President Barack Obama will visit Europe at the end of March, returning to cities that rapturously received him last July, and will venture into Eastern Europe with a visit to the Czech Republic. The reception will be edgier than last time, for both economic and political reasons.

The economic anxieties are shared on both sides of the Atlantic. The Eastern European political anxieties are unique, and regrettably have been heightened by clumsy Obama administration diplomacy. The president will have to repair that damage or risk new rifts with allies.

Last week a special meeting of the European Union ended unhappily when Germany and France refused to back bailouts for Eastern European members facing dire finances. The economic strain poses a challenge to the cohesion of the European Union.

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A wonderful and inspiring story.

Although people have spoken of greed as the source of our current problems, I suspect that it goes deeper. It is a little too easy to blame the present situation on an accumulation of individual greed, exemplified by bankers or brokers, and to lose sight of the fact that governments committed to deregulation and to the encouragement of speculation and high personal borrowing were elected repeatedly in Britain and the United States for a crucial couple of decades. Add to that the fact that warnings were not lacking of some of the risks of poor (or no) regulation, and we are left with the question of what it was that skewed the judgement of a whole society as well as of financial professionals. John Dunning, a professional analyst of the business world, wrote some six years ago about what he called the ‘crisis in the moral ecology’ of unregulated capitalism (in the editorial afterword to a collection of essays on Making Globalisation Good, p.357); and he and other contributors to his book discussed how ‘circles of failure’ could be created in the global economy by a combination of moral indifference, institutional crisis and market failure, each feeding on the others. Yet warnings went unheeded; people’s rational capacities, it seems, were blunted, and unregulated global capitalism was assumed to be the natural way of doing things, based on a set of rational market processes that would deliver results in everyone’s interest.

This was not just about greed. At least some apologists for the naturalness of the unregulated market pointed ”“ quite reasonably in the circumstances ”“ to the apparently infallible capacity of the market to free nations from poverty. It may help to turn for illumination to an unexpected source. Acquisitiveness is, in the Christian monastic tradition, associated with pride, the root of all human error and failure: pride, which is most clearly evident in the refusal to acknowledge my lack of control over my environment, my illusion that I can shape the world according to my will. And if that is correct, then the origin of economic dysfunction and injustice is pride ”“ a pride that is manifest in the reluctance to let go of systems and projects that promise more and more secure control, and so has a bad effect on our reasoning powers. This in turn suggests that economic justice arrives only when everyone recognises some kind of shared vulnerability and limitation in a world of limits and processes (psychological as well as material) that cannot be bypassed. We are delivered or converted not simply by resolving in a vacuum to be less greedy, but by understanding what it is to live as an organism which grows and changes and thus is involved in risk. We change because our minds or mindsets are changed and steered away from certain powerful but toxic myths.

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[The Rev. Rayford] Ray told ENS that while Thew Forrester has served the diocese since 2001, names of potential candidates for bishop were received from “throughout the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion.” A diocesan report said that names of 28 people had been received, 11 of those people completed the paperwork, and one person eventually dropped out.

He said there is “precedent” for putting forth only one name as candidate. In the most recent instance, in 2007, Mark Lawrence was the only candidate to be bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina. Lawrence was first elected from among several candidates on September 16, 2006, but Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori later declared that election “null and void” because of defects in six of the needed 56 affirmative responses from diocesan standing committees. Required to hold a second election, the diocese nominated only Lawrence.

Ray noted that it is standard operating procedure in congregations looking for a rector, where a call committee typically discerns a number of candidates and, in the end, submits one name for the vestry’s final approval.

Oh please. The parallels with the South Carolina process are almost nil. Mark Lawrence was originally elected out of a slate of a number of finalists, as everyone knows. He was then rejected by the Standing Committees for the first time in a huge amount of time in the history of the Episcopal Church. It was only because of that rejection that South Carolina met again in Convention and voted on one nominee. There was no original process in Northern Michigan with several nominees, and there was no rejection of the election subsequently. If in the first South Carolina election on the bishop to succeed Edward Salmon there has been only one nominee, there would have been a hue and cry down here, and there should have been had that been the case.

