The primates’ meeting has come and gone, and I’m sure there will have been abundant commentary by the time this is published. I’d like to reflect on some of the deeper issues behind our conversations about sexuality, particularly the influence of our understanding of gender.

The most intriguing conversation I had in Alexandria was with a primate who asked how same-sex couples partition “roles.” He literally asked if one was identified as the wife and one as the husband, and then wanted to know which one promised to obey the other in the marriage ceremony. Several of us explained that marriage in the West is most often understood as a partnership of equals, and has been for some time.

Those of you with a few more years on you may remember that the marriage service in the 1928 (and earlier versions) of the Book of Common Prayer did indeed have language about the wife obeying her husband. It’s pertinent here to note that the 1662 English Book of Common Prayer is still the norm in many provinces of the Anglican Communion, and it uses the same kind of language about obeying in the marriage service.

Read it all

Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said it’s impossible to calculate the exact effects of all the tax changes, but said the overall result is clear – less philanthropic giving.

“This will lead people to give less to charities if they behave the way they’ve behaved in the past,” he said. “We’ve already seen a drop in giving as a result of the economic collapse. On top of that, this will just reduce the amount of giving.”

Read it all.

(For some important background on this please read further here as well as there)–KSH.

The following notice appears under the heading “Interfaith Celebration” in the most recent Saint Mark’s Cathedral Newsletter in Seattle:

“…being made new…”
Thursday, March 26, 2009, 5:30 – 9:30 p.m. Town Hall Seattle, 1119 Eighth Avenue (Seneca Street entrance)

Please join in the celebration of the publication of Out of Darkness Into Light: Spiritual Guidance in the Quran with Reflections from Jewish and Christian Sources, co-authored by The Rev. Ann Holmes-Redding, Jamal Rahman and Kate Elias. The evening will also observe the 25th anniversary of Ann’s ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church and her movement into the next phase of ministry as both Christian and Muslim. The evening will begin with a book reading at 5:30 p.m., followed at 6:30 p.m. by a book signing and food. Then, at 7:15 p.m, there will be a talk, panel discussion, music, conversation, and more!

Tickets cost $20 and are available at www.brownpapertickets.com; The Cathedral Shop; and at the door. A limited number of subsidized tickets are available.
Proceeds will benefit Abrahamic Reunion West.

(Hat tip: BKITNW)

Terminally ill patients with less than six months to live will soon be able to ask their doctors to prescribe them lethal medication in Washington state.

But even though the “Death with Dignity” law takes effect Thursday, people who might seek the life-ending prescriptions could find their doctors conflicted or not willing to write them.

Many doctors are hesitant to talk publicly about where they stand on the issue, said Dr. Tom Preston, a retired cardiologist and board member of Compassion & Choices, the group that campaigned for and supports the law.

Read it all.

There are also no green shoots yet to suggest a turning point. There is, for example, very little sign of a recovery in the US housing market ”“ in fact none at all. Inasmuch as you can generalise about such a vast country, US homes are pretty much back to fair value in terms of their affordability. But the uncertainty is such, and the overhang of unsold homes so huge, that prices are still falling. Confidence is lower than it was during the recessions of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, as you can see from the other graph.

The question that arises then is whether the new US budget will change things. The boost is huge. The budget deficit is projected to rise to 12.5 per cent of GDP. That is higher than at any time since the Second World War. It is double the size, relative to GDP, of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. It is larger than the fiscal deficits run by Japan during the 1990s, which is not an encouraging precedent since they pretty much failed ”“ though arguably Japan’s so-called “lost decade” would have been even more lost without them. Finally, it is even larger than the proposed deficit that our present Government plans to run here.

So what should we make of it? I suppose I fear this administration is making the same mistake with fiscal policy that the previous one made with monetary policy. Remember how the Federal Reserve cut US interest rates way below the rate of inflation to pump up the economy after the collapse of the internet bubble? It succeeded in boosting demand. People borrowed like crazy, savings plunged, the housing boom took off, and the economy recovered. But the growth was artificial and could not be sustained.

Read the whole article.

The pace of decline in global economic output is extraordinary. On virtually any metric, we are seeing the worst global downturn in decades: worse than the aftermath of the first oil shock in the mid-1970s and worse than the early-1980s downswing, when the world economy had to cope with a doubling of the oil price, the tough love of monetarism and the onset of the Latin American debt crisis. Moreover, this time we cannot use the resurgence of inflation as an excuse for lost output: the credit crunch in all its many guises has seen to that. Instead, we have a world of collapsing output combined with falling prices: a world, then, of depression.

