According to Joshua Cooper Ramo’s provocative new book, “The Age of the Unthinkable,” one study ”” in which hundreds of experts in subjects like economics, foreign policy and politics were asked to make predictions about the short-term future and whose predictions were evaluated five years later ”” showed that foxes, with their wide-ranging curiosity and willingness to embrace change, tended to be far more accurate in their forecasts than hedgehogs, eager for closure and keen on applying a few big ideas to an array of situations.

It’s a finding enthusiastically embraced by Mr. Ramo, who argues in these pages that today’s complex, interconnected, globalized world requires policy makers willing to toss out old assumptions (about cause and effect, deterrence and defense, nation states and balances of power) and embrace creative new approaches. Today’s world, he suggests, requires resilient pragmatists who, like the most talented Silicon Valley venture capitalists on the one hand or the survival-minded leadership of Hezbollah on the other, possess both an intuitive ability to see problems in a larger context and a willingness to rejigger their organizations continually to grapple with ever-shifting challenges and circumstances.

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Becca Stevens may well be the fastest-talking woman in Tennessee. Although the Episcopal priest speaks with a gentle Southern accent, the velocity is rapid-fire New York, so it’s no surprise to learn her parents hail from there. Tragically, her father””also a pastor””was killed by a drunk driver when Stevens was just five years old. That experience, she says, changed her life and made her more aware of the pain that women can feel. “We went from being this hopeful young family to looking for the Social Security check,” she says. To add to her suffering, the senior warden of the church began sexually abusing her.

Today, however, Stevens has channeled that pain into a compassionate and unique ministry to women from the streets. In 1997, she founded Magdalene, a Nashville-based program for women with a history of prostitution and substance abuse. Most of those women, Stevens says, were physically and sexually abused as children. “Because women don’t get to the streets by themselves””it takes all kinds of failed systems to get them there””they’re not going to get off the streets by themselves. It takes a community to bring them back.” Magdalene is that community, a two-year residential program that gives women job training, drug rehabilitation and a house of their own to live in. It has been so successful that there are now five houses in Nashville, two in Charleston, one in Chattanooga, and even one in Rwanda. Another is planned for Ecuador.

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Veteran Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania abruptly switched parties Tuesday, a move intended to boost his re-election chances that also pushed Democrats within one seat of a 60-vote filibuster-resistant majority.

“I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans,” Specter said in a statement posted on a Web site devoted to Pennsylvania politics and confirmed by his office. Several Senate officials said a formal announcement was expected at mid-afternoon.

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Ugh.

A divided Supreme Court Tuesday upheld a federal prohibition on the one-time use of expletives in a case arising partly from an expletive uttered by Cher at a Billboard Music Awards show in 2002.

The ruling, by a 5-4 vote and written by Justice Antonin Scalia, endorsed a Bush administration Federal Communications Commission policy against isolated outbursts of, as Scalia said from the bench, the “f-word” and “s-word.”

The ruling does not resolve a lingering First Amendment challenge to the 2004 policy that is likely to be subject to further lower court proceedings.

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The Episcopal Church, long ago, concluded and publicly proclaimed through its own legislative body that gay and lesbian persons are children of God and, by baptism, full members of the church. We have also concluded that sexual orientation, in and of itself, is no bar to holding any office or ministry in the church, as long as the particular requirements of that office or ministry are met. And we have repeatedly affirmed our support for the human and civil rights of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered persons. In many of our congregations, both here in Maine and around the country, faithful same sex couples and their families are participating in the life of the church and sharing in the work of ministry and service to their communities.

If we, as Mainers, believe that faithful, lifelong monogamous relationships are among the building blocks of a healthy and stable society, then it is in our interest to extend the rights and obligations of civil marriage to all Maine citizens. To deny those rights to certain persons on the basis of sexual orientation is to create two classes of citizens and to deny one group what we believe is best for them and for society.

