For the few remaining members of the former St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal church in the Town of Tonawanda, starting over meant staying right where they were.

Just a dozen-or-so in number, they represent the beginning of a brand new church in the same old building, now called Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles, since the majority of their members left citing philosophical differences with the greater Episcopal Church late last year.

Those who remain sat in the very same pews they’ve occupied in some cases for decades Sunday, listening to a sermon about seeing beyond the old veneer.

“Allow your responses to change,” the Rev. Sarah Gordy told worshippers young and old, elaborating on a theme encouraging spiritual growth and leaving old assertions at the door as Lent approaches.

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What, then, unites us?

Belief in the USA, answers Lear ”” belief in a Constitution that has brilliantly stood the test of time; belief in shared history, holidays and rituals; belief in the Founding Fathers and the founding documents.

Lear is describing what academics call “civil religion” ”” a national creed of sorts that unites people across sectarian, ethnic and other divides, and calls them to revere the nation’s ideals with something approaching “religious” intensity.

Like many decent things, civil religion can have a downside. Some of the past century’s ugliest chapters of history had civil religion underpinnings, from Hitler’s and Pol Pot’s genocides to Mussolini’s fascism. Worship of the state can be disastrous theologically as well as politically, a clear violation of the admonition against false gods emblazoned in the Ten Commandments.

Is Lear dipping our toes into troublesome waters with his Born Again American campaign? At least a few think so.

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Watch it all–a very interesting report.

Vigeland: Let’s start with a little definition. How do you define ethical behavior?

Cohen: Ethics concerns are the effects of our actions on other people. And so ethical behavior is that which has a benign effect on other people, or certainly doesn’t do harm to other people.

Vigeland: Given that definition, you know, as we’ve just heard from Nancy, there’s a lot of, shall we say, frustration out there from people who say, “Look. I did nothing wrong. I was responsible. My neighbor’s going to get a bailout. Where’s mine, even though I don’t really need it?” How are we supposed to reconcile, I guess kind of the greater good, versus individual fairness, especially when it comes to the dollars in our pockets?

Cohen: It’s an understandable feeling, but it’s a poor guide to public policy. Once you start conjuring up this Victorian notion of the undeserving poor. Look, we help people who make mistakes all the time. When someone goes to the emergency room, the doctors don’t question their moral worth, they make a medical decision. We send the fire department to someone’s house without asking why did their house catch fire? What it is to live in a community is to shoulder the burden of responding to the needs of those around you, without making moral judgments.

Vigeland: But, you know, there seems to be this notion that helping people in trouble is equivalent to rewarding them for bad behavior. But, as you said, we choose as a society to help people all the time. Why is this different?

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Episcopalians loyal to the national Church in New York have formed a second Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth at a special convention held Feb 7.

The new diocese, formed around five congregations and individual Episcopalians who declined to follow the majority out of the Episcopal Church into the Province of the Southern Cone, invited the Bishop of Kentucky, the Rt Rev Edwin Gulick to serve as its provisional bishop for the next six months, and elected diocesan officers.

In November, the Synod of the Diocese of Fort Worth voted by a margin of 80 per cent to 20 per cent to quit the Episcopal Church for the temporary oversight of Presiding Bishop Gregory Venables and the Province of the Southern Cone. US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori responded by removing Bishop Jack Iker from the ordained ministry, saying she had accepted his voluntary renunciation of orders. However, Bishop Iker denied having given such a renunciation.

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Police are preparing for a “summer of rage” as victims of the economic downturn take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.

Britain’s most senior police officer with responsibility for public order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming “footsoldiers” in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police’s public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

Read it all.

I get a lot of questions these days about sources for understanding the current massive financial crisis. CNBC’s House of Cards is good, and Frontline’s recent effort was solid, but by far the best is this program from NPR. You can download a transcipt, but I highly recommend listening to the whole thing–KSH.

The Obama administration will begin taking a hard look at the financial condition of the country’s 20 biggest banks this week to judge whether they could hold up even if the downturn worsens further than policy makers already expect.

These reviews of the banks’ books, known as “stress tests,” are heightening a dilemma for Obama aides about how candid they should be about the health of banks like Citigroup and Bank of America. The tests are expected to take several weeks.

