The Rev. Forrester is also primary author and a signatory of A Response from the Diocese of Northern Michigan’s Standing Committee to the “Dar es Salaam Communiqué,” in which there is the following:

“Baptism confirms this most basic truth which is at once, the Good News: all is of God, without condition and without restriction.”

This is incongruous with each of the Eucharistic Prayers and the Rite of Baptism, particularly the renunciations.

“Because each and every one of us is an only begotten child of God; because we, as the church, are invited by God to see all of creation as having life only insofar as it is in God; because everything, without exception, is the living presence, or incarnation, of God”

Claiming “each and every one of us is an only begotten child of God” and that “everything, without exception, is the living presence, or incarnation of God” is a pantheism incompatible what we say (and pray) we believe about Jesus Christ as the Incarnation of God. It also contradicts the language we use in every rite of the Book of Common Prayer, not to mention the Catechism.

I know these are serious charges. I do not make them lightly. I am not given to finding false teaching under every rock. And it is no small thing to reject a candidate put forward by a diocese to be its bishop. But I also believe, with Charles Gore, that ours is a tradition that is “conspicuously orthodox on the great fundamentals of the Trinity and the Incarnation” (Roman Catholic Claims, p. 173). If we believe the rule of our praying is the rule of our believing, then the prayers of our common worship must guide what we teach and preach. One whose stated beliefs are as at odds with that common worship as are the Rev. Forrester’s can hardly “guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church” (BCP p. 517).

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I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty and paralysis to human thought.

–Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Chapter X

Clergy attended a meeting last month to hear about the work of The International Commission of English in the Liturgy, which is producing a new English translation of the Latin mass which will be used in churches next year.

Priests at the meeting, held in the Diocese of Leeds, were told to question whether it was appropriate to say “good morning” once the priest was on the altar and had made the sign of the cross.

Following the meeting, some priests in the diocese told their congregations that they would no longer greet them in an informal manner at the start of services.

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After a two-year search, California’s oldest Episcopal Church now has a new rector, Nevada City native Seth Kellermann.

The Rev. Kellermann, 32, starts preaching Sunday at Grass Valley’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church downtown, kicking off the highest holiday of the Christian calendar: Palm Sunday and Holy Week, featuring a series of sermons leading up to Easter on April 12.

“This is kind of our big time,” he said.

It’s a big time for mainstream churches across the country, as they face the challenges of an aging demographic and struggle to attract younger people and busy families.

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Today, more and more children are being raised by their grandparents. These grandparents provide a crucial safety net, allowing children whose parents can’t provide for them to remain in families, instead of winding up as wards of the state. But as the recession hits “grandfamilies,” that safety net is under stress.

The unemployment rate for older workers is lower than the overall rate. But once they become unemployed, older workers find it harder to land a job and they tend to remain out of work longer than younger workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for those 55 and over has been climbing significantly in recent months; in March, it rose to 6.2% — the highest it has been since September, 1949, according the bureau.

At the same time, the number of grandfamilies has been growing. In 1970, about 3% of all children under 18 lived in households headed by a grandparent. By 2007, 4.7 million kids — or 6.5% of American children — were living in households headed by a grandparent, according to Census Bureau data. This shift was driven by a variety of factors, including more parents hit by drug use, AIDS or cancer, and the large numbers of single parents who, if struck by tragedy, leave children behind.

Not all of these grandparents are sole caregivers, says Kenneth Bryson, a director at Generations United, a Washington nonprofit, “but most are making important contributions,” providing “substantial care so that the parents can work or go to school.”

Caught this one on the way home yesterday on the plane. Take the time to read it all. The portrait of the lead character and her six year old granddaughter is especially heart-rending–KSH.

Last autumn most of my friends’ lives looked as if they might be recession-proof. I don’t know many people who work in the City, or for wobbly high street chains, and although house prices were dropping and everything was getting a bit stressful, I wasn’t personally acquainted with more than two people who’d actually lost their jobs or seemed at risk. They were feeling poorer, yes, booking holidays in Britain, going out less, not buying new clothes, buying cheaper food at cheaper supermarkets, even thinking about taking their children out of private school (although one friend who informed the headmistress of her intentions was quickly whisked aside and offered a 50% reduction in fees, applicable immediately). But they weren’t sitting in mortal fear of unemployment.

Fast forward six months and everyone’s dropping like flies. The only people who I know are doing well are my hairdressers since, apparently, people in search of cheering up the hard times with a non-grey root or a blowdry no longer travel to West End salons but walk to their local one.