In any event, read it all–KSH.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s lifting of restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research puts him at odds with Pope Benedict and the American Roman Catholic Church.

After Obama signed the order on Monday, the Vatican and U.S. and Italian Church leaders condemned the move. One commentator said the test of “a real democracy” was its defence of the most defenceless.

Obama’s executive order reversed and repudiated restrictions placed on the research by his predecessor, George W. Bush, freeing labs across the country to start working with the cells, which can give rise to any kind of cell in the body.

Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ committee on pro-life activities, called Obama’s decision “a sad victory of politics over science and ethics.”

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Prayer has become more common at presidential appearances under the Obama administration, including at nonreligious events such as stimulus rallies. The White House is acting in a deliberately inclusive, interfaith way that seems to limit opposition.

Church-state experts say the policy, which President Obama also followed while campaigning, does not appear to be illegal because the White House tells people who lead the prayers to be nonsectarian. But some raised concerns about prayers being scripted or reviewed in advance.

People who helped plan public events for former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton say they did not routinely organize prayers before non-religious events. Historians note that there is no clear record of prayers before presidential appearances, but they could not remember prayers being said as routinely as they are now.

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Luckily for Obama, the public still likes and trusts him, at least judging by the latest polls, including NEWSWEEK’s. But, in ways both large and small, what’s left of the American establishment is taking his measure and, with surprising swiftness, they are finding him lacking.

They have some reasons to be concerned. I trace them to a central trait of the president’s character: he’s not really an in-your-face guy. By recent standards””and that includes Bill Clinton as well as George Bush””Obama for the most part is seeking to govern from the left, looking to solidify and rely on his own party more than woo Republicans. And yet he is by temperament judicious, even judicial. He’d have made a fine judge. But we don’t need a judge. We need a blunt-spoken coach.

Obama may be mistaking motion for progress, calling signals for a game plan. A busy, industrious overachiever, he likes to check off boxes on a long to-do list. A genial, amenable guy, he likes to appeal to every constituency, or at least not write off any. A beau ideal of Harvard Law, he can’t wait to tackle extra-credit answers on the exam.

But there is only one question on this great test of American fate: can he lead us away from plunging into another Depression?

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Watch it all from Charlie Rose.

It starts tomorrow.

Astonshingly moving–I wept. Watch it all (Hat tip: SS).

Hard but important viewing–watch it all.

The Anglican Church of Canada has reached the point where its bureaucracy has outlived its compassion. There. I said it. And I can speak with at least some small authority, considering that I was once an Anglican myself, although my observations led to enough disillusionment to see my departure from the Anglican Church. Generally I don’t like to disparage people for their religion (except Scientologists), but recent developments at the Anglican parish of St. Matthias in Victoria have tipped my hand.

The Anglican Church of Canada is in a state of unrest, for a variety of reasons mainly to do with biblical interpretation. In a nutshell, two completely separate theologies are competing for the same religious title: one rather conservative theology, which believes that the Bible carries great literal authority, and one rather liberal theology, which does not believe that the Bible carries great literal authority — although it still acknowledges the Bible as an important document. As you can see, the two just won’t mix, they won’t get along, it’s like asking a six year old boy to hold hands with a girl, it just ain’t gonna happen, no dice, no way, no how. But naturally, the higher-ups in the Anglican administration are trying to keep the two halves together, to ensure that the schism within the Anglican Church does not develop into a full-blown separation.

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The Christian church in its homelands in the Middle East is undergoing a “rapid attrition”, the Anglican Bishop of Chichester has warned.

Bishop John Hind, in a House of Lords debate on religious persecution, pointed to the “extreme deprivation” suffered by Christians in Iraq.

“In places where different faiths have coexisted for centuries we see the rapid attrition of the Christian church in its ancestral homelands,” he said.

“In Iraq, Christians have suffered extreme deprivation, sometimes due to sheer religious hatred, sometimes just caught in the cross-fire, sometimes because, amazingly and quite wrongly, they are regarded as representatives of a western faith.