Bank shares were pummeled last week, partly out of deepening fear that the government might nationalize some of the banks. Officials consider many of the top 20 banks “too big to fail.”

The stress tests come as anxiety grows among investors and industry analysts about the U.S. Treasury Department’s broader plans to shore up the overall banking system. People familiar with the plan, which has been criticized by industry executives and analysts as vague, say its crucial details may not be ready for another few weeks.

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A new independent study sponsored by the Church of England rates the well-being of British and American children as worst among the world’s wealthiest nations.

More than 35,000 people contributed to the study, which concludes that rampant individualism and social irresponsibility have damaged the children of both societies.

Concentrating its criticism on Britain, the report cites evidence that “some of the worst rates of child unhappiness, poverty, family breakdown and child violence in the Western world” prevail in the United Kingdom.

The above headline is the one chosen by the local paper yesterday for this story. We have covered this before, but it is interesting to see how the American press is choosing to cover it. Read it all .

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh, N.C., is starting a new ministry to gays and lesbians. Yet those who have embraced that identity may not like it.

The ministry is called Courage, and its aim, in the words of its executive director, is to “assist men and women who are afflicted with the thorn of same-sex attraction.” A 29-year-old international ministry with about 90 U.S. chapters, the Courage Apostolate will serve as a kind of support group – like Alcoholics Anonymous – for men and women who want to remain celibate.

The move is part of a more aggressive push by the dioceses of Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., to march in step with the Vatican on the issue of homosexuality.

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David Smyly fills out job applications in the unemployment office a couple of miles, give or take, from the old textile mill downtown, where he works for the time being.

He pages through the phone book to find the street address for his high school. In the pocket of his T-shirt, he has a pack of smokes, Basic menthols, the cheapest ones in the store.

Sometime around the first of June, his work ends at Milliken & Co., which announced plans to close the plant later this year.

“I don’t know if I can make it through, but I’m gonna try,” Smyly says. He recounts the tales of a hard-knock life: a buyout about five years ago from a high-paying job he could never replace, a failed marriage and the steady grip of depression.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

It was good to hear the keynote speaker ”” Dr. Louis Weil ”” at this year’s “Epiphany West” conference come out strongly against so-called “open communion” (communion of the un-baptized). That was especially courageous here in California where the practice is becoming widespread….

I am in absolute agreement with Louis Weil here. I am familiar with the “open table” of Jesus argument ”” that he ate with outcasts and sinners and never turned anyone away, etc. However, I am unpersuaded that this is the same thing as the Eucharist and would encourage congregations really to invite the poor into their homes and parish halls for meals rather than believe that they have actually exercized hospitality by inviting the unbaptized to communion.

Certainly, it is an ecumenical nightmare.

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I do not believe I would be guilty of exaggeration if I were to say Anglican polity simply couldn’t work apart from general acceptance of the account of communion TSAD sets out and defends. Apart from this understanding and its centrality, the mechanisms of governance and consultation Anglicans have put in place over the years will work largely in support of local concerns and commitments, and will move the life of the provinces relentlessly toward more and more fragmentation. Progressives will move toward increasingly particular moral and social agendas and those who place central importance on common confession will find themselves ever dividing into opposing theological camps.

Even under the most ideal circumstances, even if “mutual subjection” is agreed upon as the operating principle of the Communion, it is still the case that a covenant would be of no effect if it had no means to address the question of what happens if a province refuses to ratify its terms or, having ratified them, does not abide by its commitments. This question clearly posed the most difficulty for the drafters of TSAD. Given the Anglican propensity for muddling through, it is not surprising the proposal put forward presents an involved process for reconciling differences that can last up to five years.