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President Obama has led international condemnation of North Korea this morning after it launched an intercontinental rocket over Japan, defying weeks of warnings from world leaders and risking new sanctions and high level denunciation in the UN Security Council.

Mr Obama called the launch “provocative” and a clear violation of UN Security Council rules.

“The launch today of a Taepodong-2 missile was a clear violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1718, which expressly prohibits North Korea from conducting ballistic missile-related activities of any kind,” the US President said in a statement.

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There is a lesson here not just for policymakers but also for the rest of us. “It is human nature always to want a little more,” writes the psychologist Timothy Miller in the recent book How to Want What You Have, perhaps the first self-help book based explicitly on evolutionary psychology. “People spend their lives honestly believing that they have almost enough of whatever they want. Just a little more will put them over the top; then they will be contented forever.” This is a built-in illusion, Miller notes, engrained in our minds by natural selection.

The illusion was designed to keep us constantly striving, adding tiny increments to the chances that our genes would get into the next generation. Yet in a modern environment–which, unlike the ancestral environment, features contraception–our obsession with material gain rarely has that effect. Besides, why should any of us choose to pursue maximum genetic proliferation–or relentless material gain, or anything else–just because that is high on the agenda of the process that designed the human mind? Natural selection, for better or worse, is our creator, but it isn’t God; the impulses it implanted into our minds aren’t necessarily good, and they aren’t wholly beyond resisting.

Part of Miller’s point is that the instinctive but ultimately fruitless pursuit of More–the 60-hour workweeks, the hour a month spent perusing the Sharper Image catalog–keeps us from indulging what Darwin called “the social instincts.” The pursuit of More can keep us from better knowing our neighbors, better loving our kin-in general, from cultivating the warm, affiliative side of human nature whose roots science is just now starting to fathom.

—Robert Wright in a 1995 cover article in Time Magazine entitled “The Evolution of Despair”. I bumped into this this week while working on a teaching and scrounging through some old sermon files. It’s appropriateness is, I think, quite evident in our time. Not especially this line also in the essay: we are designed to seek trusting relationships and to feel uncomfortable in their absence–KSH.

North Korea fired a rocket over Japan on Sunday, defying Washington, Tokyo and others who suspect the launch was cover for a test of its long-range missile technology. President Barack Obama said the move threatens the security of nations “near and far.”

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A gunman invaded an immigration services center in downtown Binghamton, N.Y., during citizenship classes on Friday and shot 13 people to death and critically wounded 4 others before killing himself in a paroxysm of violence that turned a quiet civic setting into scenes of carnage and chaos.

The killing began around 10:30 a.m. and was over in minutes, witnesses said, but the ordeal lasted up to three hours for those trapped inside the American Civic Association as heavily armed police officers, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers threw up a cordon of firepower outside and waited in a silence of uncertainty.

Finally, officers who had not fired a shot closed in and found a sprawl of bodies in a classroom, 37 terrified survivors cowering in closets and a boiler room and, in an office, the dead gunman, identified as Jiverly Wong, 42, a Vietnamese immigrant who lived in nearby Johnson City.

Two pistols and a satchel of ammunition were found with the body. In what the police took to be evidence of preparation and premeditation, the assailant had driven a borrowed car up against the center’s back door to barricade it against escape, then had walked in the rain around to the front to begin the attack.

Read it all.

Update: A slideshow is available there.

One of the popular traditional hymns for Palm Sunday was written by Henry Milman, a Victorian dean of St Paul’s. He wrote dramatic poems and romantic verse dramas, as well as some of the first studies of biblical history to root Scripture in the culture of its day (he gave offence by describing Abraham as “a nomad sheikh”). In his Palm Sunday hymn, Ride on, Ride on in Majesty, he sees the Palm Sunday procession as a poignant, funeral procession ”” “in lowly pomp ride on to die”. Indeed, that is how this Holy Week, which begins on Palm Sunday, unfolds.

If there was an expectation among the Palm Sunday crowds that this was the beginning of a revolution in which Jesus would drive out the oppressive Roman occupiers, it was not to be. The week that begins with Palm Sunday moves inexorably through ever darker moments: the Last Supper, the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (the garden of the pressing out of the olives), betrayal, arrest, torture, mocking, scourging and a trial that shows both religious and political leaders as utterly unconcerned with truth (as Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, asks dismissively, “what is truth?”).

