The board of trustees of Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) in Cambridge, Mass., has voted to roll back tuition by 25 percent for its master of divinity and master of arts degrees in theological study programs next year.

“This decision reflects EDS’ commitment to making theological education accessible to a wide range of students,” said the Rev. Randall Chase, acting president in a release. “For several years we have been looking for ways to address the problem of access to an Episcopal seminary education: our distributive learning master’s program makes access possible for students unable to relocate for two to three years; reducing tuition for our fall and spring master’s students, in combination with our financial aid program, helps to reduce seminarian debt, which often serves as a barrier to studying at EDS.”

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It removes the word “sacrament” from the rite. It reduces baptism to an organizational membership ceremony of some kind.

It has NO renunciation of evil. It does not admit to the reality of Satan, spiritual evil, worldly corruption or our own sinful desires. It does not warn that this false Trinity of the world, the flesh and the devil can separate us from God – rather, it says that “new birth is a gift that none can take away.” There is no expression of the need to continually “repent and return to the Lord.” Baptism is a magical, immediate entitlement to eternal life. It claims to “bestow the forgiveness of sin” without ever really acknowledging our status as creatures who have trespassed in rebellion against our Creator.

It has a few holdover phrases from the ’79 Prayer Book, but is completely detached from the Biblical message. In fact, it removes some of the most Biblically accurate statements from the ’79 BCP. “… made members of your Church” (yes, big “C”) displaces deliverance “from bondage to sin” in the Thanksgiving over the Water.

Read it carefully and please follow and read the linked material also.

As many of our readers know, TitusOneNine shares server space with StandFirm. Greg Griffith has done an incredible job in ensuring the uptime and reliability of both blogs. As part of his commitment to managing for growth, Greg has planned to migrate Stand Firm and T19 to a new server this weekend. You can read all the details over at Stand Firm. The main things our readers need to know are:

[blockquote]What this means for the Stand Firm and TitusOneNine communities… is that I anticipate we’ll probably spend the better part of a day offline, beginning some time between Friday evening and Saturday evening. User commentary is the pulse of these two communities, and because the server change will not occur for all users at the exact same time, at the beginning of the move we’re going to shut off comments here at the current server in order to ensure that none of the conversation is lost.

Please note that there is nothing you can do to hasten the transition on your computer. It is a function of a vast network of “domain name servers” distributed all over the world, some of which receive and implement the switchover instructions earlier or later than others, and sometimes the difference can be several hours or even a day or more.[/blockquote] Read more

We’ll keep you updated with any further details as we get them from Greg. Thanks for your understanding in advance.

–elfgirl for all of the elves. (We’ll try to assist in any way we can though we’re not directly involved in anything to do with the server move.)

I really do not know anymore what is coming next. How things are done and not done are as haphazard as people’s ideas; or so it seems.

Now I read that the “New” Diocese of Fort Worth passed a $632,466 dollar budget for a part-time bishop, a little over 19 priests and 62 delegates who represent way less than a thousand people, and $200,000 is from the General Convention budget!

First, I did not see that in the GC budget that was passed in 2006. Where did it come from?

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Global concerns and Anglican Communion issues will be a major focus of the Episcopal Church’s 76th General Convention when it meets July 8-17 in Anaheim, California.

The church’s main legislative gathering, which meets every three years, also will welcome many international guests from various Anglican Communion provinces. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will attend General Convention for the first time July 8-9. He will participate in Bible study and be a keynote speaker at a global economic forum on the evening of July 8.

Convention will devote extensive conversation to global issues through its Committee on International Concerns, which will prepare legislation to be addressed by convention’s House of Bishops and House of Deputies.

Some of the key issues will focus on the crises and peacemaking efforts in conflict areas such as the Middle East, Sudan, Sri Lanka and the Great Lakes region of Africa.

Convention addresses global concerns for two reasons, said the Rev. Canon Brian Grieves, the Episcopal Church’s senior director of mission and director of the Advocacy Center.

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The Federal Reserve Board of Governors receives daily reports on loans to banks and securities firms, the institution said in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Bloomberg News.

The Fed refused yesterday to disclose the names of the borrowers and the loans, alleging that it would cast “a stigma” on recipients of more than $1.9 trillion of emergency credit from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

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A study of Muslim Americans released Monday presents a portrait of an often misunderstood community — one that is integrated socio-economically but culturally alienated; that succeeds in the workforce but struggles to find contentment.

