More than five years later, tensions caused by the consecration of a partnered homosexual man as Bishop Coadjutor of New Hampshire continue to affect half of all Episcopal churches, according to census information compiled in the Blue Book prepared for the 76th General Convention, to be held July 8-17 in Anaheim, Calif.

The report, based on results from 783 completed surveys, is a sober snapshot of an aging denomination, struggling with unresolved conflict and in danger of long-term decline. It was written by the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church and included in the Blue Book report published in advance of Convention.

“In prior years the Committee on the State of the Church often heard the criticism that our church seemed unwilling to recognize the presence of a major source of internal controversy that some argued was having an impact on our common life, as reflected in declining membership and attendance statistics,” the Blue Book Report states. “The metaphor most often used was that we ”˜failed to acknowledge the elephant in the room’, referring to what many viewed as the momentous decision by the 74th General Convention (2003) to consent to the consecration of the Bishop of New Hampshire.”

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Crafting a three-year budget more than a year in advance of its starting date is never an easy task, but the Episcopal Church’s Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance (PB&F) acknowledged this week that the work is even tougher given the world’s economic crisis.

The committee met March 24-27 at the Maritime Institute’s Conference Center to begin work on the church’s 2010-2012 triennial budget, which it will present for the 76th General Convention’s approval this summer in Anaheim, California. Speaking to the timeframe involved in the effort, Episcopal Church Treasurer Kurt Barnes pointed out that work on the budget began six months ago and that Executive Council approved a draft version two months ago.

“The world has changed a couple of times” during that period, he said. The budget will not be complete until General Convention approves it, a vote now scheduled for July 16. The budget takes effect January 1, 2010.

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One of the Church of England’s most outspoken bishops has announced that he is to resign a decade early to devote the rest of his life to work with Christians in Islamic areas.

The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Church’s only Asian bishop, who is just 59 and could have stayed at Rochester until his 70th birthday, intends to use his expertise as an Islamic scholar to work in Pakistan where he was born and in the Middle East to build bridges between Christians and Muslims.

A conservative evangelical, he will step down in September after nearly 15 years in the diocese.

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Thousands of shivering, tired residents got out while they could and others prayed that miles of sandbagged levees would hold Friday as the surging Red River threatened to unleash the biggest flood North Dakota’s largest city has ever seen.

The agonizing decision to stay or go came as the final hours ticked down before an expected crest Saturday evening, when the ice-laden river could climb as high as 43 feet, nearly 3 feet higher than the record set 112 years ago.

“It’s to the point now where I think we’ve done everything we can,” said resident Dave Davis, whose neighborhood was filled with backhoes and tractors building an earthen levee. “The only thing now is divine intervention.”

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As religious leaders, we are extremely concerned about the deteriorating plight of the civilians who are still trapped in the Vanni. Endless debates about the actual numbers trapped or who is primarily to be blamed for their plight are not the most urgent needs at this stage. The immediate and absolutely urgent need is to recognize that this is a very critical humanitarian crisis faced by fellow Sri Lankans. The needs of food, water, health, sanitation, shelter and, above all, physical security of these our sisters and brothers and children need to be addressed without delay. From all independent reports available, the plight of these trapped civilians has become absolutely desperate. These are people who over the past several years have lived under severe deprivations and restrictions and have in recent months been displaced several times over. We urge that all sides recognize the helplessness and powerlessness of these desperate Sri Lankans to change their circumstances or voice their fears and concerns. We earnestly appeal to all concerned to set aside debates on secondary issues and take immediate steps to alleviate their suffering.

We are grateful that a seven mile long strip has been declared by the Government of Sri Lanka as “no-fire” zone. We trust that negotiations can be facilitated to ensure that there is bilateral agreement for this “no-fire” zone and for the avoidance of the use of heavy artillery and multi-barrel shelling in the areas where civilians reside. We are also thankful that arrangements have been made for the sick and the injured to be transported by ship to Trincomalee for treatment. But in the prevailing desperate plight of civilians in the Vanni, we appeal to all parties, in the name of our religions and in the name of our common humanity, to have the humility and the courage to agree to the following…

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Jesus saves, the Episcopal Church teaches, but a growing number of its clergy and leaders believe other faiths may lead to salvation as well. Long divided and distracted by questions of sexual ethics, the Episcopal Church (along with most mainline Protestant communities) are facing a cultural and theological shift towards religious pluralism””the belief that there are diverse paths to God.

The debate is not just academic. In two current cases, Episcopal clergy are under scrutiny for practicing and promoting other religions. On February 12 a devotee of Zen Buddhism was elected bishop of the Episcopal Church’s Northern Michigan diocese. Meanwhile, a Seattle-area priest has been given until March 30 to decide whether she is a Muslim or a Christian as her bishop will not permit her to profess both faiths.