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We are on the verge ”“ within 10 years ”“ of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

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In a joint statement the Catholic primate Cardinal Seán Brady, the Church of Ireland primate Archbishop Alan Harper, the Presbyterian Moderator Rev Dr Donald Patton and the Methodist President Rev Alan Ferguson said “it takes us back to events which we thought we had left in the past and is a dangerous attempt to destabilise the peace process which must not be allowed to succeed.

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The congregation at St. Matthias Anglican Church in Fairfield voted overwhelmingly Sunday to leave the Anglican Church of Canada, the latest sign of division among parishes across the country over controversial church doctrines like blessing same-sex marriages.

Of the 180 people who voted, 94.5 per cent said they want to join the Anglican Network of Canada, a conservative body that opposes same-sex marriage.

About 30 people refused to participate in the vote and wrote letters opposing the split, said church spokesman Michael Skinner, who chaired the meeting.

But another 20 parishioners who could not attend in person wrote letters of support, he said. The congregation had been just over 200 people.

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Churches that look like cafes and serve coffee and offer guided chanting and meditation could become the norm as the diocese looks for ways to reach out to a wider group of followers.

Traditional pastoral models would be tweaked to include more of what was relevant to today’s community, Anglican diocese of Newcastle ministry development officer Father David Battrick said.

“We will reconnect with ancient forms of spirituality like chanting that engages all the senses and tap into older forms of the eucharist that was common practice in the church 100 years ago,” he said.

Research showed there was great interest in spirituality, as distinct from religion, prompting the church to look at ways of helping people in their spiritual quest.

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The misguided policy response from Washington has focused almost exclusively on squandering public money and burdening our children with indebtedness in order to defend the bondholders of mismanaged financial institutions (blame Paulson and Geithner ”“ I’ve got a lot of respect for our President, but he’s been sold a load of garbage by banking insiders). Meanwhile, I suspect that the little tapes in Bernanke’s head playing “we let the banks fail in the Great Depression” and “we let Lehman fail and look what happened” are so loud that he is making no distinction about the form of those failures. Simply letting an institution unravel is quite different from taking receivership, protecting the customers, keeping the institution intact, replacing management, properly taking the losses out of stockholder and bondholder capital, and issuing it back into private ownership at a later date. This is what it would mean for these banks to “fail.” Nobody is advocating an uncontrolled unraveling of major financial institutions or permanent nationalization as if we’ve suddenly become Venezuela.

Make no mistake. Buying up “troubled assets” will not materially ease this crisis, nor will it even improve the capital position of financial institutions (see You Can’t Rescue the Financial System if You Can’t Read a Balance Sheet). Homeowners will continue to default because their payment obligations have not been restructured to any meaningful extent. We are simply protecting the bondholders of mismanaged financial institutions, even though that bondholder capital is more than sufficient to cover the losses without harm to customers. Institutions that cannot survive without continual provision of public funds should be taken into receivership, their assets should be restructured to better ensure repayment, their stockholders should be wiped out, bondholders should take a major haircut, customer assets should (and will) be fully protected, and these institutions should be re-issued to the markets when the economy stabilizes.

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Among those shocked by President Obama’s 2010 budget, the most surprising are the true-blue liberals who run most of America’s nonprofits, universities and charities. How dare he limit tax deductions for charitable giving! They’re afraid they’ll get fewer donations, but they should be more concerned that Mr. Obama’s policies will shove them aside in favor of the New Charity State.

What did these nonprofit liberals expect, anyway? Mr. Obama is proposing a vast expansion of the entitlement state, and he has to find some way to pay for it. So logically enough, one of his ideas for funding public welfare is to reduce the tax benefit for private charity. His budget proposes to raise the top personal income tax rate to 39.6% in 2011 from 35%, and the 33% rate to 36% while reducing the tax benefit from itemized deductions for the top two brackets to 28% from 35% and 33%, respectively. The White House estimates the deduction reduction will yield $318 billion in revenue over 10 years.