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Eliud Wabukala of Bungoma, who becomes the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya in July, will not likely reverse his predecessor’s opposition to same-sex unions.

This is the view of bishops and church leaders who spoke to Ecumenical News International after Wabukala was on April 24 elected to replace Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi, who retires on June 30.

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“I don’t care what the politicians think,” Mr. [Floyd] Flake, a former Democratic congressman and one of the city’s most influential religious leaders, thundered last week during a Sunday service at the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral in Queens. “Ain’t nothing perfect about laying down and signing a license with somebody who got the same body parts you got.”

Mr. Flake went on for about two minutes, much to the delight of many in the pews, who cheered and applauded as the church organist punctuated the reverend’s words with notes from “I’ve Got a Woman,” by Ray Charles.

The sentiment, shared in many churches, would normally warrant little notice. Mr. Flake is the pastor of a predominantly black congregation in a community with a socially conservative tilt ”” hardly an unlikely spokesman for those opposed to same-sex marriage.

But Mr. Flake is also a mentor to the Senate majority leader, Malcolm A. Smith, who is among a handful of political leaders in Albany who will be responsible for the fate of same-sex marriage in New York.

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While they might seem like odd bedfellows, [Richard] Holloway actually has much in common with [Richard] Dawkins, who is famous for his outspoken views about the non-existence of a supreme being and the irrational nature of religious faith. Holloway has written 12 books, including Godless Morality, which was controversially denounced by the then-Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey after its publication in 1999 for daring to suggest it is not necessary to be religious to be moral.

Holloway left the church in 2000 after suffering a crisis of conscience. Although he now refers to himself as a “Christian agnostic”, he still keeps some ties with his erstwhile profession.

I’m still a member of the Christian community as it carries many beautiful values, tropes, metaphors and narratives. I’ve changed my mind so many times in the past that I now handle what I say with a certain provisionality. I’m not done yet – who knows where I’ll end up? – but one of the things I have learned is the virtue of uncertainty. If you absolutely know the mind of that mystery you call God then it leads you to do terrible things because, of course, God is on your side.

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Since I am the only person indicated by this statement (despite the use of the plural “leader(s)”, let me respond briefly, in hopes that someone from the Consultation is reading. The Consultation’s statement is, taken as a whole, completely disingenuous. Since I have been long and ublicly committed to the view that partenered homosexuals should not, on Scriptural, traditional, and moral reasons, be ordained or have their partnerships affirmed by the Christian Church, my commitments have always been, in the Consultation’s view, “sinful”. This is not news to the Constulation members, and brings no revelatory instruments to bear in their reading of the CP Bishops’ statement. But it really has nothing to do with the Anglican Covenant. This is logical hooey, and at best an indirect form of ad hominem diversion. The various drafts of the Covenant have had nothing to do with the issues of sexuality (much to the chagrin of some), and the Consultors know it. If the “full intent of the documents” is based not on their content, however, but on the people involved in drafting them, then the the Consultors are rather slow in figuring out what is going on. After all, about half of the Covenant Design Group shares my “sinful” perspective and has shared it long before the Covenant was even a gleam in Canterbury’s eye.

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Sorting through the “marquee flus” of recent years ”” SARS, avian flu and now swine flu ”” is complicated.

The three come from different viruses and carry different kinds of danger, depending on ease of transmission and virulence. As a benchmark, the deadliest influenza pandemic in the past century, the Spanish influenza of 1918 to 1919, had an estimated mortality rate of around 2.5 percent but killed tens of millions of people because it spread so widely.

The new swine flu cases are caused by an influenza strain called H1N1, which appears to be easily passed from person to person. Mexican health authorities have confirmed 149 deaths from that flu and are investigating the illnesses of 1,600 people, and the United States, Canada, Spain and other countries have confirmed or are investigating cases.

