“We didn’t control the communications,” lamented Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Jesuit priest who heads the Vatican press office.

That was putting it mildly.

By now the whole world knows ”” or thinks it knows ”” the story behind Father Lombardi’s lament. On Jan. 24, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of four bishops from a traditionalist group known as the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). Within hours of that announcement it emerged that one of those prelates, Bishop Richard Williamson, had questioned the severity of the Holocaust during a recent television interview. Jewish leaders and editorial writers erupted in understandable outrage, and what began as an effort to heal a rift within the church became an ugly public dispute.

Even today, more than a month after the original announcement, many people have not heard the Vatican’s side of the story. How can this be?

In an age of instant global access, when every blogger has a vehicle for his own opinions, no institution ”” from the White House to the Vatican ”” can “control the communications” entirely. The challenge of conveying a positive message is especially acute for the Catholic Church, though, as it must cope with a media culture that often is hostile to traditional expressions of religious belief. Even so, there is no reason why the Vatican cannot learn from this while employing the elementary techniques of public-relations management.

Read it all.

Nearly three years on, the government’s biggest problem is that it is struggling with two big questions at once. One is the set of problems described under the catch-all term of “cohesion”””narrowing the social, economic and cultural gap between Muslims (especially in some poor urban areas of northern Britain) and the rest of society. The second is countering the threat from groups preparing to commit violence in Britain or elsewhere in the name of Islam.

The government says the two problems are related: poor, frustrated and mainly self-segregated groups are more likely to produce terrorists. Muslims as a group lag behind other Britons in qualifications, employment, housing and income (see chart). But in fact the overlap between exclusion and extremism is messy. And attempts to fight terrorism through tougher policing, which can alienate whole communities, make boosting cohesion harder.

Read it all.

How to rescue housing? The Obama administration doesn’t have a plan — or, more accurately, it has only half a plan. It presupposes that preventing or minimizing home foreclosures is a formula for revival. It isn’t.

Almost everyone agrees that a housing recovery is essential for a broader economic upswing, in part because housing’s collapse brought on the recession. Mortgage delinquencies triggered the financial crisis. Tumbling home prices (down 26 percent from their peak) ravaged consumer confidence, borrowing and spending. Since late 2007, housing-related jobs — carpenters, real estate agents, appraisers — have dropped by 1 million, a quarter of all lost jobs.

Housing’s distress is too much supply chasing too little demand. Huge inventories of unsold homes have depressed prices and construction. Given that prices rose too high in the “bubble” — homes were affordable only because credit was dispensed so recklessly — much of this painful adjustment was unavoidable. But that process should be mostly complete….

Read it all.

Added to what at least appears to be a communiqué ”˜spin’ on Archbishop Coggan’s 1978 address, in a press briefing last week the Archbishop of Canterbury referred to a “need for a shift of focus in the life of the Communion from autonomy of provinces with communion added on, to communion as the primary reality with autonomy and accountability understood within that framework”. Precisely what that implies remains somewhat mysterious, but one can see the direction in which such a comment points. There is a slippery slope here, and it is important that the Primates’ Meeting should remain essentially for the purposes of consultative fellowship. The Anglican Communion should avoid a formal College of Primates.

Read the whole thing.

The gap between rhetoric and hype in President Barack Obama’s budget is as wide as the Pacific Ocean. Obama has not offered change; he has offered a continuation of George W. Bush’s policies.

Obama is not the anti-Bush. He is Bush on steroids.

Read it all.

Cherie Blair has urged the Anglican and Catholic churches to stop “marginalising” women or face terminal decline.

“Today, while women remain marginalised, Christianity cannot flourish. Women and men must be equal partners for 21st century Christianity,” she said.

Her forthright remarks, in a programme she presents tonight on Channel 4, marks an escalation in her campaign to change the culture of the church.

She is one of the most influential lay figures in the church, a position which has been enhanced by her husband’s conversion to Catholicism after he stepped down as prime minister.

Read it all.

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.