As government data revealed that 651,000 more jobs disappeared in February, a sense took hold that growing joblessness may reflect a wrenching restructuring of the American economy.

The unemployment rate surged to 8.1 percent, from 7.6 percent in January, its highest level in a quarter-century. In key industries ”” manufacturing, financial services and retail ”” layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business.

“These jobs aren’t coming back,” said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia in Charlotte, N.C. “A lot of production either isn’t going to happen at all, or it’s going to happen somewhere other than the United States. There are going to be fewer stores, fewer factories, fewer financial services operations. Firms are making strategic decisions that they don’t want to be in their businesses.”

Read it all.

If the dual roles put too much stress on Forrester, he has a good way to relieve it. He has been instructed in Zen Buddhist meditation and incorporates what he’s learned into his duties.

“It’s not a matter of holding two faiths. There’s one faith and it’s Christianity,” Forrester said. “The gift is that that faith is deepened by my meditative practice and I’m eternally grateful to Zen Buddhism for teaching me that practice and receiving me as an Episcopal priest.”

Not everyone sees it that way. Jeff Walton, a member of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute on Religion and Democracy, said Forrester’s Zen Buddhist theology conflicts with traditional Anglican belief.

“Buddhist theology emphasizes the accumulation of experiential knowledge. Adherents work to gain awareness of the universe, by which they attain a synthesis with nirvana,” he said. “Christianity emphasizes the importance of grace, that which God gives freely but is neither earned nor deserved. You cannot with integrity resolve a system in which salvation is earned, and one in which it is freely given.”

Read it all.

It is a sign of the times when Sacha Taylor, a fixture on the charity circuit in this gala-happy city, digs out a 10-year-old dress to wear to a recent society party.

Or when Jennifer Riley, a corporate lawyer, starts patronizing restaurants that take coupons.

Or when Ethel Knox, the wife of a pediatrician, cleans out her home and her storage unit, gives away an old car to a needy friend and cancels the family Christmas. “I just feel so decadent with all the stuff I’ve got,” she explained.

This certainly is one positive outcome of all of this mess. Read it all.

A blue-ribbon panel has recommended that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America lift its ban on partnered gay and lesbian clergy, but only after the church agrees in principle on gay relationships and agrees to respect the consciences of those who dissent.

A majority of the 15-member Task Force for ELCA Studies on Sexuality believes that “it is possible to devise guidelines and policies that would allow . . . some flexibility” in its ordination standards.

The 4.7-million-member ELCA currently allows gay or lesbian clergy who pledge to be celibate; partnered or sexually active homosexual clergy are technically not allowed in ELCA pulpits, though some buck the rules without punishment.

Read it all.

The presiding bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church is scheduled to visit Peoria next month.

Read it all.

Commercial real estate in Atlanta has been on a downhill slide for more than a year. But the slide will become an avalanche in the next six months, says Jay Mannelly of Bullock Mannelly Partners, one of Atlanta’s oldest commercial real estate investment brokers.

He’s referring to the time frame when the renewals on construction loans and the debt on existing buildings will be coming due.

Sales aren’t happening, except in desperation.

Refinancing debt on existing buildings will be difficult since fewer occupants equal less rental income.

Call it a bloodbath, avalanche, tsunami or the other shoe. Regardless, it will not help the mess known as our banks’ balance sheets.

Read it all.

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers.

The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers ”” or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

Read it all.

Alex Blumberg: We’re in his office, and we’re looking at a graph, and it’s, basically, a measure of how much debt we the citizens of America, are in. How much we all owe–on our mortgages and credit cards and auto loans–compared to the economy as a whole, the GDP. And for most of history, the amount we owed was a lot smaller than the economy as a whole. This ratio, household debt to GDP bounces along around between 30 and 50 percent, for most of the ’30s and ’40s 50s, 60s, and 70s, right into the 80s. Then it breaks through 50 % in the 80s, starts heading up in the 1990s. And then ..

David Beim: From 2000 to 2008, it just goes, almost a hockey stick, it goes
dramatically upward.

Alex Blumberg: Like a rocket.

David Beim: It hits 100% of GDP. That is to say, currently, consumers own 13 trillion dollars when the GDP is $13 trillion. That’s a $100 trillion owed by individuals. That is a ton.