For many years, Marxist ideas appeared to be totally irrelevant. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought to an end the era of Marxist-Leninist Communism, while China’s decision to join the modern world at the beginning of the 1980s drew a line under its earlier Maoist ideology. In western economies, Marxist ideas were at their most potent after the First Word War when the likes of Rosa Luxemburg could smell revol-ution in the air and as the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Great Depression of the 1930s. I’m not suggesting we’re entering revolutionary times. However, it seems increasingly likely that the economic landscape in the years ahead will be fundamentally different from the landscape that has dominated the working lives of people like me who entered the workforce in the 1980s. We’ve lived through decades of plenty, where incomes have risen rapidly, where credit has been all too easily available and where recessions have been mostly modest affairs. Suddenly, we’re facing a collapse in activity on a truly Marxist scale. It’s difficult to imagine the world’s love affair with free markets being sustained under this onslaught. The extreme nature of this downswing will change our lives for decades to come.

Read it all.

“Take heed lest you forget the LORD your God, by not keeping his commandments and his ordinances and his statutes, which I command you this day:
lest, when you have eaten and are full, and have built goodly houses and live in them,
and when your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied,
then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage….

–Deuteronomy 8:11-14

TORY JOHNSON, the owner of Women for Hire, has been running job fairs in 10 of America’s largest cities for the last decade, and during that time she has never had more than 2,000 people come to the events. Last Tuesday, at a little after 3 p.m., after the last person had checked in at her latest job fair at the Sheraton Manhattan, she showed me the counter she uses to keep track of attendance: 5,103.

“Never,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing ever like this before.” Many of the women and men (she opened the event to men for the first time) had waited over two hours on the sidewalk in 20 degree temperature, or close to minus-7 centigrade, for the chance to mill through a ballroom, push to the front of a line at one of the 40 employer booths, hand a rep a résumé, maybe get a minute of face time and collect a business card or two.

“Very humbling,” said Pat Gericke, 61, of Manhattan who has had a successful interior design business for 20 years that suddenly went dead last fall. “I never thought I’d be at one of these.”

Read it all.

Historians will look back and say this was no ordinary time but a defining moment: an unprecedented period of global change, and a time when one chapter ended and another began.

The scale and the speed of the global banking crisis has at times been almost overwhelming, and I know that in countries everywhere people who rely on their banks for savings have been feeling powerless and afraid. But it is when times become harder and challenges greater that across the world countries must show vision, leadership and courage ”“ and, while we can do a great deal nationally, we can do even more working together internationally.

So now is the time for leaders of every country in the world to work together to agree the action that will see us through the current crisis and ensure we come out stronger. And there is no international partnership in recent history that has served the world better than the special relationship between Britain and the United States.

Read it all.

I mentioned this program earlier but I wanted to make sure people were aware it can be viewed online here. Very much worth the time.

Even if the financial crisis is spread throughout the world, this is no time for discouragement, says the leader of Caritas Internationalis.

Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga affirmed this at a conference this week in Mexico, sponsored by the Instituto Mexicana de Doctrina Social Cristiana (Mexican Institute of Christian Social Doctrine).

“The crisis is generalized but we must not be discouraged,” the Honduran cardinal affirmed. “The Church isn’t a dead organization and she responds in times of crisis. This time of scarcity is an occasion for growth, and solidarity is the solution.”

Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga called the Incarnation a manifestation of solidarity. And, he said, the Christian should never take an attitude of “let he who can save himself.” Instead the faithful must hear Christ’s call to solidarity.

Read it all.

A month after allegations of child sexual abuse surfaced in the mainstream press, the Hasidic community in Brooklyn, N.Y., is taking cautious steps to confront the scandal. Meanwhile, outsiders are tackling the issue head on.

On Sunday, state Assemblyman Dov Hikind plans to host a community-wide “morning of chizuk” (support) for the alleged victims of abuse. Hikind, an Orthodox Jew who is largely responsible for bringing public attention to the scandal, has recruited rabbis and community leaders to speak at the event, which takes place in Boro Park, the center of the Hasidic district he represents. Some community members believe the gesture is merely symbolic, but Hikind calls the event “unprecedented.”

“No one has touched this subject before,” he says. “We’re telling the victims we’re sorry we didn’t see your pain before, and we’re turning the corner.”

I caught this this morning on the way to worship. Definitely disturbing but nevertheless important. Read or better still listen to it all.

“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”

–Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

What to say to all this?

First, to give him his due, [Michael] Medved does provide an important corrective. In every age there are two extremes: Those who see nothing wrong with the times they live in, and those who see their times as hopeless.