The numbers suggest economic and career success among Muslim Americans — they have a higher employment rate than the national average and are among the nation’s most educated religious groups. Yet only 41% described themselves as “thriving.”

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One of …[Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s] first actions after the arrest warrant was to undertake yet another crime against humanity: He expelled major international aid groups, including the International Rescue Committee and the Dutch section of Doctors Without Borders. In effect, he is now preparing to massacre the Darfuri people in still another way, for Darfuris are living in camps and depend on aid workers for food, water and health care ”” even as deadly meningitis has broken out in one of the camps.

“The consequences are going to be dire,” notes George Rupp, the president of the International Rescue Committee, on which 1.75 million Sudanese depend for water, sanitation, education and health care. “If Sudan persists in this decision, it’s difficult to see how the outcome will be anything other than serious suffering and death for hundreds of thousands of people.”

Mr. Bashir is now testing the international community, and President Obama and other world leaders must respond immediately and decisively, in conjunction with as many non-Western nations as possible.

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Follow up: This related NPR story which I caught driving home last night is worthwhile also.

Should you read the Bible? You probably haven’t. A century ago, most well-educated Americans knew the Bible deeply. Today, biblical illiteracy is practically universal among nonreligious people. My mother and my brother, professors of literature and the best-read people I’ve ever met, have not done much more than skim Genesis and Exodus. Even among the faithful, Bible reading is erratic. The Catholic Church, for example, includes only a teeny fraction of the Old Testament in its official readings. Jews study the first five books of the Bible pretty well but shortchange the rest of it. Orthodox Jews generally spend more time on the Talmud and other commentary than on the Bible itself. Of the major Jewish and Christian groups, only evangelical Protestants read the whole Bible obsessively.

Read it all.

The title above is his, not mine–KSH.

Pro-life groups have come out in force against health and human services secretary nominee Kathleen Sebelius over her pro-choice record. But Sebelius, the Roman Catholic governor of Kansas, has talked publicly about being a pro-choice pro-lifer. Here’s an excerpt from her 2006 address at the Kansans for Faithful Citizenship conference, in which she discussed abortion more than any other issue:

Of course, no discussion of life and dignity of the human person can be complete without discussing the important issue of abortion.

My Catholic faith teaches me that all life is sacred, and personally I believe abortion is wrong. However, I disagree with the suggestion that criminalizing women and their doctors is an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the number of abortions in our nation.

There is another way. By working in support of the common good we can better protect human life and the dignity of all people.

Read it all and make sure to read this follow up also.

I’m worried. We’ve just elected a talented young president with many good instincts about how to propel our country forward, extend health care to more people, make our tax code fairer and launch a green industrial revolution. But do you know what I fear? I fear that his whole first term could be eaten by Citigroup, A.I.G., Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and the whole housing/subprime credit bubble we inflated these past 20 years.

I hope my fears are exaggerated. But ask yourself this: Why couldn’t former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson solve this problem? And why does it seem as though his successor, Tim Geithner, won’t even look us in the eye and spell out his strategy? Is it because they don’t get it? No. It is because they know ”” like Roy Scheider in the movie “Jaws,” when he first saw the great white shark ”” that “we’re gonna need a bigger boat,” and they’re too afraid to tell us just how big.

This problem is more complicated than anything you can imagine. We are coming off a 20-year credit binge. As a country, too many of us stopped making money by making “stuff” and started making money from money ”” consumers making money out of rising home prices and using the profits to buy flat-screen TVs from China on their credit cards, and bankers making money by creating complex securities and leverage so more and more consumers could get in on the credit game.

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Influential Georgia lawmakers have introduced a bill that would make illegal in their state some of the fertilization procedures used in the high-profile case of a California mother who recently gave birth to octuplets.

The bill appears to be the most sweeping state legislation of its kind introduced in the wake of the case of Nadya Suleman, a 33-year-old single woman who gave birth in January to eight babies through in-vitro fertilization. Ms. Suleman has said that she had six frozen embryos left from prior in-vitro treatments and asked that they all be implanted because she didn’t want them to be destroyed. Two of the embryos split, creating eight total embryos, she said.

Another bill was recently introduced in Missouri’s House of Representatives calling for less restrictive limits on the number of implanted embryos.

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An Anglican priest, Venerable Emmanuel Ejianya, has been abducted by unknown gunmen in Anambra State.