Alex Blumberg: I’m going to ask a leading question, because I’m looking at a graph right here. Tell me professor, has there ever been a time where we owed that much before?

David Beim: I’m glad you asked me that. And guess what? The earlier peak, which is way over on the left part of the chart, where debt is 100% of GDP, was in 1929. This is a map of twin peaks. One in 1929 and one in 2007.

Alex Blumberg: Does that chart scare you?

David Beim: Yes. That chart is the most striking piece of evidence that I have that what is happening to us is something that goes way beyond toxic assets in banks, it’s something that had little to do with mortgage securitization, or ethics on Wall Street, or anything else. It says the problem is us. The problem is not the banks, greedy though they may be, overpaid though they may be. The problem is us. We have over-borrowed. We have been living very high on the hog. We are, our standard of living has been rising dramatically over the last 25 years, and we have been borrowing to make much of that prosperity happen.

—From a recent This American Life program on NPR entitled “Bad Bank” which is not to be missed

Thanks to Greg for his perseverance in the face of serious unexpected database and domain forwarding issues!

It looks like T19 is pretty much back online. Though there may be some hiccups with links to individual entries or subpages that are still working through the system. Feel free to comment here or e-mail us elves if you are having problems or notice something that is not working properly.

T19elves@yahoo.com

Watch it all.

The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:

“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The “day of reckoning” has arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

Read it all.

An entire nation without immediate experience or even distant memory of high finance had gazed upon the example of Wall Street and said, “We can do that.” For a brief moment it appeared that they could. In 2003, Iceland’s three biggest banks had assets of only a few billion dollars, about 100 percent of its gross domestic product. Over the next three and a half years they grew to over $140 billion and were so much greater than Iceland’s G.D.P. that it made no sense to calculate the percentage of it they accounted for. It was, as one economist put it to me, “the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind.”

Read it all.

The Louis Mulkey story is headed to the silver screen.

ESPN Films said Friday it is developing a movie based on the inspirational story of Mulkey, one of nine Charleston firefighters killed in the Sofa Super Store fire on June 18, 2007. Mulkey also was a coach at Summerville High School and provided the inspiration for the boys basketball team that won the 2008 Class AAAA state championship.

“Louis would be absolutely humbled and thrilled to know that his life and the relationships he so deeply cherished with his players and his brothers at the fire department would be worthy of so much positive public attention,” his widow, Lauren Bennett Mulkey, said in a statement.

Read it all.

A revival of 1950s style domesticity has swept Britain due to the economic downturn. Consumers are applying a do-it-yourself attitude to all areas of daily life by making clothes, growing vegetables and dying their own hair.

Sales of knitting and dressmaking equipment are powering ahead – knitting needles are up by 7 per cent and sewing machines by 34 per cent according to the department store chain John Lewis.

Meanwhile garden centres are reporting strong demand for fruit bushes – up 68 per cent last year – and hardware stores have brought out budget gardening tool ranges. Although the motivation for the return to the thrifty, homely appears to be money, the new habits may stay once the economic good times return, at least according to one expert.

Read it all.

If anyone in the US media had thought to ask a former Australian prime minister for his assessment, they would have heard a different view. And they would not have been so surprised at Geithner’s performance since.

In a speech to a closed gathering at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Thursday, Paul Keating gave a starkly different account of Geithner’s record in handling the Asian crisis: “Tim Geithner was the Treasury line officer who wrote the IMF [International Monetary Fund] program for Indonesia in 1997-98, which was to apply current account solutions to a capital account crisis.”

In other words, Geithner fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. And his misdiagnosis led to a dreadfully wrong prescription.

Read it all.

My trouble starts right here. I struggle with the idea of coming to faith through intellectual assent to a set of belief statements about God, Jesus and the Church. Our credal statements and formularies might gradually become meaningful to those who have already grasped a sense of the presence of God in their lives, but they are not helpful as entry points to faith. They are not the place to begin. Their metaphorical and mythical significance is too complex for that.

A phrase such as “ascended into Heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father”, for example, becomes ludicrous if taken in a literal sense. It is figurative language that conjures up a powerful image of the familial relationship of Christ to God. And after many years of worship, contemplation and critical biblical study, it is possible to place it in a theological and devotional landscape which can be creative and inspiring.