We religious folks tend to fall into the second extreme. We romanticize history and forget that other ages were also marked by grievous sins: Feudalism was a nightmare system of oppression; the Industrial Revolution turned human beings into cogs; the casual racism of the beginning of the 20th century makes us wince when we glimpse it. We have abortion; our forefathers had slavery. We objectify women with pornography; others did it by denying them rights.

But second, the moral crisis we pointed to didn’t depend on rising teen sex rates. What about child sexual abuse? What about pornography? What about suicide rates? We did mention that casual sex is common from a young age, and I think that’s a justifiable thing to point out: The rates may have dropped, but calling their drop “dramatic” doesn’t change the fact that they are still very high.

And third, as Pope John Paul II and others have pointed out, the greatest sin in our day isn’t any particular sin, but the loss of the sense of sin.

Read it all.

The United States now believes that Iran has amassed enough uranium that with further purification could be used to build an atomic bomb, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared Sunday.

The statement by the chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, went further than previous, official judgments of the Iranian nuclear threat, and it essentially confirmed a new report by the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, which found that Iran had enough nuclear material for a bomb.

“We think they do, quite frankly,” Admiral Mullen said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “And Iran having a nuclear weapon, I’ve believed for a long time, is a very, very bad outcome for the region and for the world.”

Read it all.

A few of the speakers yesterday connected the decision in 1989 to approve a woman bishop to the later decision to approve a gay bishop.

“After Feb. 11 [1989], how could we not consent to the election of Gene Robinson?” asked Byron Rushing, a Massachusetts state representative who is also an active Episcopal layman. “Today we celebrate that we have been changed. Although we are not what God, and we, want us to be, thank God we are not what we used to be.”

And later, during the liturgy, the Rev. Stephanie Spellers added an audible prayer “For Brother Gene – another first, but not last.”

Jefferts Schori said the significance of the anniversary is that “we’re marking the fact that transformation is real, and it lasts.”

Read it all

Jeff Wagoner is a bankruptcy attorney in Kansas City, Mo., with the brush-cut hair and clear eyes of a former Navy aviator. From his office in a tower on a hill, he can see miles of prairie and a world of hurt. Wagoner’s clients (and he has plenty these days) range from folks who had no business ever buying a house to folks freshly fired from executive suites. Based on his survey of the economic wreckage, Wagoner’s conclusion is that even the slightest miscalculation or change in circumstances could send another customer through his door: “There are not a lot of second chances out there right now.”

We have entered the one-strike-and-you’re-out era. One lost job. One medical emergency. One bad risk or misjudgment of the heart. “I’ve seen more people lose their houses in the past year than in the previous nine years put together,” Wagoner said one recent afternoon, as gray skies hung low over the vast horizon. “It sounds crazy,” he continued, “but I’d say unless you’re making over $350,000 a year, the more you’re paid, the more vulnerable you are. If you lose a job, you’re going to have a hard time finding another that pays as much. Or maybe you need to move to find that new job, but you’re stuck with a house you can’t sell. Or maybe your marriage breaks up, and you have to liquidate your assets at today’s prices.”

In the one-strike economy, it’s not just the subprime suckers going down. Trouble stretches beyond the province of liar loans, condo-flipping and the collateralized debt obligations that no one fully understands. A hard rain now falls on the just as well as the unjust. Consumers have stopped spending, factories have stopped operating, employers have stopped hiring ”” and home values continue to fall. For millions of people, the margin between getting by and getting buried is becoming as thin and as bloody as a razor blade.

Read it all.

Mark Cooper started his work day on a recent morning cleaning the door handles of an office building with a rag, vigorously shaking out a rug at a back entrance and pushing a dust mop down a long hallway.

Nine months ago he lost his job as the security manager for the western United States for a Fortune 500 company, overseeing a budget of $1.2 million and earning about $70,000 a year. Now he is grateful for the $12 an hour he makes in what is known in unemployment circles as a “survival job” at a friend’s janitorial services company. But that does not make the work any easier.

“You’re fighting despair, discouragement, depression every day,” Mr. Cooper said.

Working five days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Mr. Cooper is not counted by traditional measures as among the recession’s casualties at this point. But his tumble down the economic ladder is among the more disquieting and often hidden aspects of the downturn.

What interested me most about this story was the picture. Make sure not to miss it. Pretty unusual for a front page NY Times story above the fold. Read it all–KSH.

Take a good look at the cover of this week’s Time Magazine.

What are the implications of Timothy Dolan stepping into this position?