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The need for more doctors comes up at almost every Congressional hearing and White House forum on health care. “We’re not producing enough primary care physicians,” Mr. Obama said at one forum. “The costs of medical education are so high that people feel that they’ve got to specialize.” New doctors typically owe more than $140,000 in loans when they graduate.

Lawmakers from both parties say the shortage of health care professionals is already having serious consequences. “We don’t have enough doctors in primary care or in any specialty,” said Representative Shelley Berkley, Democrat of Nevada.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said, “The work force shortage is reaching crisis proportions.”

Even people with insurance have problems finding doctors.

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President Obama started putting his mark on U.S. foreign policy from his very first hours in office. He quickly and deliberately presented a more conciliatory, multilateral approach to world affairs, analysts say.

While trying to grapple with a global economic meltdown, the new president initiated immediate reviews of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. He started to open diplomatic channels with previous enemy states such as Cuba and Iran. He reached out to Europe and sought to thaw U.S.-Russia relations.

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…[During his time in the diocese Bishop Eliud Wabukala] initiated the Wycliffe Centre for Theology and Mission and Development in Bungoma, an affiliate of St Paul’s Theological College, Limuru.

Eight medical clinics were set up.

“Many of these projects got funding from Peterborough in England, an indicator that the bishop could create links,” said Rev Mechumo, adding that the greatest challenge Bishop Wabukala had to contend with was lack of training among the clergy.

Now Bungoma Diocese has several priests with degrees and diplomas.

“This is no mean achievement for a bishop.” Rev Mechumo added: “But now we have to release him. He has now become the leader of the province.”

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A group of conservative Anglicans in Canada and the United States has finalized plans to begin forming an alternate church in North America.

Leaders of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), a collection of 12 Anglican organizations that began to unify last November, approved applications for the creation of 28 new dioceses in the church. The new church’s leaders also finalized a draft constitution and church laws ahead of its provincial assembly.

“It is a great encouragement to see the fruit of many years’ work,” said the Right Rev. Robert Duncan, archbishop-elect of the Anglican Church in North America and bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh. “Today 23 dioceses and five dioceses-in-formation joined together to reconstitute an orthodox, Biblical, missionary and united Church in North America.”

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The cavalier use of brute government force has become routine, but the emerging story of how Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke forced CEO Ken Lewis to blow up Bank of America is still shocking. It’s a case study in the ways that panicky regulators have so often botched the bailout and made the financial crisis worse.

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New cases of the deadly swine flu virus have been confirmed as far afield as New Zealand and Israel as the UN warns it cannot be contained.

The US, Canada, Spain and Britain confirmed cases earlier but no deaths have been reported outside Mexico, where the virus was first reported.

Mexico has raised the number of probable deaths to 152, with 1,614 suspected sufferers under observation.

UN inspectors are to examine reports that pig farms spread the virus.

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I am in Boston looking at Boston University with our middle child, our son Nathaniel.

Dr [John] Hartley outlines his plan in the latest issue of his parish magazine in an article headed “Let’s collectivise the bishop”. His scheme provides for:

* Reorganisation of all the dioceses to a size that could comfortably be led by one bishop and two suffragans;

* Abolition of the word “bishop”;

* Each diocese being headed by a “College of Oversight” consisting of three people, including at least one man and one woman;

* At every confirmation and ordination, all three people being present, each of them laying hands on all the candidates;

* In appointing the college, all of its members receiving the laying-on of hands from all the members of at least three other diocesan colleges of oversight.

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Check it out.

More Americans have given up their faith or changed religions because of a gradual spiritual drift than switched because of a disillusionment over their churches’ policies, according to a new study released today which illustrates how personal spiritual attitudes are taking precedence over denominational traditions.

The survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life is the first large-scale study of the reasons behind Americans switching their religious faith and found that more than half of people have done so at least once during their lifetime.

Almost three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants who are now unaffiliated with a religion said they had “just gradually drifted away” from their faith. And more than three-quarters of Catholics and half of Protestants currently not associated with a faith said that, over time, they stopped believing in their religion’s teachings.

