Six months before General Convention, it is already clear that dioceses want the triennial gathering to tackle a range of issues including same-gender relationships, criteria for consenting to episcopal consecrations, the environment, the economy, financing theological education and liturgical change.

In the run-up to the convention, which will take place July 8-17 in Anaheim, Calif., two issues in the debate over homosexuality have seen the most reaction from diocesan conventions. One involves blessing same-gender relationships, especially in states that grant some legal status to those relationships. The other centers on consenting to the episcopal election of individuals “whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion,” as stated in Resolution B033 from the 2006 General Convention.

Read it all.

These developments present very basic and very obvious civil rights concerns. But they also raise a deeper, fundamental question that Israelis generally prefer to avoid: Is it possible to be both a Jewish state and a democratic state? Or, put another way: Can a nation founded as a Jewish homeland — with a “right of return” for diaspora Jews but no one else, a Star of David on the flag and a national anthem that evokes the “yearning” of Jews for Zion — ever treat non-Jews as true, equal citizens?

Israel has tried to balance these conflicting ideas since the state was created. Its Declaration of Statehood, issued on May 14, 1948, asserted the “right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate … in their own sovereign state,” while also promising “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” But today, although Israel has a vibrant democracy in many ways, that tension remains, especially as the Arab population grows faster than the Jewish population. What would happen to the Jewish state, Israeli leaders worry, if Arabs outnumbered Jews?

These are complicated questions that go to the heart of Israel’s very identity….

Read it all.

Timothy Geithner, the brand new Treasury secretary, was panned last week for how he unveiled the Obama administration’s plan to rescue the financial system from the bankers who broke it.

Mr. Geithner was not especially articulate, his critics said, and he provided only an outline of an outline, not the detailed blueprint people anticipated and wanted.

To a degree, one of Mr. Geithner’s biggest problems was not of his own making. His boss, President Obama, had fanned expectations for his debut as Mr. Fix-It, leaving the impression that it would be boffo. It wasn’t.

Why is anyone surprised that Mr. Geithner’s Financial Stability Plan lacked details? We are still in sugar-coating mode ”” yes, we have a problem, government officials contend. But they can handle it. Don’t you sweat the details, dear taxpayers.

Read it all.

Deeply moving–watch it all.

The death count is expected to surpass 200 in the aftermath of the most devastating wildfires in Australia’s history. More than 1,800 homes have been destroyed, and now a man has been charged with arson in one fire that killed 21 people.

Host Scott Simon speaks with Richard Glover from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for an update on the devastating wildfires.

This is a fantastic interview. I still casn’t wrap my mind around the scale of the problem. Listen to it all.

A Williamsburg priest who says homosexuality should not exclude people from full involvement in the Episcopal Church will be consecrated this week as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia.

The Rev. Herman “Holly” Hollerith IV said he supports the church leadership’s position that all baptized Christians should have equal rights to a full life in the church. But full life in the church doesn’t guarantee ordination, he added.

Hollerith will receive the title “right reverend” on Friday during a 7 p.m. service at William and Mary Hall. The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the New York-based Episcopal Church, will lead the consecration, to be held in conjunction with the diocese’s Annual Council meeting Saturday and Sunday at the Williamsburg Lodge.

“Full membership in the church is not confined to heterosexuals,“ added Hollerith, 53, who has spent almost half his life in ministry. He will be the 10th bishop of the diocese.

Read it all.

Decades before she was elected presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, when even the priesthood seemed an unlikely calling, a teenage Katharine Jefferts Schori wrestled with big questions through the night.

In the darkness of the Stanford University chapel, she pondered the usual puzzles of young adulthood: Where do I belong? Why am I here? But Jefferts Schori was also hunting bigger fish””how to reconcile her Christian faith with the science she was learning as a biology major.

“How to make sense of the wonders of creation and the scientific descriptions of how they came to be,” Jefferts Schori recalled in an interview in her office here, “I hadn’t had any conscious assistance in how to deal with that as a child.”

Read it all.

The authorities are still at a loss on the best course of action 18 months after the credit crisis broke out. That’s left them pursuing a disjointed approach as the global economy deteriorates further….

—From a Bloomberg article on the G7

Here in the UK each of us can point to new or existing church projects to help those in need. In London there are night shelters, food banks, debt counselling and youth employment projects to name but a few. The ARC Addington Fund continues to help farmers and those in rural communities facing hardship; whilst in Leeds the church has been involved in cracking down on doorstep lenders seeking to exploit the most economically vulnerable.

Our strength as a Church lies not only in our vision but also in our presence. Our place in every parish in England gives us an unparalleled opportunity to make this fresh vision a reality.