DAVID GIBSON (Author and Journalist): Well Kim, I think you have really a media-friendly bishop stepping into the media capital of the world, frankly. So it’s really an important step both for New York, for New York Catholics, 2.5 million””one of the largest dioceses certainly in the country, still””but also for the national church. You get a really high-visible guy like Timothy Dolan out there who can present the faith but also engage the culture. So I think it’s really in a sense a beginning of a new era for New York and perhaps for the church in the United States, while at the same time he’s something of a throwback to the older Cardinal O’Connor-type Irish archbishops of New York.

[KIM] LAWTON: Well, how is he different from Cardinal Egan, just personality-wise? And how may that have an impact, then, on some of these issues?

Mr. GIBSON: Well, in a sense he’s, you know, just most obviously he’s more outgoing. He’s just more a “man of the people,” you might say. He enjoys what he calls hanging out with the meat-and-potatoes Catholics. He’s very funny. You know, I think he’s good management-wise. You know, he knows how to take care of the purse strings. Cardinal Egan was very good with the finances, but he’s much more of a behind-the-scenes type of guy. He just didn’t have that personality that Archbishop Dolan and, before Egan, Cardinal John O’Connor had. So there’s just that real contrast, and I think everybody is looking, both left and right, it’s not a conservative-liberal thing for once in the church, but everybody is looking for a more high-profile archbishop who would be really more of a pastor out there in the parishes and in the pews.

Read it all.

In his 11 years in the Washington Legislature, Representative Mark Miloscia says he has supported all manner of methods to fill the state’s coffers, including increasing fees on property owners to help the homeless and taxes on alcohol and cigarettes, most of which, he said, passed “without a peep.”

And so it was last month that Mr. Miloscia, a Democrat, decided he might try to “find a new tax source” ”” pornography.

The response, however, was a turn-off.

“People came down on me like a ton of bricks,” said Mr. Miloscia, who proposed an 18.5 percent sales tax on items like sex toys and adult magazines. “I didn’t quite understand. Apparently porn is right up there with Mom and apple pie.”

Mr. Miloscia’s proposal died at the committee level, but he is far from the only legislator floating unorthodox ideas as more than two-thirds of the states face budget shortfalls.

Read it all.

“Yes, relationships are indeed natural and God made humans to have relationships, but relationships are more than sexual,” he said. “The church allows celibacy to be part of the priest, not only because it frees these men to work full-time ministry, but it is an opportunity to begin to live the life promised in eternal life where there will be no marriage but the marriage between God and humanity.”

[Father Bob] Vaillancourt also responds to those who say that allowing priests to marry better equips them to counsel married couples and having families helps make them more in touch with the real world.

“I have not had the gift of living a married life, and yes, I have not had the privilege of having children; but I have had the honor of listening to many, many couples struggling in their marriage and family life and attempting to bring healing and peace in their lives,” he said.

He has worked with many wounded couples and families, and they have taught him what it takes to be married and helped him understand the important needs of married couples, and of family life, he said.

“They are the ones who have taught me how to counsel couples and their families. I may not be qualified to counsel in some eyes, but I humbly admit that many couples whom I have counseled have grown in healing and holiness. And for that, I am grateful.”

Read it all.

President Obama calls his budget outline a guide for the nation’s path back to prosperity. But it looks more like a path to immense debt.

Under the Obama plan, federal spending will rise faster than national income over the next decade. He projects the nation’s debt will rise from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $15.4 trillion in 2019.

Indeed, his budget plan, which includes a record $3.55 trillion in spending next year, shows no exit from a dependency on debt, despite higher taxes. The plan estimates that federal revenues will grow 76 percent by 2019, while the nation’s gross domestic product grows only 60 percent.

Mr. Obama’s budget offers a clear contradiction of his assertion, in Tuesday night’s speech to Congress, that he doesn’t believe in “bigger government….”

Read it all.

An office party goes on without her, across town in an affluent world vastly different from the one where Mariana Chilton now finds herself. Her husband’s tried calling. Twice.

And still she sits in dress slacks and stocking feet, gray suede shoes tossed aside, on the drab carpet of a row house in the Philadelphia projects, playing with someone else’s children while her own three kids wait for Mom to come home.

A mouse scurries by, but Chilton doesn’t flinch.

She is listening, for the umpteenth time, as another mother speaks about what it means to be poor and hungry in America.

Read it all.

One of the discoveries of modern science is the sheer improbability of the Universe. It is shaped by six fundamental forces which, had they varied by an infinitesimal amount, the Universe would have expanded or imploded in such a way as to preclude the formation of stars. Unless we assume the existence of a million or trillion other universes (itself a large leap of faith), the fact that there is a universe at all is massively improbable.