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Back in February there were groans of dismay among civil-liberties activists when Hillary Clinton, in one of her early pronouncements as secretary of state, suggested that America had more important things to discuss with China than human rights. “Our pressing on those [human-rights] issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate-change crisis and the security crisis,” she said.

But on March 31st the Obama administration did something very concrete to correct any impression that diplomatic lobbying for liberty was too big a luxury in a world with other woes on its mind. In a bid to redeem a body which sceptics had called irredeemable, it announced its intention to seek one of the 47 seats on the United Nations Human Rights Council.

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A year ago, I wrote:

Think Social Security will be solvent until 2041? Think again. The next president will face rapidly growing problems by the end of his or her first term.

At the time, the concern was that the substantial Social Security surpluses we have experienced during the past 22 years would begin to shrink.

An updated version of a Congressional Budget Office chart I presented last year shows that the shrink has indeed begun…

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Listen to it all from NPR. Note especially what he says about the so-called “Geithner plan” to rescue the banks. At some point it is going to dawn on more people that significant questions need to be asked about this plan and whether it is the right approach, since so many thoughtful industry participants and observers do not think so. But maybe that is just yours truly, since I am worried about the plan–KSH

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We are becoming more relaxed about death of late, it seems, or at least about the possibility that it might be ushered in a little sooner than expected. There is broad public sympathy for individuals who travel abroad to assist terminally ill relatives in their expressed wish to die. The former health secretary Patricia Hewitt recently proposed legislation to protect such individuals from prosecution, and the broadcaster John Humphrys wrote defending the right to euthanasia, using personal experience of deaths in his family to bolster his argument.

Then, last week, Ludwig Minelli suddenly spoke up, and there were sharp intakes of breath all round. Mr Minelli is the founder and director of Dignitas, the Swiss-based organisation that provides a team of doctors and nurses to administer painless deaths on request. He is also a radical on matters of death: he not only regards it as a human right, but appears eager to expand his client base.

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She is, I realize, “just” a dog. But she has, nonetheless, taught me a few lessons about life, living and illness. Despite all her troubles, Bijou is still game. She still groans to her feet to go outside, still barks at and with the neighborhood dogs, is willing to hobble around the kitchen to carouse with a rubber ball ”” her shrub of a tail quivering in joy.

I know now that Bijou was an important part of my therapy as I recovered from having my prostate removed. I learned that dogs, besides being pets, can also be our teachers.

Human beings constantly struggle to live in the moment. We’re either obsessing over the past (”Gee, life would’ve been different if I’d only joined the Peace Corps.”), or obsessing over the future (”Gee, I hope my 401K holds up”). We forget that life, real life, is lived right now, in this very moment.

I am a self-confessed dog lover so my attraction to the piece is understandable, but it is marvelously written. Our Toy Maltese sometimes falls asleep with all four feet in the air and his mouth partially open. I find it impossible to look at him in that posture without smiling, and often laughing. Indeed, last night my wife Elizabeth simply described his posture to me over the phone–he wasn’t even with me– and he was making me smile. I was just up visiting my brother and his wife who are invaluably helped, as is my Dad who is staying with them at the moment, by their two dogs. Here’s to pets who help us–KSH

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“I don’t think a player of his caliber can be replaced,” [Burress’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman]… said.

Will this hurt the team? Of course. Brafman noted Friday that “there are very few great players, and Plaxico happens to be one of them.”

That’s true: Burress was a pillar of the Giants’ offense, and the Giants could not compensate for his absence. No matter what they did, no matter how much they talked up the other receivers, Burress was the one whose presence helped the other receivers, helped the offensive line, helped the running backs.

But let’s talk about accountability. Does Burress’s ability to catch a football justify reckless endangerment, walking into a crowded club with a loaded, unlicensed gun and risking everyone’s life ”” yours, your child’s, my child’s?

Accountability–now there’s a concept. Read it all–KSH.

EARLY this year, Barbara Plumb, a freelance editor and writer in New York who is on Medicare, received a disturbing letter. Her gynecologist informed her that she was opting out of Medicare. When Ms. Plumb asked her primary-care doctor to recommend another gynecologist who took Medicare, the doctor responded that she didn’t know any ”” and that if Ms. Plumb found one she liked, could she call and tell her the name?

Many people, just as they become eligible for Medicare, discover that the insurance rug has been pulled out from under them. Some doctors ”” often internists but also gastroenterologists, gynecologists, psychiatrists and other specialists ”” are no longer accepting Medicare, either because they have opted out of the insurance system or they are not accepting new patients with Medicare coverage. The doctors’ reasons: reimbursement rates are too low and paperwork too much of a hassle.

