisely and authentically only because of his revelation in the call, liberation and history of his Chosen People and supremely, of course, in Jesus Christ. This history of salvation and judgement is the touchstone, or canon, by which we are able to recognise God’s providence anywhere.

The Anglican formularies affirm such an understanding of salvation history. No-one can be saved by any ”˜natural’ knowledge of God, nor by religious observance but only by God’s graciousness, fully revealed in Jesus Christ.

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