So is the existence of life. Among the hundred billion galaxies, each with billions of stars, only one planet known to us, Earth, seems finely tuned for the emergence of life. And by what intermediate stages did non-life become life?

It’s a puzzle so improbable that Francis Crick was forced to argue that life was born somewhere else, Mars perhaps, and came here via meteorite, so making the mystery yet more mysterious.

How did life become sentient? And how did sentience grow to become self-consciousness, that strange gift, known only to Homo sapiens. So many improbabilities, Stephen J. Gould concluded, that if the process of evolution were run again from the beginning it is doubtful whether Homo sapiens would ever have been born.

You don’t have to be religious to have a sense of awe at the sheer improbability of things….

Read it all.

But perhaps the problem is not so much this ‘me culture’, but the lack of another ‘me culture’. Yesterday, the social commentator Polly Toynbee said on this programme that good sex education was about giving girls the chance to say “no”. It is interesting that girls, post-feminism, should not be able to stand up for themselves. Yet sexual freedom appears to have made it harder for them to admit they don’t want to have sex, especially when they are bombarded with sexual imagery, and pressured by their peers into believing it’s great to be having sex.

Young people often lack confidence, and young teenage girls in particular can lack self-esteem. There’s certainly a ‘me culture’ today that’s an entirely self-centred one. But there’s another ‘me culture’ that’s about having regard for yourself, having a strong sense of your own worth. When people quote Christ saying love your neighbour as yourself, the emphasis is usually on how you treat others. But his words also make clear that you cannot reach out to others unless you love yourself.

Read it all.

Here’s what is most infuriating: Here we are now, fully aware of how these scams worked. Yet for all practical purposes, the government has to keep them going. Indeed, that may be the single most important reason it can’t let A.I.G. fail. If the company defaulted, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps would “blow up,” and all those European banks whose toxic assets are supposedly insured by A.I.G. would suddenly be sitting on immense losses. Their already shaky capital structures would be destroyed. A.I.G. helped create the illusion of regulatory capital with its swaps, and now the government has to actually back up those contracts with taxpayer money to keep the banks from collapsing. It would be funny if it weren’t so awful.

I asked Mr. Arvanitis, the former A.I.G. executive, if the company viewed what it had done during the bubble as a form of gaming the system. “Oh no,” he said, “they never thought of it as abuse. They thought of themselves as satisfying their customers.”

That’s either a remarkable example of the power of rationalization, or they were lying to themselves, figuring that when the house of cards finally fell, somebody else would have to clean it up.

That would be us, the taxpayers.

Simply infuriating. Read it all.

The Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region is the sick man of emerging markets. While the global crisis means few, if any, bright spots worldwide, the situation in the CEE area is particularly bleak. After almost a decade of outpacing worldwide growth, the region looks set to contract in 2009, with almost every country either in or on the verge of recession. The once high-flying Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) look headed for double-digit contractions, while countries relatively less affected by the crisis (i.e. Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia) will have a hard time posting even positive growth. Meanwhile, Hungary and Latvia’s economies already deteriorated to the point where IMF help was needed late last year.

The CEE’s ill health is primarily driven by two factors ”“ collapsing exports and the drying-up of capital inflows. Exports were key to the region’s economic success, accounting for a significant 80-90% of GDP in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. By far the biggest market for CEE goods is the Eurozone, which is now in recession. Meanwhile, the global credit crunch has dried up capital inflows to the region. An easy flow of credit fueled Eastern Europe’s boom in recent years, but the good times are gone. According to the Institute of International Finance, net private capital flows to Emerging Europe are projected to fall from an estimated $254 billion in 2008 to $30 billion in 2009. Whether or not this is formally considered a ”˜sudden stop’ of capital, it will necessitate a very painful adjustment process.

What is especially worrisome is that the days of easy credit flows were accompanied by rising external imbalances that rival or even exceed the build-up of imbalances in pre-crisis Asia ”“ e.g. current account deficits in Southeast Asia from 1995-97 fell within the 3.0-8.5% of GDP range, while those in CEE were in the double-digits in Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltics in 2008. As examined in a recent RGE analysis piece, the vulnerabilities in many CEE countries ”“ high foreign currency borrowing, hefty levels of external debt and massive current-account deficits ”“ suggest the classic makings of a capital account crisis a la Asia in the late 1990s.

Read it all.

A wonderfully uplifting story about a parish making a difference through generosity–watch it all.

Read it carefully and read it all and here is more on the wonderful Marjory Wentworth.