We share a hope, born of the incarnation, which goes far beyond economic recovery. It reaches into the heart of every man, woman and child. Yes we lament our situation, but we do so knowing that our song will finish in hope: the hope in Christ’s message to us. “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive for ever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and Hades. Do not be afraid”. (Revelation 1:17-18).

Read it all.

It was the biggest bill of the year, a giant expansion of government spending.

Top members of Congress were incensed that they were cut out of final negotiations between the House and Senate. They complained that the legislation was the product of just one party with only a few select members of the opposition invited to play a role.

But the Medicare drug plan passed anyway in 2003 when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress. So it was hardly novel this week when Republicans protested vigorously that their legislative rights had been violated as the Democratic-led Congress pushed through the $787 billion economic stimulus bill with just three Republican votes in the Senate. Only the party labels had changed.

In truth, regular order ”” as following the Congressional rule book is known on Capitol Hill ”” has not been occurring very regularly in the House and Senate for years. And both parties are to blame.

Read it all.

Check it out. Also, the whole filing is here.

US President Barack Obama has welcomed Congress’s approval of his $787bn (£548bn) economic stimulus package.

He described it as a “historic step” and “major milestone on our road to recovery”, and is expected to sign the bill into law early next week.

The Senate approved the measure with just three Republican votes, hours after the House of Representatives backed it without Republican support.

Mr Obama has said the plan will “save or create more than 3.5 million jobs”.

Republicans argue the tax cuts are insufficient, and that the economy will be saddled with debt for years to come.

Read it all.

16:48ET BULLETIN — WORLD IN A “SERIOUS RECESSION”, SAYS IMF CHIEF.

The Synod, the governing body of the state religion, voted overwhelmingly in favour of an amnesty for those whose cases are still being decided on, and said all those who want to live here should be allowed to work.

It also said that a solution must be found to the “intolerable” situation of people who are refused leave to remain but cannot return to their home countries, and that children and families must no longer be detained in Immigration Removal Centres.

The Rev Ruth Worsley, a priest in the diocese of Southwell & Nottingham who tabled the motion on the subject, said: “The financial cost to our country, as well as the human cost which leaves people in limbo for years, not knowing what their future might hold, seems unconscionable.

“With the arrival of the credit crunch, the subsequent loss of jobs, the recent call for British jobs for British people, there is a danger that we become inward-looking and even xenophobic.

“But the Gospel tells us that we are not a tribal nation but a global family.”

Read it all.

This is really helpful–read it all.

The Obama administration is committing huge sums of money to rescuing banks, but the veterans of Japan’s banking crisis have three words for the Americans: more money, faster.

The Japanese have been here before. They endured a “lost decade” of economic stagnation in the 1990s as their banks labored under crippling debt, and successive governments wasted trillions of yen on half-measures.

Only in 2003 did the government finally take the actions that helped lead to a recovery: forcing major banks to submit to merciless audits and declare bad debts; spending two trillion yen to effectively nationalize a major bank, wiping out its shareholders; and allowing weaker banks to fail.

By then, Tokyo’s main Nikkei stock index had lost almost three-quarters of its value. The country’s public debt had grown to exceed its gross domestic product, and deflation stalked the land. In the end, real estate prices fell for 15 consecutive years.

More alarming? Some students of the Japanese debacle say they see a similar train wreck heading for the United States.

“I thought America had studied Japan’s failures,” said Hirofumi Gomi, a top official at Japan’s Financial Services Agency during the crisis. “Why is it making the same mistakes?”

Read it all.

Once again, family-friendly, uplifting and inspiring movies drew far more viewers in 2008 than films with themes of despair, or leftist political agendas. Sex, drugs and antireligious themes were not automatic sellers, either. Among the 25 top-grossing movies alone, 14 out of 25 had strong or very strong Christian, redemptive and moral content, and nearly all had at least some such content.

Values of importance to all people of faith were not the only ingredients in many of 2008’s top movies. As in past years, films with strong pro-capitalist content — extolling free-market principles or containing positive portrayals of real or fictional businessmen and entrepreneurs — tended to make the most money. The hero of the biggest success of the year, “The Dark Knight,” is a billionaire capitalist who, disguised as Batman, defends Gotham City and its residents from a crazed, anarchistic terrorist criminal. In “Iron Man,” the second-most popular movie with American and Canadian moviegoers in 2008, a capitalist playboy and billionaire defense contractor stops working against the interests of America and its citizens and uses his wealth to defend America and its free-market values.

I would replace “uplifting” with wholesome. Read it all–KSH.

The U.S. banking system is close to being insolvent, and unless we want to become like Japan in the 1990s — or the United States in the 1930s — the only way to save it is nationalization.