But it is not a phrase to come across cold. In fact, it could be a very off-putting phrase. “He shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead” is another phrase requiring considerable theological rehabilitation if it is to be understood in any meaningful, pastoral way. It is too heavily freighted with Jewish apocalyptic to be immediately comprehensible within a Christian environment.

Why does his trouble get to be the controlling element in this process of interpretation? Not for the first time, the Dean of Perth has it the wrong way around. For him, the creed is the problem, the older language is the problem, this all requires “rehabilitation” which his vantage point is uniquely suited to offer us. But this hermeneutic of suspicion just gets exhausting and is itself to be called into question. What really allows the meaning not to be squeezed out at the outset is when the Creed gets to question us first, when our language and our categories are suspected first. Isaiah 55 comes to mind as a good passage to apply here. In any event, read it all–KSH

If you’re reading this, you’re seeing T19 on our new server.

Took about an hour longer than I had anticipated, but all in all things went pretty smoothly. Thanks to everyone for their patience.

Gov. Martin O’Malley is preparing to move forward with regulations to allow executions to resume in Maryland now that his effort to repeal the death penalty appears to have failed, a spokesman said yesterday.

The Senate abruptly ended debate on O’Malley’s proposal yesterday morning, instead embracing a bill that would tighten evidence standards in death penalty cases. That bill is expected to pass the Senate today by a wide margin and head to the House of Delegates for consideration.

Maryland has had a de facto moratorium on capital punishment since December 2006, the month before O’Malley (D) took office, after the state’s highest court ruled that lethal injection procedures had not been properly adopted.

O’Malley, a longtime capital punishment opponent, has declined to issue regulations since then, saying the legislature deserved a chance to permanently repeal the death penalty. Such bills have been considered during each of the past three years.

Read it all.

Polygamy came to Parliament Hill yesterday, as opponents of decriminalization opened a political front in their campaign to ensure that marriage remains a union limited to two people.

Immediately apparent at the news conference yesterday were the strange alliances that form around this issue. Charles McVety of the Institute for Family Values is an outspoken evangelical leader from the Christian right, who was vocal in his opposition to same-sex marriage. Farzana Hassan, president of the Muslim Canadian Congress, an organization that represents secular and progressive Muslims, supported gay marriage but opposes polygamy.

Read it all.

Supporters regard the threat of a mortgage modification in bankruptcy as a crucial tool to prod banks to negotiate with homeowners for more affordable terms. Critics argue the measure will create a flood of bankruptcy filings that ultimately will drive up mortgage rates and further destabilize the battered housing market.

Read it all.

The Anglican Church of Melanesia has a new Archbishop. He is the Rt Rev David Vunagi who is currently the Bishop of the Diocese of Temotu in Solomon Islands.

Bishop Vunagi was elected to the highest Episcopal position within the Anglican Church by the Provincial electoral board on the afternoon of March 4th at Tetete Ni Kolivuti; headquarters of the Sisters of the Church east of Honiara.

The new archbishop will become the fifth in succession since Melanesia was inaugurated in January 1975 as an independent ecclesiastical province from New Zealand.

The archbishops since then were the late John Chisholm, the late Norman Kitchener Palmer, Amos Waiaru, and Sir Ellison Pogo.

The Province of Melanesia covers three independent nations of Solomon Islands, the Republic of Vanuatu and the French Trust Territory of New Caledonia.

Read it all.

Statement on the Government of National Unity by the Bishops of the Church of the Province of Central Africa at the Consecration of the Right Reverend Cleophas Lunga as Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Matabeleland on the 1st Sunday of Lent 1st March 2009 at the Parish Church of St Columbus, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

We the Bishops of the Province of Central Africa in holding and believing that all people are created equal in the image of God and that God wills his people to live their lives to its full potential abundantly, cautiously welcome the formation of the Government of National Unity in Zimbabwe.

This development comes after a long period of political polarisation which created immense suffering of the people. However we are concerned about the continued detention of some political and human rights activists which is indicative of business as usual contrary to the spirit and objectives of Global Agreement. The continued detention of the activists is not conducive to the spirit of reconciliation and to the promotion of peace and justice. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Read it all.

The Archbishop of Sudan, Dr Daniel Deng Bul, has called on the British Government to step up its support for the country’s Compre­hensive Peace Agreement (CPA) as the key to peace in Darfur and across the country. Britain is a co-signatory of the agreement, which marked the end of Africa’s longest-running civil war in 2004.