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Take a look.

A brother in sacred song as well as in Pastoral efficiency, with Presbyters like Herbert, Keble, and Croswell; be still a brother in that heavenly gift as well as in Episcopal Authority, as you take your seat with Ambrose, Gregory Nazianzen, Ken and Doane. Win souls to Jesus by every power that God has given you, and through every avenue that He has opened to the hearts of man.

The bearer of an honored name, you will to-day consecrate anew to the Triune God the treasures of your intellect and heart, in all their varied richness, and pour them out afresh at the foot of the Cross. For the hill of Ecclesiastical eminence like Calvary of old, is crowned with THE CROSS; and they who, in God’s providence, ascend through the grades of the Christian Ministry to the highest point of Churchly authority, will find themselves lifted up, not for self exaltation but for self crucifixion. “As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you””“these words embrace, within their mysterious scope, suffering and sacrifice, as well as authority and dignity. A Bishop’s true crozier is the Cross; his Mitre the crown of thorns: his Ring the stigmata of self sacrifice; and his message of peace and good will the end as well as the beginning of his Holy Ministry.”

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Over the last four decades, Powell’s Books has swelled into the largest bookstore in North America ”” a capacious monument to reading that occupies a full square block of this often-drizzly city. But this year, growth has given way to anxiety.

Michael Powell, the store’s owner, recently dropped plans for a $5 million expansion. An architect had already prepared the drawings. His bankers had signaled that financing was available. But the project no longer looked prudent, Mr. Powell concluded ”” not with sales down nearly 5 percent, stock markets extinguishing savings, home prices plunging and jobs disappearing.

“It’s going to take a period of time to recover,” Mr. Powell said. “Whether it’s 2 years or 10 years I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s going to be quick. People are nervous.”

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Watch it all–John Finn is an amazing man.

If you follow the links there is a lot of material to sift through.

At a Mass on Saturday in Luanda, Angola, Pope Benedict tried to warn his listeners of the dangers of belief in witchcraft. Though he never used that word, his implication was clear when he suggested that African Catholics should offer Christ to their fellow citizens because “so many of them are living in fear of spirits, of malign and threatening powers.” He worried aloud about many Africans: “In their bewilderment they end up even condemning street children and the elderly as alleged sorcerers. Who can go to them to proclaim that Christ has triumphed over death and all those occult powers?”

Who indeed? The statement reflects a real and tragic problem in many parts of Africa, even among people who identify as Christians. Many still consult shamans and use talismans or potions for everything from fertility problems to exorcisms, while others take things a horrifying step further: Children, especially those with a physical deformity or afflicted with a disease like AIDS, are often brutalized or killed in the belief that they are possessed by evil spirits. The elderly, especially women, are also common targets. Earlier this month, Amnesty International reported that more than 1,000 people were rounded up in Gambia in a government-sponsored witch-hunt, and in Tanzania alone, at least 45 albinos have been murdered since 2007 because popular superstition holds that they are witches.

No wonder church leaders who praise the explosion of faith across Africa as the future of Christianity — the Christian population has gone to 360 million today from eight million in 1900 — also take pains to try to purge superstition and witchcraft from the continent. And they regularly fail, or offend.

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Wonderful stuff–watch it all.

After over 126 years, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church will hold its last service this Sunday.

The church, located on Warwick Neck Avenue, which has close to 100 members, is merging its congregation with St. Barnabas Episcopal Church on Post Road in Apponaug.

The two parishes will officially become one during this Sunday’s mass, which will begin at St. Mary’s and proceed to St. Barnabas where it will be completed. Episcopal Bishop Geraldine Wolfe will preside over the mass.

During an interview on Tuesday, church elders from St. Mary’s said the decision was made strictly due to financial reasons. The church has seen a steady decrease in parishioners over the years and despite a drive two years ago to modernize their service, attendance didn’t increase enough for the church to survive.

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China is seeking technology and weapons to disrupt the traditional advantages of American forces, and secrecy surrounding its military creates the potential for miscalculation on both sides, according to a Pentagon study released Wednesday.

The annual report from the Defense Department to Congress, “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China 2009,” catalogs efforts by China to supply its armed forces with weapons that can be used to intimidate and attack Taiwan and blunt the superiority of American naval and air power, at least near its territory.

“We have advocated time and again for more dialogue and transparency in our dealings with the Chinese government and military, all in an effort to reduce suspicions on both sides,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary.

