From its beginnings, the Episcopal Church has relied on its geographic administrative units (dioceses) to preserve those claims. The Convention of the Diocese of Virginia, for example, asserted as early as 1790 that it was the “sole owner” of church property. For two centuries, dioceses have placed restraints on parishes encumbering property and claimed property when parishes closed.

For 29 years, the Dennis Canon has been a part of church discipline. All priests who are younger than 56 have made ordination promises to abide by the “discipline” of the church under church canons including that canon.

If some clergy and laity are uncomfortable with the range of interpretation by Episcopalians of the statements of belief found in our Book of Common Prayer, they are free to find a more compatible home but not to ignore other obligations they undertook as parish leaders. For me, leaving behind the property when one leaves the Episcopal Church is a moral obligation as well as a legal requirement.

Claims that “Christians should not sue Christians” or that the generous course is to negotiate a property settlement require that we ignore previous promises and obligations. This makes a mockery of the trust my grandparents and parents (and others) had that their work building an Episcopal church in a particular location would be honored by those who followed them. Many wrote clauses into their bylaws or articles of incorporation binding the corporation “forever” to the Episcopal Church.

Read the whole piece.

Quite simply, Christianity is about grace and love. For we who seek to follow Jesus, grace should take precedence over law.

The Episcopal Church operates through democratic processes. When a majority of a parish (or a diocese) votes to leave, those who leave should recognize that the property belongs to the denomination and, if they wish to have the property, offer to purchase it at fair market value. If those who wish to leave insist on keeping the property, however, grace demands that we accept that selfish decision rather than holding to the letter of the law. Although the Episcopal Church likely may prevail in the courts, it will have further alienated the disaffected, turned its focus away from the gospel imperative and wasted precious resources on an issue ultimately of little importance for God’s business.

This choice may seem unfair to the minority who wish to remain Episcopalian, but it is gracious towards the larger number who left as well as to those whom God’s love will touch because the church focuses, and invests its resources, in mission rather than legal actions. The Diocese of Virginia, for example, may well spend several million dollars in lawsuits to retain the property of seven parishes that voted to leave.

Although substantial property is at stake, for the several million dollars and countless hours of time the suits will require from bishops, priests and laity, the Diocese of Virginia could fund several new missions to serve those who remain and others. Successful lawsuits that retain large buildings for small remnants will burden those congregations with excessive overhead and probably instill a maintenance rather than missionary orientation.

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The Public-Private Investment Program will purchase real-estate related loans from banks and securities from the broader markets. Banks will have the ability to sell pools of loans to dedicated funds, and investors will compete to have the ability to participate in those funds and take advantage of the financing provided by the government.

The funds established under this program will have three essential design features. First, they will use government resources in the form of capital from the Treasury, and financing from the FDIC and Federal Reserve, to mobilize capital from private investors. Second, the Public-Private Investment Program will ensure that private-sector participants share the risks alongside the taxpayer, and that the taxpayer shares in the profits from these investments. These funds will be open to investors of all types, such as pension funds, so that a broad range of Americans can participate.

Third, private-sector purchasers will establish the value of the loans and securities purchased under the program, which will protect the government from overpaying for these assets.

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The interview captured the balancing act that Obama must strike on the economy. He gave a nod to public anger at Wall Street while saying it could not dictate his response.

He got in a few whacks of his own at Wall Street executives who contributed to the meltdown””referring to them ironically at one point as “the best and the brightest”””while being ever-mindful that he still needs their help to dig out of the crisis.

His talk of depression could be viewed as alarmist””but it also seemed aimed at bracing Congress and the public for the unpopular prospect of spending even more taxpayer dollars to prop up Wall Street. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is set to roll out a plan Monday aimed at restoring the flow of credit that would back up private investments with government funds.

Even his awkward laughter highlighted an issue Obama has faced dating back to the campaign, a sense that he sometimes is too “cool” and detached to fully grasp the public anxiety over mounting job losses and economic worries.

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“And you know, one of the challenges that Tim Geithner has had is the same challenge that anybody would have in this situation. People want a lot of contradictory things. You know, the banks would love a lot of taxpayer money with no strings attached. Folks in Congress, as well as the American people, would love to fix the banks without spending any money. And so at a certain point, you know, you’ve got just a very difficult line to walk.”

“You need the financial community�to solve this crisis,” Kroft remarked. “Do you think that the people on Wall Street and the people in the financial community that you need trust you, believe in you?”