Having said this, however, I hasten to add that the proposal, though it does not use the word discipline, does involve real consequences that would place a recalcitrant province in what the Archbishop of Canterbury has nicely termed “a diminished status” in relation to the Communion as a whole. Time does not allow me to sketch the entire process. In its present form it is cumbersome, complex and far too lengthy to be effective. But in brief, if a matter comes up that threatens the unity and mission of the Communion, it is referred to the Archbishop of Canterbury who in turn can send it on to three assessors who in turn can send it on one or another of the Instruments of Communion. If at the end of all this, it is determined that a province has gone beyond the limits of diversity and refuses to alter its behavior, either the offending church or the Instruments of Communion are to understand that “the force and meaning of the covenant” has been relinquished. In short, the offending province by its own choice or by the decision of the Instruments now is in a diminished status in relation of the rest of the provinces of the Communion. That means it will not take part in the common councils of the Communion, though it may enjoy bilateral relations with one or more of the provinces.

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“‘This is much worse than the East Asia crisis in the 1990s,’ said Lars Christensen, at Danske Bank. ‘There are accidents waiting to happen across the region, but the EU institutions don’t have any framework for dealing with this. The day they decide not to save one of these one countries will be the trigger for a massive crisis with contagion spreading into the EU.’ Europe is already in deeper trouble than the ECB or EU leaders ever expected. Germany contracted at an annual rate of 8.4% in the fourth quarter. If Deutsche Bank is correct, the economy will have shrunk by nearly 9% before the end of this year. This is the sort of level that stokes popular revolt.

“The implications are obvious. Berlin is not going to rescue Ireland, Spain, Greece and Portugal as the collapse of their credit bubbles leads to rising defaults, or rescue Italy by accepting plans for EU “union bonds” should the debt markets take fright at the rocketing trajectory of Italy’s public debt (hitting 112pc of GDP next year, just revised up from 101pc — big change), or rescue Austria from its Habsburg adventurism. So we watch and wait as the lethal brush fires move closer. If one spark jumps across the eurozone line, we will have global systemic crisis within days. Are the firemen ready?”….

This has the potential to be a real crisis, far worse than in the US. Without concerted action on the part of the ECB and the European countries that are relatively strong, much of Europe could fall further into what would feel like a depression. There is a problem, though. Imagine being a politician in Germany, for instance. Your GDP is down by 8% last quarter. Unemployment is rising. Budgets are under pressure, as tax collections are down. And you are going to be asked to vote in favor of bailing out (pick a small country)? What will the voters who put you into office think?

We are going to find out this year whether the European Union is like the Three Musketeers. Are they “all for one and one for all?” or is it every country for itself? My bet (or hope) is that it is the former. Dissolution at this point would be devastating for all concerned, and for the world economy at large. Many of us in the US don’t think much about Europe or the rest of the world, but without a healthy Europe, much of our world trade would vanish.

However, getting all the parties to agree on what to do will take some serious leadership, which does not seem to be in evidence at this point.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Attendance appears to be on the rise at some churches as more people turn to religious centers not only for faith and fellowship but also for inexpensive entertainment and social engagement.

Though a recent poll indicates that overall attendance is stable, some parishes are reporting increases, according to local church leaders.

As the slumping economy forces people to cut back on expenses, free entertainment offered by churches is becoming increasingly popular. Colin Kerr, director of Christian education at Charleston’s Second Presbyterian Church, said young people are the beneficiaries at his church.

“Because our church does have such a small demographic, with one-third to half of the congregation being young adults, the majority of the church’s events are geared towards a younger generation,” Kerr said.

Read it all from the Faith and Values section of the local paper.

When Robert Allen Stanford arrived here in the early 1990s, few locals had ever heard of the Texas financier. Today, he dominates so many aspects of life on this sun-drenched Caribbean island that some have taken to calling it “Stanford Land.”

At one point or another, he has owned an airline that many locals and visitors fly on. A local newspaper that covers their goings-on. A vast residential complex where many live. Two restaurants where they eat. And the national stadium where they go to watch cricket, the island’s favorite sport.

But the crown jewel of his domain has long been Stanford International Bank, an offshore institution that attracted billions of dollars of cash from clients around the world ”” and especially from Latin America ”” seeking a haven for their wealth.

All the while, he cultivated a comfortable relationship with Antiguan officials. The bank made loans to the Antiguan government, which often used the money to award his companies lucrative construction contracts. To clean up the nation’s image as a dodgy tax haven, the authorities installed him on a new regulatory authority to oversee its banks ”” including his own.