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A conversation about the economy with Bill Ackman, major investor and hedge fund manager of Pershing Square Capital Management LP, Kate Kelly, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Joe Stiglitz, economist and a member of Columbia University faculty.

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Yuck.

Pope Benedict XVI canonized five new saints Sunday, including Portugal’s 14th century independence leader and a nearly blind Italian monk who died of the plague after tending to the sick.

Benedict presided over the ceremony in a packed St. Peter’s Square, decorated with tapestries featuring pictures of each of the five. He praised each as a model for the faithful and said their lives and work were as relevant today as they were some 700 years ago.

Benedict singled out the Rev. Arcangelo Tadini, who lived at the turn of the last century and founded an order of nuns to tend to factory workers at the dawn of the industrial era. Tadini also created an association to provide emergency loans to workers experiencing financial difficulties.

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The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course ”” with no benefits ”” than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

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Two months after the local atheist organization here put up a billboard saying “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone,” the group’s 13 board members met in Laura and Alex Kasman’s living room to grapple with the fallout.

The problem was not that the group, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, had attracted an outpouring of hostility. It was the opposite. An overflow audience of more than 100 had showed up for their most recent public symposium, and the board members discussed whether it was time to find a larger place.

And now parents were coming out of the woodwork asking for family-oriented programs where they could meet like-minded nonbelievers.

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The Audit Bureau of Circulations released this morning the spring figures for the six months ending March 31, 2009, showing that the largest metros continue to shed daily and Sunday circulation — now at a record rate.

According to ABC, for 395 newspapers reporting this spring, daily circulation fell 7% to 34,439,713 copies, compared with the same March period in 2008. On Sunday, for 557 newspapers, circulation was down 5.3% to 42,082,707. These averages do not include 84 newspapers with circulations below 50,000 due to a change in publishing frequency.

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The habit of assessing a president’s accomplishments after his first 100 days in office goes back to the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his first 100 days, Roosevelt laid the foundations for the New Deal. It’s an impossible standard to meet, says former Federal Reserve vice chairman Alan Blinder.

“I often say that Roosevelt cursed future presidents with the 100 days concept. … It’s just too short,” Blinder says.

In normal times, new presidents can’t hope to match Roosevelt’s accomplishments. In that regard, Obama has an advantage. These aren’t normal times. In fact, they’re the most challenging economic times since the Great Depression. So challenging, says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, John McCain’s former top economic adviser, that Obama began to influence economic policy even before he was inaugurated.

“This is the longest first hundred days, at least in my lifetime,” Holtz-Eakin says. “President Obama actually became the leader right after his election.”

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A veteran newspaper columnist and longtime member of the Episcopal Church USA says the denomination has cheerfully given up truth to placate a relativistic culture.

William Murchison’s new book is called Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity. He says the denomination, like other churches of the American mainline, seems to be in a mad dash to catch up with a secular culture that values self-expression and does not want to promote the holy and just God of the Bible.

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Viewed as a political prize, however, the Church ceases to be a Church. Its mission is being determined by politics rather than under the governance of the Holy Spirit. So long as the battle rages for the prize, the fiction that it is a Church has to be maintained at all costs, because no one who could affect the outcome must realize what is at stake. And with the publicizing of views like those expressed in the Bishops’ Statement, the risk is now great that the momentum so carefully accumulated over the years will be seen for what it is: nothing more (or less) than a political attempt to take over a money machine.

And that is why the Bishops, the ACI and its lawyer have received the treatment they did. Only those who are plotting already can regard the publication of such a power-renouncing statement of subsidiarity as “an unprecedented power grab by anti-gay bishops who will assert they are not bound by the Episcopal Church’s governing body: General Convention.”

The spectacle of taking over a church politically, of even speaking in terms of a church “power-grab”, is so antithetical to the essence of a church that in the end it must be self-defeating.

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