“Part of my job is to communicate to them. Look, I believe in the market. I believe in financial innovation. And I believe in success. I want them to do well. But what I also know is that the financial sector was out of balance. You look at how finance used to operate just 20 years ago, or 25 years ago. People, if you went into investment banking, you were making 20 times what a teacher made. You weren’t making 200 times what a teacher made,” Obama said.

“There is a perception right now, at least in New York, which is where I live and work. �People feel they thought that you were going to be supportive. And now I think there are a lot of people the say, ‘Look, we’re not gonna be able to keep our best people. They’re not gonna stay and work here for $250,000 a year when they can go work for a hedge fund, if they can find one that’s still working�and make a lot more,” Kroft remarked.

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The statewide property tax reforms of 2006, which exempted homeowners from most school taxes, were supposed to be paid for with a penny increase in the statewide sales tax. The result: A shortfall of more than $143 million over the past two years, which made the state’s budget problems worse.

Locally, the optional sales taxes that voters approved by referendum in two-thirds of South Carolina counties are used to offset town, city and county taxes.

The difficulty for local governments comes in projecting sales tax revenues up to a year ahead of time, and crediting those amounts to property tax bills. If they guess wrong, they come up short.

“That was our problem,” said Keith Bustraan, Charleston County deputy administrator and chief financial officer. “We set our revenue estimate and then began the long slide.”

Read it all from the local paper.

The Diocese of Charleston has announced that the ordination Mass for the new Bishop of Charleston will take place on Wednesday, March 25, with video and audio of the Mass being streamed live over the internet.

Bishop-designate Robert E. Guglielmone, a monsignor from the Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York succeeds Bishop Robert J. Baker, who was appointed Bishop of Birmingham, Ala. in August 2007.

Good for them–read it all.

In 2007, President Bush issued an executive order requiring the government to fund research into alternatives. Inexplicably ”“ and without discussing it in his speech ”“ Obama revoked this Bush order, too. He claimed he wants to fund such research, but what he did was take away the existing legal requirement that it be done. We have seen this same undermining of alternatives here in California. Last year, Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) introduced a bill (SB 1565) that would have, among other provisions, made it easier for the CIRM to fund IPSC research. That proposed legal shift in emphasis was opposed adamantly by the CIRM, and despite overwhelming bipartisan support, fell to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto.

If pursuing the best and most ethical science were truly the goals, why deflect increased support for this promising research to which no one objects? Perhaps it is because this debate involves more than stem cells taken from embryos “left over” from in-vitro fertilization ”“ as the argument is usually couched ”“ which brings us back to ethics. In the wake of the Obama changes in federal policy, the New York Times editorially threw down a gauntlet, calling for both the rescission of the Dickey Amendment and federal funding of human therapeutic cloning research. Now that the Bush restrictions are history, look for these battles ”“ which again are not science debates ”“ to flare in the years to come. In this sense, embryonic stem cell research threatens to become a launching pad to an ever-deepening erosion of the unique moral status of human life.

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Having been asked to examine what November 2008 and its aftermath can teach Catholics about American culture, the state of American Catholicism and the kind of Pauline discipleship necessary today, Archbishop Chaput said:

“November showed us that 40 years of American Catholic complacency and poor formation are bearing exactly the fruit we should have expected. Or to put it more discreetly, the November elections confirmed a trend, rather than created a new moment, in American culture.”

Noting that there was no question about President Barack Obama’s views on abortion “rights,” embryonic stem cell research and other “problematic issues,” he commented:

“Some Catholics in both political parties are deeply troubled by these issues. But too many Catholics just don’t really care. That’s the truth of it. If they cared, our political environment would be different. If 65 million Catholics really cared about their faith and cared about what it teaches, neither political party could ignore what we believe about justice for the poor, or the homeless, or immigrants, or the unborn child. If 65 million American Catholics really understood their faith, we wouldn’t need to waste each other’s time arguing about whether the legalized killing of an unborn child is somehow ”˜balanced out’ or excused by three other good social policies.”

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Somewhere Dan Quayle is clenching his fists. Two decades after the then-vice president bemoaned single motherhood ”” calling out the sitcom Murphy Brown for having its eponymous main character choose to have a child on her own ”” the latest data on U.S. births show that a full 40% of babies are now born to unmarried mothers. (Read about the Quayle/Murphy Brown controversy here.)