To some, it felt too cozy.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.

In politics, as in marriage, moments come along when sensitive compromise can avert a major conflict down the road. The two of us believe that the issue of same-sex marriage has reached such a point now.

We take very different positions on gay marriage. We have had heated debates on the subject. Nonetheless, we agree that the time is ripe for a deal that could give each side what it most needs in the short run, while moving the debate onto a healthier, calmer track in the years ahead.

It would work like this: Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own. All of these changes would be enacted in the same bill.

For those not immersed in the issue, our proposal may seem puzzling. For those deeply immersed, it may seem suspect. So allow us a few words by way of explanation….

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The wind and solar industries in America “were dead in the fourth quarter,” said John Woolard, chief executive of BrightSource Energy, which builds and operates cutting-edge solar-thermal plants in the Mojave Desert. Almost five gigawatts of new solar-thermal projects ”” the equivalent of five big nuclear plants ”” at various stages of permitting were being held up because of a lack of financing.

“All of these projects will now go ahead,” said Woolard. “You are talking about thousands of jobs … We really got something right in this legislation.”

These jobs will be in engineering, constructing and operating huge solar systems and wind farms and manufacturing new photovoltaics. Together they will drive innovation in all these areas ”” and move wind and solar technology down the cost-volume learning curve so they can compete against fossil fuels and become export industries at the “ChinIndia price,” that is the price at which they can scale in China and India.

That is how taxpayer money should be used to stimulate: limited financing, for a limited time, targeted on an industry bristling with new technology start-ups that, with a little push from Uncle Sam, won’t just survive this crisis but help us thrive when it is over. We need, and the world needs, an America that is thriving not just surviving.

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To better compete, companies slashed jobs and wages, replacing much of their work force with temporary workers who had no job security and fewer benefits. Nontraditional workers now make up more than a third of Japan’s labor force.

Younger people are feeling the brunt of that shift. Some 48 percent of workers age 24 or younger are temps. These workers, who came of age during a tough job market, tend to shun conspicuous consumption.

They tend to be uninterested in cars; a survey last year by the business daily Nikkei found that only 25 percent of Japanese men in their 20s wanted a car, down from 48 percent in 2000, contributing to the slump in sales.

Young Japanese women even seem to be losing their once- insatiable thirst for foreign fashion. Louis Vuitton, for example, reported a 10 percent drop in its sales in Japan in 2008.

“I’m not interested in big spending,” says Risa Masaki, 20, a college student in Tokyo and a neighbor of the Takigasakis. “I just want a humble life.”

Japan’s aging population is not helping consumption. Businesses had hoped that baby boomers ”” the generation that reaped the benefits of Japan’s postwar breakneck economic growth ”” would splurge their lifetime savings upon retirement, which began en masse in 2007. But that has not happened at the scale that companies had hoped.

Economists blame this slow spending on widespread distrust of Japan’s pension system, which is buckling under the weight of one of the world’s most rapidly aging societies. That could serve as a warning for the United States, where workers’ 401(k)’s have been ravaged by declining stocks, pensions are disappearing, and the long-term solvency of the Social Security system is in question.

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But on what basis do they make their objection? On procedure? That’s a tough sell for a movement willing to violate ecclesiastical procedures in setting up their alternative province.

Luther based his Reformation on Scripture. Here, once again, the schismatics fall short. Jesus himself said nothing whatsoever about homosexuality, although he did affirm the religious laws set out in the book of Leviticus. But if that is the redoubt for the conservatives, they would be obliged to observe and enforce the other Levitical proscriptions as well ”“ beginning, I suppose, with the fabric content of the purple shirts they’re wearing! One of the Levitical proscriptions warns against wearing garments of mixed fabric.

If the conservatives truly wanted to “prooftext” their case against Gene Robinson, they should quote Titus 1:6, where St. Paul mandated that church leaders should be “the husband of one wife.” Gene Robinson, a divorced man, presumably would not qualify (nor would some other bishops). Jesus, after all, said nothing explicit about homosexuality; he did, however, have something to say about divorce — and none of it good.

Having struck out with both procedure and Scripture, the schismatics are left only with tradition.