A police source told Daily Champion that the clergyman was kidnapped last Sunday when his abductors trailed him from Eziowelle in Idemili North Council area to his official residence at Anglican Church, Ogidi in Idemili North Area Council of the state.

The incident is coming barely two weeks after his brother, Mr. Mike Ejianya, slumped and died while preaching on the pulpit. Mike is yet to be buried. It was gathered that Venerable Ejianya was returning from a one-day crusade organized by members of the Anglican community at Eziowelle late in the night when the unidentified hoodlums trailed him to his official residence and abducted him.

Read it alll.

The head of that Vatican office, Cardinal William Levada, wrote Hepworth in July 2008, saying he was giving “serious attention” to the TAC’s proposal. But he noted that the situation within the broader Anglican Communion, with which the Vatican has an official dialogue, had “become markedly more complex.” The Anglican Communion is on the brink of schism because of internal rifts over how it should interpret what the Bible says about gay relationships and other issues.

Hepworth has called the letter a sign of “warmth and encouragement,” and the traditional Anglicans posted the note on their Web site. But Monsignor Marc Langham, who is in charge of Anglican relations at the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, said that Levada’s letter was a “standard Vatican holding letter” and suggested interpreting it with caution.

“It’s very easy to turn expectation and hope into hard fact,” Langham said in a recent phone interview.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, confirmed that the traditional Anglican group and the Vatican have been in contact for some time and would continue to talk.

Read it all.

I think we’re beginning to see a time of darkness when, amid a plethora of high tech connectivity, one-quarter of Americans say they have no close confidante, more than double the number twenty years ago. It’s a darkening time when we think togetherness means keeping one eye, hand, or ear on our gadgets, ever ready to tun into another channel of life, when we begin to turn to robots to tend to the sick and the old, when doctors listen to patients on an average for just eighteen seconds before interrupting, and when two-thirds of children under six live in homes that keep the television on half or more of the time, and envoronment linked to attention deficiencies. We should worry when we have the world at our fingertips, but half of Americans age eighteen to twnety-four can’t find New York state on a map and more than 60 percent can’t similarly locate Iraq

–Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus Books, 2008), page 22

Watch it all.

In this sense, I am essentially in agreement with you: It is not enough to preach or to do pastoral work with the precious cargo acquired in theology studies. This is important, it is essential, but it must be personalized: from academic knowledge, which we have learned and also reflected upon, in a personal vision of my life, in order to reach other people. In this sense, I would like to say that it is important, on one hand, to make the great word of the faith concrete with our personal experience of faith, in our meeting with our parishioners, but also to not lose its simplicity. Naturally, great words of the tradition — such as sacrifice of expiation, redemption of Christ’s sacrifice, original sin — are incomprehensible as such today. We cannot simply work with great formulas, [although] truths, without putting them in the context of today’s world. Through study and what the masters of theology and our personal experience with God tell us, we must translate these great words, so that they enter into the proclamation of God to the man of today.

And, on the other hand, I would say that we must not conceal the simplicity of the Word of God in valuations that are too heavy for human approaches. I remember a friend who, after hearing homilies with long anthropological reflections in order to bring others near the Gospel, said: But I am not interested in these approaches, I want to understand what the Gospel says! And it seems to me that often instead of long summaries of approaches, it would be better to say — I did so when I was still in my normal life: I don’t like this Gospel, we are the opposite of what the Lord says! But what does it mean? If I say sincerely that at first glance I am not in agreement, I already have their attention: It is understood that I would like, as a man of today, to understand what the Lord is saying. Thus we can, without circumlocution, enter fully into the Word.

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We can tap into 50 million Web sites, 1.8 million books in print, 75 million blogs, and other snowstorms of information, but we increasingly seek knowledge in Google searches and Yahoo! headlings that we gulp on the run while juggling other tasks. We can contact millions of people across the globe, yet we increasingly connect with even our most intimate friends and family via instant messaging, virutal visits, and fleeting meetings that are rescheduled a half dozen times, then punctuated when they do occur by pings and beeps and multitasking. Amid the glittering promise of our new technologies and the wondrous potential of our scientific gains, we are nurturing a culture of social diffusion, intellectual fragmentation, sensory detachment. In this new world, something is amiss. And that something is attention.

–Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus Books, 2008), page 13

With closed eyes, 12 men and women sat in a circle of mismatched high-backed couches and chairs, listening as the soft musical voice of Mother Julia Anne Fritts led them in meditation.