The findings, released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics and covering the 2007 calendar year, also revealed a general increase in fertility rates across nearly every age category. That rise included teen birth rates, which jumped 4% between 2005 and 2007, after a startling 45% decline from 1991 to 2005.

This turnaround of what had been an enormous public health advance has policy makers worried ”” and culture warriors pointing fingers. Within a half hour of the data release on Wednesday, the National Abstinence Education Association released a statement calling for greater use of abstinence ”” only sex education programs in public schools. At the same time, supporters of so-called comprehensive sex education, like columnist Bonnie Erbe at U.S. News & World Report, said abstinence education is the problem; they blamed the rising teen birth rate on the fact that federal funding for sex education over the past eight years has been restricted to programs that encourage kids to postpone sex until marriage.

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Africans always give a visiting pope a hearty welcome. Thousands of finely dressed Cameroonians danced and sang at the roadside this week as Pope Benedict XVI arrived on an inaugural African tour that will also take in Angola. The Vatican is keen on the continent, home to around 135m Catholics. Pope Benedict delivered a compassionate message, recognising that Africa suffers disproportionately from food shortages, poverty, financial turmoil and a changing climate. Yet for all the mutual appreciation, he got one matter painfully wrong.

Asked about the use of condoms to help tackle the scourge of AIDS, the pope restated, in unusually explicit terms, the church’s position that these are not useful to “overcome” the epidemic, indeed their use actually makes the problem worse. He suggested the disease could be beaten through chastity, abstinence and “correct behaviour”. Speaking in a continent where more than 20m people have died from AIDS and another 22.5m are infected with HIV, his statement sounded otherworldly at best, and crass and uncaring at worst. Merely wishing away human sexual behaviour does nothing for the potential victims of AIDS, many of whom are innocent under even the most moralistic definition of that word.

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America’s states are laboratories of democracy. They are both affected by, and relevant to, the larger national debate. What we’ve found in our own corner of the country is that carrying a substantial debt load limits our options when it comes to running government.

A recent report by the American Legislative Exchange Council ranked us 47th worst in the nation for annual debt service as a percentage of tax revenue. Our state dedicates nearly 11% of its annual tax revenue to paying debt. On top of that, South Carolina has another $20 billion in unfunded, long-term political promises for pensions and other liabilities. The state budget has already been cut four times in recent months as the national economic downturn has impacted South Carolina and driven down tax revenue.

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Rachel Bennett, 12, loves playing soccer, spending time with her grandparents and making jewelry with beads. But since she entered a magnet middle school in the fall — and began receiving two to four hours of homework a night — those activities have fallen by the wayside.

“She’s only a kid for so long,” said her father, Alex Bennett, of Silverado Canyon. “There’s been tears and frustration and family arguments. Everyone gets burned out and tired.”

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The publication late last week of eyewitness accounts by Israeli soldiers alleging acute mistreatment of Palestinian civilians in the recent Gaza fighting highlights a debate here about the rules of war. But it also exposes something else: the clash between secular liberals and religious nationalists for control over the army and society.

Several of the testimonies, published by an institute that runs a premilitary course and is affiliated with the left-leaning secular kibbutz movement, showed a distinct impatience with religious soldiers, portraying them as self-appointed holy warriors.

A soldier, identified by the pseudonym Ram, is quoted as saying that in Gaza, “the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”

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Bishop [Robert] Duncan is Archbishop-designate of the ACNA and Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh that is now under the auspices of the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone. The Rev. J. Philip Ashey, chief operating officer and chaplain for the American Anglican Council, told The Living Church that Pittsburgh is one of the five applications for recognition as an ACNA diocese that have already been received. The deadline for applications is April 15.

Earlier this month, the Rt. Rev. John H. Chapman, Bishop of Ottawa in the Anglican Church of Canada, said he would authorize a congregation under his oversight to begin performing same-sex blessings in part because “while our church struggles to honor the call for gracious restraint in blessing same-sex unions, those who are proponents of cross-border interventions have and continue to show no restraint.”

That view was echoed this week during the House of Bishops’ spring retreat by Bishop Dan Edwards of Nevada. Bishop Edwards posted a blog entry noting that a number of bishops are considering the repeal of Resolution B033 because of what they perceive as a lack of reciprocal restraint by the ACNA.