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“I was snapping at my wife and our children, choking down my food at mealtimes, and feeling irritated at those unexpected interruptions through the day. Before long, things around our home started reflecting the pattern of my hurry-up style. It was becoming unbearable.”

“I distinctly remember after supper one evening, the words of our younger daughter, Colleen. She wanted to tell me something important that had happened to her at school that day. She began hurriedly, ‘Daddy, I wanna tell you somethin’ and I’ll tell you really fast.’

“Suddenly realizing her frustration, I answered, ‘Honey, you can tell me — and you don’t have to tell me really fast. Say it slowly.” “I’ll never forget her answer: ‘Then listen slowly.'”

–Chuck Swindoll, Stress Fractures (Zondervan, 1995) [also quoted in this morning’s sermon]

I mean, yesterday in a staff meeting, one of my staffers got a call that was obviously important. She took the call and left the room on her little cell phone, came back, looked stricken. We said, “What’s wrong?” She said she had just learned her husband had lost his job.

That sort of thing is scaring the daylights out of people, and it’s happening a lot. Everybody knows a dozen people who’ve been laid off.

–Mark Funkhouser, Mayor of Kansis City, on the Lehrer News Hour Friday evening (and quoted in this morning’s sermon by KSH)

The General Synod of the Church of England might not sound like a spiritual theme, for it, like all human assemblies, has its own share of politics and inevitably falls short of the Christian assembly it is supposed to be.

But the Christian faith is an incarnational religion, with at its heart the belief that the Universe is God’s creation, that human beings are created in the image of God, and that in Jesus God took our human nature and knew His creation and our human need from the inside. God did not stand aside from the sin and evil of the world, and therefore from the political and religious organisations that shape human history and human society.

The Church on which the Risen Christ breathed out his life-giving Spirit is not an abstract idea, but a visible society, called in its life and witness to point to God’s kingdom of justice, love and peace. A Church therefore needs, in responding to that call and to that mission, to meet, to pray and to wrestle with how that calling and mission is to be taken forward.

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Stephen Kemp rummaged through a supply closet for a box of staples, being careful not to jostle the blue paper bags of cremated remains on the floor.

It’s not a great spot for ashes, but he ran out of space long ago. In the grand scheme of things, the closet is as good a resting place as any.

Kemp, the owner of Haley Funeral Directors, is used to a certain rhythm of life and death.

Good times mean fancy funerals — open bars with top-drawer liquor, horse-drawn carriages, jazz bands for all-night jam sessions. Bad times mean unclaimed remains — funeral fees often being a low priority for the living.

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Check it out. Note that according to this, active baptized members went from 61,859 in 1997 to 49,977in 2007 in the diocese.

Mr. [Nouriel] Roubini tells me that bank nationalization “is something the partisans would have regarded as anathema a few weeks ago. But when I and others put it in the context of the Swedish approach [of the 1990s] — i.e. you take banks over, you clean them up, and you sell them in rapid order to the private sector — it’s clear that it’s temporary. No one’s in favor of a permanent government takeover of the financial system.”

There’s another reason why the concept should appeal to (fiscal) conservatives, he explains. “The idea that government will fork out trillions of dollars to try to rescue financial institutions, and throw more money after bad dollars, is not appealing because then the fiscal cost is much larger. So rather than being seen as something Bolshevik, nationalization is seen as pragmatic. Paradoxically, the proposal is more market-friendly than the alternative of zombie banks.”

In any case, Republicans must now temper their reactions, he says. “The kind of government interference in the economy that we saw in the last year of Bush was unprecedented. The central bank — supposed to be the lender of the last resort — became the lender of first and only resort! With our recapitalizing of financial institutions, and massive government intervention in the markets, we’ve already crossed a significant bridge.”
So, will the highest level of government be receptive to the bank-nationalization idea? “I think it will,” Mr. Roubini says, unhesitatingly. “People like Graham and Greenspan have already given their explicit blessing. This gives Obama cover.” And how long will it be before the administration goes in formally for nationalization? “I think that we’re going to see the policy adopted in the next few months . . . in six months or so.”

Read it here or you may also find it there.