From the Ivy League to the United Jewish Appeal, petitions and manifestos are in the works. The Independent Sector, otherwise eager to praise the Obama budget, worries the tax change “could be a disincentive to some donors.” According to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, total itemized contributions from the highest income households would have dropped 4.8% — or $3.87 billion — in 2006 if the Obama policy had been in place. That year, Americans gave $186.6 billion to charity, more than 40% from those in the highest tax bracket. A back of the envelope calculation by the Tax Policy Center, a left-of-center think tank, estimates the Obama plan will reduce annual giving by 2%, or some $9 billion.

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The day after the report I heard from a young Naval aviator in predeployment training north of San Diego. He flies a Super Hornet, sister ship to the plane that went down. He said the Marine investigation “kept me up last night” because of how it contrasted with “the buck-passing we see” in the government and on Wall Street. He and his squadron were in range of San Diego television stations when they carried the report’s conclusions live. He’d never seen “our entire wardroom crowded around a television” before. They watched “with bated breath.” At the end they were impressed with the public nature of the criticism, and its candor: “There are still elements within the government that take personal responsibility seriously.” He found himself wondering if the Marines had been “too hard on themselves.” “But they are, after all, Marines.”

By contrast, he says, when the economy came crashing down, “nowhere did we see a board come out and say: ‘This is what happened, these are the decisions these particular people made, and this was the result. They are no longer a part of our organization.’ There was no timeline of events or laymen’s explanation of how a credit derivative was actually derived. We did not see congressmen get on television with charts and eviscerate their organization and say, ‘These were the men who in 2003 allowed Freddie and Fannie unlimited rein over mortgage securities.’ Instead we saw . . . everybody against everybody else with no one stepping forth and saying, ‘We screwed up.'” There is no one in national leadership who could convincingly “assign blame,” and no one “who could or would accept it.”

Read it all or you may also find it here.

It is a 35 page pdf file and it is worth the time to read it all.

Robert P. Jones, the research group’s founder and president, said during a March 6 telephone briefing that the survey showed that Episcopal Church and UCC clergy were “really staking out more progressive views” than the rest of the clergy who responded.

The two denominations also led the list of those clergy who said they believe the U.S. government should do more to solve social problems (UCC clergy were at 90 percent, Episcopal clergy 87 percent)….

On Episcopal stances about specific issues, the survey showed that:

* 73 percent of Episcopal clergy said that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to 51 percent of all clergy surveyed.

* 49 percent approved of same-gender marriage and another 38 percent supported allowing gay couples to enter into civil unions, compared with 33 percent and 32 percent, respectively, of all clergy surveyed.

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The 1931 collapse of the Austrian bank Creditanstalt provoked financial panic across Europe and almost single-handedly turned a bad downturn into the Great Depression.

Last week, when I read about the brewing European banking crisis, I suddenly began to dread that history might be repeating itself.

You might think that my worries are a bit late. After all, losses on subprime mortgages in the United States have already caused a Depression-like banking collapse.

Well, believe it or not, Europe’s current crisis is scarier.

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Medical miracles do not happen simply by accident. They result from painstaking and costly research, from years of lonely trial and error, much of which never bears fruit, and from a government willing to support that work. From life-saving vaccines, to pioneering cancer treatments, to the sequencing of the human genome — that is the story of scientific progress in America. When government fails to make these investments, opportunities are missed. Promising avenues go unexplored. Some of our best scientists leave for other countries that will sponsor their work. And those countries may surge ahead of ours in the advances that transform our lives.

In recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values. In this case, I believe the two are not inconsistent. As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering. I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research — and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly.

It’s a difficult and delicate balance. And many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose, this research. And I understand their concerns, and I believe that we must respect their point of view.

But after much discussion, debate and reflection, the proper course has become clear. The majority of Americans — from across the political spectrum, and from all backgrounds and beliefs — have come to a consensus that we should pursue this research; that the potential it offers is great, and with proper guidelines and strict oversight, the perils can be avoided.

That is a conclusion with which I agree. And that is why I am signing this executive order, and why I hope Congress will act on a bipartisan basis to provide further support for this research. We are joined today by many leaders who have reached across the aisle to champion this cause, and I commend all of them who are here for that work.