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Last month Frank Koppe gathered together all 50 of his employees at Koppe-Apparatebau for coffee, cake and the kind of bad news that has lately become all too familiar. He told them the small company’s business, designing and manufacturing custom equipment for industrial plants, had been sliced nearly in half.

But rather than resorting to layoffs, Mr. Koppe asked half his employees to come in every other week. The government would make up roughly two-thirds of their lost wages out of a fund filled in good times through payroll deductions and company contributions.
The program ”” known as “Kurzarbeit,” which translates as “short work” ”” and others like it lie at the heart of a heated debate that has erupted on the eve of next week’s Group of 20 meeting of industrialized and developing nations and the European Union, creating a rift between the Obama administration and European governments. The United States is pressing for a coordinated package of stimulus plans by member countries to encourage economic growth, something that Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic, which holds the European Union presidency, has called “a way to hell.”

But virtually all European governments, led by budget-conscious Germany, are resisting the American pitch, saying the focus should be on stricter regulation of financial markets.

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The Anglican Consultative Coun­cil had a constitutional obligation towards the costs of the Conference, but had stopped putting money aside for the Conference since 2004, spending it instead on new offices.

The £1.6 million left over from 1998 and from setting money aside up to 2004 did not cover the ex­pected £2.5-million rise in the cost to £6.1 million. In the event, because of the shortfall in the number of bishops who attended, the final cost was £5.2 million.

“To commit expenditure in ad­vance of secure income was a practice that the directors of an entirely stand-alone company might have regarded as too risky. In doing so, it appears therefore that those involved have proceeded on the expectation that the Anglican Com­munion and in particular Church of England bodies . . . would not ultimately let the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Conference fail to pay its bills.”

The Commissioners were worried as early as May 2006 that they would be landed with the bill.

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Jimmy Carter came to Notre Dame in 1977. So did Ronald Reagan in 1981 and George W. Bush in 2001.

The University of Notre Dame has a tradition of inviting new presidents to speak at graduation. But this year’s selection of President Barack Obama has been met by a barrage of criticism that has left some students fearing their commencement ceremony will turn into a circus.

Many Catholics are angered by Obama’s planned appearance at the May 17 ceremony because of his decisions to provide federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and international family planning groups that provide abortions or educate about the procedure.

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Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue explained in a statement released today that the proposal originated from the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV, and “therefore comes from the heart of the abortion industry — threatening yet another hammer-blow to the sanctity of human life in this country.”

“I am appalled that this proposal will result in the deaths of many more preborn children and cause untold harm to women,” he continued. “As a society, we need to wake up and stop treating abortion as a quick-fix solution to pregnancy and offer compassionate and practical support to women facing crisis pregnancies.”

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An interesting array of editorial opinion on the subject.

Update: in yesterday’s Financial Times Jeffrey Sachs did not like the plan:

The idea of “private sector price discovery” is therefore flim-flam. There would be price discovery if the government’s loan had to be repaid whether or not the asset paid off in full. In that case, the investor would bid $360,000. But under the Geithner-Summers plan the loan is precisely designed to be a one-way bet, for the purpose of overpricing the toxic asset in order to bail out the bank’s shareholders at hidden cost to the taxpayers.

The banks could be saved without saving their shareholders ”“ a better deal for taxpayers and without the moral hazard of rescuing shareholders from the banks’ bad bets. Most simply, the government could provide loans to buy the toxic assets on a recourse basis, therefore without the hidden subsidy. Alternatively, the plan could give the taxpayers an equity stake in the banks in return for cleaning their balance sheets. In cases of insolvency, the government could take over the bank, the much dreaded nationalisation, albeit temporary. At the end of the Bush administration, Congress voted for the $700bn (€517bn, £479bn) troubled asset relief programme (Tarp) on the assurance the taxpayer would get fair value for money (for example, by taking equity stakes in the rescued banks). The new plan does not offer that.

Nearly seven in 10 high school students say the struggling economy has affected where they applied to college this year, a survey out today shows.

And yes, they are stressed about it. Most students will find out this month where they have been accepted. The biggest concern: that they will get admitted into the school they most want to attend but won’t be able to for financial reasons.

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Evangelization will be his primary focus, he said after a press conference Saturday, citing the 2000 Apostolic Letter by Pope John Paul II in which the late pontiff urged his church “to take up her evangelizing mission with fresh enthusiasm.”

[Robert] Guglielmone said that reiterating the message of Jesus Christ was the “challenge of the century.”

He is leaving the sixth-largest U.S. diocese, with about 1.4 million Catholics, for one whose population is approximately 176,000. Before he became rector of Rockville Centre’s St. Agnes Cathedral, Guglielmone was the diocesan director of clergy personnel, overseeing 450 priests and 300 deacons, he said. By contrast, South Carolina has a total of about 130 priests and 100 deacons.