As free-market economists teaching at a business school in the heart of the world’s financial capital, we feel downright blasphemous proposing an all-out government takeover of the banking system. But the U.S. financial system has reached such a dangerous tipping point that little choice remains. And while Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s recent plan to save it has many of the right elements, it’s basically too late.

The subprime mortgage mess alone does not force our hand; the $1.2 trillion it involves is just the beginning of the problem. Another $7 trillion — including commercial real estate loans, consumer credit-card debt and high-yield bonds and leveraged loans — is at risk of losing much of its value. Then there are trillions more in high-grade corporate bonds and loans and jumbo prime mortgages, whose worth will also drop precipitously as the recession deepens and more firms and households default on their loans and mortgages.

Read it all.

In the past, the Anglican Communion “has been held together by a common history, similar ”¦ ways of worship and the so-called ‘bonds of affection,'” he said. “In a rapidly globalizing world and a fast-developing communion, these are no longer enough.”

Nazir-Ali was introducing a motion that synod “do take note” of a Church of England report that responds to the latest draft (St. Andrew’s Draft) of the Anglican covenant.

“The main purpose of the covenant is inclusion rather than exclusion,” Nazir-Ali said. “We cannot forget, nevertheless, that these questions have arisen for us because of the need for adequate discipline in the communion on matters which affect everyone.”

During a one-hour synod debate, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams disagreed with Nazir-Ali’s position on the covenant. “We mustn’t have excessive expectations of the covenant,” Williams said, cautioning against it being a legal instrument. “It’s part of an ongoing inquiry of what a global communion might look like. At every stage it is something which churches voluntarily are invited to enter into.”

However, the Rev. Canon Chris Sugden of the Diocese of Oxford said he believes that the covenant should be “far more than an expression of fellowship,” and instead be “a matter of legislation and a basis for governance.”

Read it all.

Bernard Madoff, the disgraced financier accused of the biggest fraud in corporate history, was accused of having ”˜blood on his hands’ after a former soldier killed himself over the loss of his family’s life savings.

The son of William Foxton, 65, said his father was so distraught after losing his family’s entire savings in the alleged Ponzi scheme that he shot himself in a park in Southampton on Tuesday with a handgun.

Mr Madoff, 70, is under penthouse arrest and 24-hour surveillance after being arrested on December 11. He was accused of one count of securities fraud after authorities said he admitted to running a scheme over many years with losses of $50 billion.

Read it all.

Anglicans were commanded to “go forth and evangelise” yesterday in a dramatic assertion of missionary fervour that could jeopardise carefully built-up relations with Muslims, Jews and other faiths.

The established Church of England put decades of liberal-inspired political correctness behind it in a move that led one bishop to condemn in anger the “evangelistic rants”.

For Muslims, to convert to another religion is condemned as apostasy.

The Church’s General Synod, meeting in London, overwhelmingly backed a motion to force its bishops to report on their “understanding of the uniqueness of Christ in Britain’s multifaith society” and offer guidance in sharing “the gospel of salvation” with people of other faiths and none.

Read it all.

As [Rowan] Williams began his tenure as archbishop in 2003, though, the ordination of Robinson sent the issue of gay bishops to the head of the agenda. By last summer, with the Lambeth Conference approaching, schism seemed inevitable. Some bishops opposed to homosexual clergy held a rival conference in Jerusalem, denouncing Williams as a liberal pawn. Traditionalists announced plans to “go over” to the Roman Catholic Church or form their own church unless Williams got rid of Robinson. Gay activists circulated an old essay by Williams in which he had eloquently celebrated gay and lesbian relationships; the commentariat mocked him as a holy fool for some approving remarks he had made about Islamic law. Friends of Williams said he might resign. “God has given you all the gifts,” one friend told him, “and as your punishment, he has made you archbishop of Canterbury.”

The schism hasn’t come””not yet. The Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest group of Christians after the Catholics and the Orthodox, is still standing””a “hugely untidy but very lovable” body, in the words of its most famous member, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel laureate. But its unity has been compromised. In December, a half-dozen bishops broke with the Episcopal Church in the U.S. and announced their plans to found a rival Anglican Community for North America.

It is now, with his office under pressure from both left and right, that Rowan Williams’s real work is beginning. Now he must persuade the aggrieved, quarrelsome people he leads to bear with one another once and for all.

Read it all.

The Covenant process is ongoing but it has been clear for some time that it will not have the teeth to address the problems which precipitated it. It is also clear that it will take a long long time before anything is achieved.

Read it all

Scientists have unraveled the genetic code of the common cold ”” all 99 known strains of it, to be exact.

But don’t expect the feat to lead to a cure for the sniffling any time soon. It turns out that rhinoviruses are even more complicated than researchers originally thought.