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Germany may be at the heart of any European response to a weakening world economy, but Germany’s heart is not in it.

As world leaders gear up for a London summit meeting on April 2 where they are supposed to settle upon a coordinated response to the global economic crisis, conflict is brewing between Europeans who see tighter regulation of a skewed financial system as the main task ahead and Americans who are focused on the more immediate challenge of countering the acute dropoff in economic activity across the globe.

The differences between Europe and the United States are most evident in Germany, where years of growth fueled by a mighty manufacturing base and a deep-seated suspicion of financial capitalism has spurred a powerful resistance to the Keynesian-style deficit-spending favored in Washington.

As the United States pushes to ensure that governments around the world are spending enough to replace the demand that has evaporated as U.S. consumers lead a global retrenchment, Germany is sticking to the relatively modest stimulus it has already approved.

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American Church leaders claimed this week that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s new group of Pastoral Visitors is ”˜too little, too late’. As the number of lawsuits between the Episcopal Church (TEC) and breakaway conservative groups approaches 60, some say the initiative ”“ intended to help repair the torn fabric of the Anglican Communion ”“ lacks integrity.

The names of the bishops who will act as ”˜mediators’ were announced this week by Lambeth Palace. The statement said that the bishops had attended a meeting at Virginia Theological Seminary in the USA from February 25 ”“ 28. The purpose of the new group is to assist in healing the current tensions in the Anglican Communion by holding ”˜face to face’ meetings with church leaders in both the new American provinces and TEC.

But the Rev Philip Ashey, Chief Operating Officer for the American Anglican Council, a grouping of conservative Anglicanism, was deeply concerned about Lambeth’s response. Speaking from Atlanta, Georgia, he said: “Every pastoral visitor programme suggested so far has …[omitted] the participation of the parties who have been aggrieved, those people who have left TEC.”

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From the Most Revd Alan Harper, OBE, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland:

The lethal attack on Massereene Barracks leaving two people dead and four injured is deeply distressing and deplorable. I send my heartfelt sympathy to those who have been bereaved or injured.

It has been clear for some time that there are forces of evil intent on destabilising our community and returning to days of confrontation such as we knew in the past but have been steadily working to move beyond. Across our community, efforts must be redoubled to create a respectful and inclusive society that ensures that there is no place in our midst for agents of terror. We remember those affected by this incident as we continue to pray for a sustained peace.

The General Convention of the US Episcopal Church will be asked to authorize rites for the blessing of same-sex unions at their triennial meeting in July. On Jan 31 the Diocese of Newark synod endorsed a resolution asking the General Convention to amend the national Church’s canons governing Holy Matrimony, making them gender-neutral.

Newark’s Resolution 2009-05 asks the national church to amend Canon 18: Of the Solemnization of Holy Matrimony, substituting the words “two persons” where the words “a man and a woman” now appear, and to amend Canon 19: Of Regulations Respecting Holy Matrimony, to substitute the word “spouse” where the words “husband or wife” appear.

Delegates to the Newark synod also asked their diocesan clergy to henceforth record services solemnizing same-sex civil unions in the parish register “in a manner identical to the recording of marriages,” and stated the diocese’s intention of asking the national Church to amend its canons making this innovation church wide.

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No British leader in modern times has been greeted with less decorum by his American counterpart, and the amateur reception he received was more fitting for the arrival of a Third World potentate than the leader of America’s closest ally.

Brown is hugely unpopular in Britain ”“ with good reason ”“ but he is still the leader of the only nation in the world that the United States can rely on in war or time of crisis, which has consistently shed blood and expended treasure in numerous conflicts alongside America. A British Prime Minister deserves to be treated with respect, even he is a lame duck at home or is barely recognizable to much of the American public.

President Bush was frequently labeled a cowboy and an isolationist by his critics, but the Bush White House knew how to receive its guests (including traveling press corps) with tremendous dignity, respect for tradition and sincere warmth towards visitors who had traveled thousands of miles to be there.

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