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FOR some young families who bought during the housing boom, having it all meant an affordable brood-sized apartment in possession of a good public school zone. But other parents in pursuit of real estate never even thought about schools. They assumed they would send their children to private school, often because they too had followed that route.

That was before the economic crisis. Now, as many would-be private school parents scramble for a good public school, there is a despairing recognition that in this respect, geography is destiny: With odds of being accepted into a popular school in another zone slimmer than ever, they either live in a neighborhood with a decent elementary or they don’t.

Renters and first-time buyers are in the best position to light out for better school zones with their young offspring. Meanwhile, landlocked owners ”” unable or unwilling to sell in a down market or to spend around $33,000 a year to send their child to private school ”” are panicking.

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What happened to the global economy? We seemed to be chugging along, enjoying moderate business cycles and unprecedented global growth. All of a sudden, all hell broke loose.

There are many theories about what happened, but two general narratives seem to be gaining prominence, which we will call the greed narrative and the stupidity narrative. The two overlap, but they lead to different ways of thinking about where we go from here.

Read it all, and note that the first essay mentioned has already been posted on this blog.

“We’re just sitting here all day long looking for jobs on the computer, frustrated and scared as hell…I’m looking for anything.”

—Henry Pevez of New Jersey in a front page story from today’s New York Times about yesterday’s unemployment report

(ENS) The Standing Committee of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York has told a newly formed bishop search committee that they are expected to “honor the mind of the Episcopal Church regarding acceptable candidates for the episcopate as expressed through the General Convention.”

The Standing Committee said in a posting on the diocese’s bishop search website that the requirement referred to Resolution B033, passed by the Episcopal Church’s General Convention in June 2006.

In Resolution B033, General Convention called upon standing committees and bishops with jurisdiction to “exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion.”

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At least eight conservative congregations in Western Washington ”” including two that left the Episcopal Church ”” are forming a new Anglican diocese in the Northwest.

The Cascadia Diocese, as it’s being called, is the latest local example of the deep divisions splitting the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion over issues such as Scriptural authority and church teachings. The differences erupted in 2003 when the Episcopal Church confirmed the election of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire.

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United Church of Christ leaders are hailing a unanimous decision by the Iowa Supreme Court to reject the state’s ban on same-gender marriage as unconstitutional. Iowa now joins Massachusetts and Connecticut in becoming the third state to allow same-sex couples to marry.

“Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa are three states whose cultures were shaped profoundly by the Congregational experience,” said the Rev. John H. Thomas, UCC general minister and president. “I can’t help but believe and affirm that there is a connection at work here.”

The United Church of Christ has 179 local churches in Iowa, and Grinnell College – one of state’s most prominent liberal arts schools – is historically related to the denomination.

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A diverse coalition of religious groups is launching an effort to maintain attention on America’s poor as Congress takes up the 2010 budget and the White House tries to reignite a sputtering economy.

The group, The Mobilization to End Poverty, plans to bring thousands of religious and community activists to Washington later this month to urge President Obama to make the poor a priority and continue his goal of reducing domestic poverty by half in 10 years.

Both are reachable goals, said House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., who joined religious leaders to kick off the effort on Wednesday (April 1).

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The Rt. Rev. John Clark Buchanan has been nominated to serve as provisional Bishop of Quincy. Bishop Buchanan and other newly appointed diocesan leaders must be confirmed by delegates to a special reorganizing convention to be held April 4 at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Peoria, Ill.

Bishop Buchanan currently serves as the Parliamentarian of the House of Bishops. He was Bishop of West Missouri from 1989-1999, and recently completed a term as an assisting Bishop of Southern Virginia.

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Here are actual answers students have given to explain scientific events and facts:

–When you breath, you inspire. When you do not breath, you expire.

–H2O is hot water, and CO2 is cold water….

A fossil is an extinct animal. The older it is, the more extinct it is.

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Iowa’s top court legalized same-sex marriage Friday, giving advocates a victory beyond the liberal coastal states into the more conservative American interior.

The supreme court justices drew explicit parallels to civil rights struggles by blacks and women, holding that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was a violation of the equality promised in the Iowa constitution.

“If a simple showing that discrimination is traditional satisfies equal protection, previous successful equal protection challenges of invidious racial and gender classifications would have failed,” the court said in its ruling.

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