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Fallout continues from the changes of “four testing years” at Wycliffe Hall, the theological college in Oxford…where there are “some deeply wounded spirits”, says an inspection report prepared for the House of Bishops.

The five-yearly reports on theological colleges used to be confidential. The Wycliffe report was published on the Church of England website this week, along with one on St Stephen’s House, Oxford. The colleges were graded in 13 areas with “Confidence”, “Confidence with qualifications”, or “No confidence”.

The Revd Dr Robin Ward, Principal of St Stephen’s House, said on Wednesday: “We were of course surprised that the reports came to be published in full, with unexpected assessment criteria, which we didn’t know until after the inspection process had finished.”

Both colleges are declared “fit for purpose”.

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“It’s very exciting,” [Lawrence] Provenzano, 54, said Saturday night, though he added “there’s kind of a bittersweetness to all this.”

“There’s a sadness. Longmeadow’s been home for over 14 years,” said Provenzano, who will remain at St. Andrew’s until at least summer. He became pastor in January 1995.

Because the election falls within 120 days of the General Convention, Provenzano must receive the consent of the General Convention (the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops).

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Bankers on Wall Street and in Europe have struck back against moves by US lawmakers to slap punitive taxes on bonuses paid to high earners at bailed-out institutions.

Senior executives on both sides of the Atlantic on Friday warned of an exodus of talent from some of the biggest names in US finance, saying the “anti-American” measures smacked of “a McCarthy witch-hunt” that would send the country “back to the stone age”.

There were fears that the backlash triggered by AIG’s payment of $165m in bonuses to executives responsible for losses that forced a $170bn taxpayer-funded rescue would have devastating consequences for the largest banks.

“Finance is one of America’s great industries, and they’re destroying it,” said one banker at a firm that has accepted public money. “This happened out of haste and anger over AIG, but we’re not like AIG.”

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The Obama administration’s latest attempt to tackle the banking crisis and get loans flowing to families and businesses rely on a new government entity, the Public Investment Corp. to help purchase as much as $1 trillion in toxic assets on banks’ books.

The plan that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner intends to announce Monday aims to use the resources of the $700 billion bank bailout fund, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

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Back in 2003, the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York consecrated a gay bishop and allowed others to perform same-sex blessings.

The Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, an Episcopal parish at the time, disagreed with this move and severed ties. Last year, the Diocese sued for Good Shepherd to leave the church building on Conklin Avenue, and in December, a state Supreme Court judge ruled in their favor.

On Friday, both sides were back in court.

“We’ve kind of moved on as a congregation and this is almost looking backwards now. So we were dreading it but here it is,” said Father Matthew Kennedy, Good Shepherd’s head pastor.

This time, the feud centers around a will by former Good Shepherd member Robert Brannan. He died in 1986 and left behind money in a trust fund for his parish.

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I ran into an Indian businessman friend last week and he said something to me that really struck a chord: “This is the first time I’ve ever visited the United States when I feel like you’re acting like an immature democracy.”

You know what he meant: We’re in a once-a-century financial crisis, and yet we’ve actually descended into politics worse than usual. There don’t seem to be any adults at the top ”” nobody acting larger than the moment, nobody being impelled by anything deeper than the last news cycle. Instead, Congress is slapping together punitive tax laws overnight like some Banana Republic, our president is getting in trouble cracking jokes on Jay Leno comparing his bowling skills to a Special Olympian, and the opposition party is behaving as if its only priority is to deflate President Obama’s popularity.

I saw Eric Cantor, a Republican House leader, on CNBC the other day, and the entire interview consisted of him trying to exploit the A.I.G. situation for partisan gain without one constructive thought. I just kept staring at him and thinking: “Do you not have kids? Do you not have a pension that you’re worried about? Do you live in some gated community where all the banks will be O.K., even if our biggest banks go under? Do you think your party automatically wins if the country loses? What are you thinking?”

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In the presence of Almighty God, in the borrowed sanctuary of First United Methodist Church, 1411 Broadway Ave., and turned out in their Sunday best on a Saturday, a near-capacity crowd of Episcopal clergy and laity welcomed the Rev. James Scott Mayer as the new Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northwest Texas late Saturday morning.

Mayer is a 1992 graduate of the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, and a 1977 graduate of Texas Tech.

On Nov. 22, 2008, he was elected by a constitutional majority of electors inside the sanctuary of St. Paul’s-on-the-Plains Episcopal Church, 1510 Ave. X.