“Now, actually breathe — something we adults often forget to do,” Fritts, the newly ordained priest at St. John’s Episcopal Church, said just loud enough over the recorded sounds of Gregorian chants.

She pushed her long, straight, silver hair off her shoulders as she looked around the quiet circle.

Pleased by the attendance, the church opened the Tuesday night meetings, called “Got Peace?” to people outside the parish.

“In the midst of an economic crisis, we hope this will catch people’s attention,” said the Rev. Jim Wheeler, rector of the Main Street church.

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The Diocese of Ottawa has said it will perform same-sex blessings, becoming the first Canadian Anglican diocese to make such a move since a ban was imposed on the practice by the international church.

The diocese said it is developing a liturgy and protocol for the rite and once they are created it will start performing the ceremonies for gay couples on a limited basis. But critics of same-sex blessings say those steps will widen the schism in the Canadian church.

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Muslims in America have a much more positive outlook on life than their counterparts in most predominantly Muslim countries and some other Western societies, according to a poll released Monday.

The Gallup Organization study found Muslim-Americans to be racially and ideologically diverse, extremely religious, and younger and more highly educated than the typical American.

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“We won’t be rebuilding wealth so quickly,” says Christian Weller of the American Progress and the University of Massachusetts, who specializes in retirement income security.

Weller says the decline in wealth is the greatest on record.

Housing prices are expected to bottom out until mid year at the earliest. Thus far, the median price of a home is down more than 20 percent from $219,000 at the market peak in 2007 to $170,000 in January.

Stock prices, however, have fallen twice as much, some 50 percent, from their October 2007 peak.

And while a greater percentage of Americans are homeowners than investors and thus the average household’s wealth is more defined by real estate than investments, the investment outlook is still a major force.

“There are more people involved in the equity market and have wealth tied up in it than the 1980s and 1990s,” says Christopher Rupley of Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.

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Exploding pension fund shortfalls are blowing billion-dollar holes in the balance sheets of some of the Chicago area’s biggest companies, forcing them to make huge contributions to retirement plans at a time when cash flow and credit are already under stress.

Boeing Co.’s shareholder equity is now $1.2 billion in the hole thanks to an $8.4-billion gap between its pension assets and the projected cost of its obligations for 2008. At the end of 2007, Boeing had a $4.7-billion pension surplus. If its investments don’t turn around, the Chicago-based aerospace giant will have to quadruple annual contributions to its plan to about $2 billion by 2011.

Take a careful look at the chart accompanying this article and read it all.

The Ant

The ant has made himself illustrious
Through constant industry industrious.
So what?
Would you be calm and placid,
If you were full of formic acid?

–Ogden Nash (1902-1971)

The LORD is my portion; I promise to keep thy words.

I entreat thy favor with all my heart; be gracious to me according to thy promise.

Psalm 119:57-58

[From the current administration] we end up with an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new.

The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment. Yet the Obama budget is predicated on a class divide. The president issued a read-my-lips pledge that no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people. All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward.

The U.S. has always been a decentralized nation, skeptical of top-down planning. Yet, the current administration concentrates enormous power in Washington, while plan after plan emanates from a small group of understaffed experts.

The U.S. has always had vibrant neighborhood associations. But in its very first budget, the Obama administration raises the cost of charitable giving. It punishes civic activism and expands state intervention.

The U.S. has traditionally had a relatively limited central government. But federal spending as a share of G.D.P. is zooming from its modern norm of 20 percent to an unacknowledged level somewhere far beyond.

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates ”” moderate-conservative, in my case ”” are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was.

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In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.

Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

“I felt really violated,” Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.”

Mr. Zerden’s minor stir four years ago has lately grown into a full-blown movement by more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty, intent on exposing and curtailing the industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories, as well as in Harvard’s 17 affiliated teaching hospitals and institutes.

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Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher have been married for more than 84 years-setting the world record for the Longest marriage for a living couple.

They watch TV together but she leaves when the baseball game comes on. They now have separate bedrooms and she says he can stay up until the last ball is thrown.

The two sit on the porch and as a train goes by they count the cars. They also watch the neighbors who walk by.

Simply fantastic. Read it all.

Labour’s tax credits have caused thousands of families to break up, an authoritative study said yesterday.

The flagship scheme is blamed for a doubling of the divorce rate among low income parents with young children.

Tax credits, introduced a decade ago to cut child poverty, were supposed to help single mothers and hard-working families.

Read it all.