In fact, the genetic blueprints showed that you can catch two separate strains of cold at the same time ”” and those strains then can swap their genetic material inside your body to make a whole new strain.

It’s why we’ll never have a vaccine for the common cold, said biochemist Ann Palmenberg of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the three teams that assembled the family tree of the world’s rhinoviruses.

“No vaccine, but maybe a drug,” she said.

Read it all.

President Barack Obama, signaling early in his administration that religion belongs in the public discourse, has promised to open a big tent to voices from across the spectrum of belief without crossing boundaries separating church and state.

The Democrat’s inaugural pomp was steeped in prayer, and one of his first proclamations included a shout out to “an awesome God.” Last week, Obama used the platform of the National Prayer Breakfast to unveil a new-look White House Office on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that features a team of policy advisers from both religious and secular social service circles. Most are ideological allies, but not all.

The question is whether such moves will amount to symbolic window dressing or progress finding common ground on moral issues without stepping on traditional culture-war land mines.

Read it all.

Some of the large banks in the United States, according to economists and other finance experts, are like dead men walking.

A sober assessment of the growing mountain of losses from bad bets, measured in today’s marketplace, would overwhelm the value of the banks’ assets, they say. The banks, in their view, are insolvent.

None of the experts’ research focuses on individual banks, and there are certainly exceptions among the 50 largest banks in the country. Nor do consumers and businesses need to fret about their deposits, which are insured by the U.S. government. And even banks that might technically be insolvent can continue operating for a long time, and could recover their financial health when the economy improves.

But without a cure for the problem of bad assets, the credit crisis that is dragging down the economy will linger, as banks cannot resume the ample lending needed to restart the wheels of commerce. The answer, say the economists and experts, is a larger, more direct government role than in the Treasury Department’s plan outlined this week.

Read it all.

The new director of national intelligence told Congress on Thursday that global economic turmoil and the instability it could ignite had outpaced terrorism as the most urgent threat facing the United States.

The assessment underscored concern inside America’s intelligence agencies not only about the fallout from the economic crisis around the globe, but also about long-term harm to America’s reputation. The crisis that began in American markets has already “increased questioning of U.S. stewardship of the global economy,” the intelligence chief, Dennis Blair, said.

Blair’s comments were particularly striking because they were delivered as part of a threat assessment to Congress that has customarily focused on issues like terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Blair singled out the economic downturn as “the primary near-term security concern” for the country, and he warned that if it continued to spread and deepen, it would contribute to unrest and imperil some governments.

“The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests,” he said.

Read it all.

Sen. Judd Gregg abruptly withdrew his nomination as commerce secretary Thursday, telling Politico that he “couldn’t be Judd Gregg” and serve in Barack Obama’s Cabinet.

The White House ”” where some aides were caught off guard by the withdrawal ”” initially responded harshly to Gregg’s announcement, portraying the New Hampshire Republican as someone who sought the job and then had a “change of heart.”

In a statement, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Gregg had “reached out to the president and offered his name for secretary of commerce” ”” and that he’d promised that, “despite past disagreements about policies, he would support, embrace and move forward with the president’s agenda.”

Read it all.

Among the many quotes that are mistakenly attributed to William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott’s “Oh, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive . . .” is surely one that ranks among those which are the most frequent to be so cited. (It in fact comes from his epic poem “Marmion, a Tale of Flodden Field” [scroll down to Canto VI, Stanza XVII, lines 532-33], written in 1808.) Be that as it may, the quote has proved its worth by describing so aptly the results of deception as a “tangled web”, which all too frequently catches up the deceiver who spun it.

In this post, I want to point up a classic example of the improviser’s art, and to show how it will most likely catch up the improvisers in ways they surely did not imagine at the moment. At the same time, however, the facts I am about to show should let no Episcopal bishop remain comfortable in occupying his or her see. For the truth is that the innovation in this instance sets a most dangerous precedent. And given the manner in which the Episcopal Church (USA) reveres illegal precedent, as in the case of citing the depositions of Bishops Davies and Larrea to justify its subsequent “depositions” of Bishops Cox, Schofield and Duncan, the establishment of any precedent so egregious and illegal as the one I am about to relate should, as I say, be enough to make any Episcopal bishop insecure. For this precedent involves the transformation of the office of the Presiding Bishop from a “primus inter pares”, or first among equals, into a Metropolitan of the Church: a primate not in name only, but one in fact, who can swoop into any diocese and assume the Ecclesiastical Authority there.

Read it all.

It’s taken so long to get all this stuff on the balance sheets of these banks, it’s going to take a long time to get it off.

—Anthony Conroy, head equity trader for BNY ConvergEx in a CBS Marketwatch article today