The first ballot earned him 34 of the 47 clergy votes, but only 65 of the 141 votes cast by the lay electorate – six shy of the necessary majority. The results of the second ballot weren’t even close: 38 votes from the clergy order, and 90 from the lay.

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Moses, therefore, tells us that, since God had forbidden them to pass the borders of Edom, they went by another way; but immediately afterwards he adds, that they basely rebelled, without being provoked to do so by any new cause. They had before been rebellious under the pressure of hunger or thirst, or some other inconvenience; but now, when there were no grounds for doing so, they malignantly exasperate themselves against God.

–John Calvin commenting on Numbers 21, the Old Testament lesson for today; this was quoted by yours truly in the Sermon this morning

The Obama administration will call for increased oversight of executive pay at all banks, Wall Street firms and possibly other companies as part of a sweeping plan to overhaul financial regulation, government officials said.

The outlines of the plan are expected to be unveiled this week in preparation for President Obama’s first foreign summit meeting in early April.

Increasing oversight of executive pay has been under consideration for some time, but the decision was made in recent days as public fury over bonuses has spilled into the regulatory effort.

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Check out the ballot results here.

Believers will be delighted to learn that a pro-God message will be spread around Calgary starting Monday – albeit on the sides of buses and trains – in response to the controversial atheist ads already making the rounds on the city’s public transit.

“God cares for everyone … even for those who say He doesn’t exist!” reads the banner advertisements to be placed on eight buses and two light-rail trains over the next four weeks.

Transit ads will also direct people to the website http://www.godexists.ca, where they can add their voice to the debate.

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One week from today, the star of “Luau Orgy,” “Gazongas” and the ahead-of-its-time “Wanda Whips Wall Street” will walk onto the campus of Truman State University in Kirksville to debate a pastor on the subject most dear to his heart: porn.

It will fall to the Rev. Craig Gross to rebut actor Ron Jeremy’s arguments that pornography is a harmless activity that most people pursue in the privacy of their own homes.

“If Ron was right, I wouldn’t have a job,” said Gross, founder of XXXChurch.com ”” a Christian website dedicated to battling pornography. “Porn rips apart homes and families.”

The Truman State debate is just one upcoming anti-porn event organized by local Christians. Such events reflect mounting distress among Christians over pornography’s growing technological reach.

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Can we all just calm down a little?

Yes, the $165 million in bonuses handed out to executives in the financial products division of American International Group was infuriating. Truly, it was. As many others have noted, this is the same unit whose shenanigans came perilously close to bringing the world’s financial system to its knees. When the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, said recently that A.I.G.’s “irresponsible bets” had made him “more angry” than anything else about the financial crisis, he could have been speaking for most Americans.

But death threats? “All the executives and their families should be executed with piano wire ”” my greatest hope,” wrote one person in an e-mail message to the company. Another suggested publishing a list of the “Yankee” bankers “so some good old southern boys can take care of them.”

Read it all.

Pope Benedict XVI, midway through his first trip to Africa, arrived in oil-rich Angola on Friday and admonished those enjoying the nation’s newfound wealth not to ignore the justifiable demands of the poor.

“The multitude of Angolans who live below the threshold of absolute poverty will not be forgotten,” he said in a speech moments after getting off his airplane. “Do not disappoint their expectations!”

In a second address, this one delivered hours later at the residence of President José Eduardo dos Santos, he challenged Angola and other African countries to free their people “from the scourges of greed, violence and unrest” through “modern civic democracy.”

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The Anglican Church of Canada’s management team met with National Bishop Susan Johnson of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and her senior staff on March 18 and 19 to discuss ways to strengthen the relationship between the two churches, including plans for a joint General Synod/National Convention to be held in Ottawa in 2013 and the possibility of sharing national office space in the future.

“If full communion is really going to have some sense of visibility across the Canadian church, there have to be some pretty bold steps that we take together to help people realize that we are, in fact, churches in full communion,” said Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, noting that it has been eight years since the two churches reached an agreement to be in full communion.

Officers from both churches will meet next fall, followed by a joint meeting of the Council of General Synod, (CoGS, which governs the church between General Synods) and the Lutheran National Church Council, “probably in March 2011,” said Archbishop Hiltz. This would culminate in 2013 with a joint gathering of the governing bodies of each church. “It is exciting to see the momentum,” he said.

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