“We are crying to the inter­national community not to abandon the CPA. If it succeeds, then the con­flict in Darfur, too, will be resolved. The British, the Italians, the Ameri­cans, and the Norwegians need to step up now. This is a crucial time,” Dr Deng said on Thursday of last week during a visit to Salisbury dio­cese.

He was speaking just before the indictment of the President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, for war crimes. On Wednesday, the Inter­national Criminal Court issued a warrant for the President’s arrest for crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Read it all.

Last month, in his big speech to Congress, President Obama argued for bold steps to fix America’s dysfunctional banks. “While the cost of action will be great,” he declared, “I can assure you that the cost of inaction will be far greater, for it could result in an economy that sputters along for not months or years, but perhaps a decade.”

Many analysts agree. But among people I talk to there’s a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama’s failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern.

Here’s how the pattern works: first, administration officials, usually speaking off the record, float a plan for rescuing the banks in the press. This trial balloon is quickly shot down by informed commentators.

Then, a few weeks later, the administration floats a new plan. This plan is, however, just a thinly disguised version of the previous plan, a fact quickly realized by all concerned. And the cycle starts again.

Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible?

Read it all.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd is moving to allow the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to temporarily borrow as much as $500 billion from the Treasury Department.

The Connecticut Democrat’s effort — which comes in response to urging from FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — would give the FDIC access to more money to rebuild its fund that insures consumers’ deposits, which have been hard hit by a string of bank failures.

Read it all.

The Archbishop of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan, the Most Rev’d Dr. Daniel Deng Bul Yak, has this week sent a petition, on behalf of his Church, the Church of Uganda and the Anglican Church in north eastern DR Congo, to the Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

In the letter, the Anglican Church leaders of the region affected since Christmas by repeated attacks by the self-styled Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) ”“ Southern Sudan, northern Uganda and north eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) ”“ appealed to the British Government for assistance.

The request was specifically two-fold: firstly to put diplomatic pressure on the LRA leaders, leaders in Sudan, Uganda and Congo, and leaders of the UN peacekeeping missions in Sudan and Congo to do more to bring an end to the brutal attacks on unarmed civilians by the LRA, which have seen many Congolese and Sudanese towns swamped with refugees and displaced people since December. Secondly, the prelates pleaded for more international assistance for the relief effort in supporting these displaced people ”“ most of whom are now dependent on their and other churches.

Read it all.

The leaders of the European Union gathered Sunday in Brussels in an emergency summit meeting that seemed to highlight the very worries it was designed to calm: that the world economic crisis has unleashed forces threatening to split Europe into rival camps.

An urgent call from Hungary for a large bailout for newer, Eastern members was bluntly rejected by Europe’s strongest economy, Germany, and received little support from other countries. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, facing federal elections in September, said countries must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

“Saying that the situation is the same for all Central and Eastern European states, I don’t see that,” Mrs. Merkel told reporters. She spoke after Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany of Hungary warned, “We should not allow that a new Iron Curtain should be set up and divide Europe.”

With uncertain leadership and few powerful collective institutions, the European Union is struggling with the strains this crisis has inevitably produced among 27 countries with uneven levels of development.

Read it all and make sure to see this Economist article as well.

Ruthie Christy firmly believes that God will take care of her in life. But right now, she could use a little help from the government as well.

Christy and her husband have been scrambling to keep themselves afloat since January, when a local paper mill cut his work schedule to as little as six days a month. They’ve put off paying bills, asked creditors for extensions and used whatever money they could to pay the mortgage on their North Charleston home.

Christy, 57, is still trying to come up with the cash to cover last month’s mortgage payment, with another round soon coming due. She’s tried to refinance her Ranger Drive home but can’t find any institution willing to write the loan.

Read it all.

Smaller banks are outraged over the one-time fee, which could wipe out 50 percent to 100 percent of a bank’s 2009 earnings, Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said yesterday in a telephone interview.

“I’ve never seen emotions like this,” said Fine, adding that he’s received more than 1,000 e-mails and telephone messages from angry bankers.

“The FDIC realizes that these assessments are a significant expense, particularly during a financial crisis and recession when bank earnings are under pressure,” Bair wrote. “We did not want to impose large assessments when the industry and economy are struggling. We searched for alternatives but found none better.”

Read it all.