“I am both humbled and grateful that His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI would entrust this awesome ministry to me,” he said Saturday morning. “I must admit that I am a bit anxious about leaving Long Island where I have spent almost my whole life. However, I do trust in the Lord and am very encouraged by the wonderful sense of Southern hospitality I have already experienced.”

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Ever since Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt publicly uttered the term “cloud computing” in 2006, a storm has been gathering over Silicon Valley.

Companies across the technology industry are jockeying to associate themselves with clouds. Amazon.com Inc., better known for peddling books online, began selling an Elastic Compute Cloud service in 2006 for programmers to rent Amazon’s giant computers. Juniper Networks Inc., which makes gear for transmitting data, dubbed its latest project Stratus. Yahoo Inc., Intel Corp. and a handful of others recently launched a research program called OpenCirrus.

While almost everybody in the tech industry seems to have a cloud-themed project, few agree on the term’s definition.

“I have no idea what anyone is talking about,” said Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison, when talking about cloud computing at a financial analyst conference in September. “It’s really just complete gibberish. What is it?” He added: “When is this idiocy going to stop?”

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

I think this ever-growing hysteria about the invasion of privacy in Great Britain might be a direct result of the secularisation of our society. As a Roman Catholic, I’ve spent my whole life believing that my every move is being monitored. God, after all, is the ultimate CCTV. There have been many occasions when this sense of being watched has led me to do the right thing rather than the easier or more pleasurable wrong one. We hate those intermittent yellow boxes on modern roads but they do, generally speaking, cause us to drive more safely.

Maybe, now that God doesn’t feature in most people’s lives, society need things like Street View and surveillance cameras to make people behave better. I don’t suppose the citizens whose sins were exposed by Google fear they’ll end up sizzling on Satan’s griddle as a result but all this fuss about images of drunkenness, crime and lust does suggest a certain sense of shame.

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Poor planning, inexperienced management, and weak financial controls contributed to a £288,000 deficit for the 2008 Lambeth Conference, a report released last week by the Archbishops’ Council and the Church Commissioners has concluded.

The management team, conference structure and business practices were not up to the job, the report found, stating that the “arrangements in place for the 2008 conference were less robust than they needed to be.”

The conference’s opaque management structure had left no one in charge, with the result that there had been a “disconnect between design on the one hand, and capacity and execution on the other.” The lack of clear lines of authority had led to cost overruns, with the financial team “not always aware” of the commitments made by conference management staff. Two examples cited by the report were the “failure to recognise a commitment for expenditure of £411,000 on the Big Top” the blue tent that served as the principle venue for conference meetings, and IT support.

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In a solemn, lengthy ceremony full of pageantry and peppered with bursts of enthusiastic applause, the Most Rev. Robert E. Guglielmone was installed as the 13th bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston on Wednesday at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.

Before the ceremony began, a group of Hispanic Catholics assembled on the Cathedral steps to sing and welcome the new bishop to South Carolina. Inside, the pews were full of diocese officials, members of the Knights of Columbus, seminary students, monks and nuns and Boy Scout troops.

Guglielmone has been involved in Scouting since 1974, serving in various capacities, including the Vatican-appointed National and World Chaplain.

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CHARLIE ROSE: Your thesis in [your new book] “Dead Aid” is?

DAMBISA MOYO: My thesis is two parts. Essentially first of all a critique of the billion dollar government to government aid packages that have gone to Africa, now totaling over a trillion dollars in the past 60 years. But the second half of the book which I consider actually more important, is, are the prescriptions for actually getting Africa on track to achieve long-term economic development and become an equal partner in the global stage.

CHARLIE ROSE: And aid is preventing that?

DAMBISA MOYO: Absolutely. The types of aid that I’m talking about, I’m not talking about humanitarian or emergency aid, sort of the aid that goes for tsunami, for example. Nor am I talking about NGO or charitable aid which is relatively small beer. I myself sit on the board of a number of charities. But I think it’s important where charities are concerned to understand what they can and cannot do. So they can provide Band-Aid solutions. So we can send a girl to school for example, but they cannot deliver long-term economic development growth and growth or alleviate poverty on the level that we want to see across the continent.

Read it all or if you prefer you may watch the video here.

* Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent””and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed””leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
* Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
* Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.

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I happened to catch this by accident this morning–the video is amazing.

Six Democratic legislators have introduced a bill to stop Boeing from threatening to move out of Washington. That’s right: threatening to move…. No more threats from Boeing! The state’s biggest manufacturer might leave, but it could never threaten to leave. Then again, if Boeing were really planning an exit, wouldn’t lawmakers want to know?

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