A potential rift within the Church of Scotland over gay relationships emerged yesterday after the Church’s house magazine backed civil partnerships and openly gay ministers.
Accusing religious traditionalists of selectively quoting the Bible to support their attacks on homosexual relations, the editorial in Life And Work urged the Kirk to show strong leadership on an issue that has threatened to split the Church of England and could prove just as divisive in Scotland.
Security professionals are being called on to band together to fight the highly organised cyber criminals of the world.
The call was made at a San Francisco conference organised by security firm RSA – the largest event of its kind.
RSA President Art Coviello said the online fraudsters “are not bound by any rules of law” and “control massive armies of zombie computers”.
Although President Obama opposes the prosecution of CIA operatives who carried out the most controversial interrogations of suspected terrorists during the Bush administration, Obama suggested today that he had not ruled out action against Justice Department officials who authorized the tactics.
The president, who banned and then publicized interrogation tactics employed by the CIA in the early years of the Bush administration, has maintained that he is more interested in looking forward than dwelling on past actions.
Every year between 2001 and 2008, former President Bush’s calendar was cleared on the first Thursday in May to mark the National Day of Prayer in the White House East Room with prominent evangelicals.
Now the Obama White House is facing questions of inside-the-Beltway etiquette: Should Obama maintain the open door to conservative critics like James and Shirley Dobson, and if so, should they accept?
Or, will the White House have an official observance at all?
A potentially troubling era dawned Sunday in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, where a top Islamist militant leader, emboldened by a peace agreement with the federal government, laid out an ambitious plan to bring a “complete Islamic system” to the surrounding northwest region and the entire country.
Speaking to thousands of followers in an address aired live from Swat on national news channels, cleric Sufi Mohammed bluntly defied the constitution and federal judiciary, saying he would not allow any appeals to state courts under the system of sharia, or Islamic law, that will prevail there as a result of the peace accord signed by the president Tuesday.
“The Koran says that supporting an infidel system is a great sin,” Mohammed said, referring to Pakistan’s modern democratic institutions. He declared that in Swat, home to 1.5 million people, all “un-Islamic laws and customs will be abolished,” and he suggested that the official imprimatur on the agreement would pave the way for sharia to be installed in other areas.
The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council began its last meeting of the 2007-2009 triennium here by hearing reports about efforts to relocate the church’s archives, cultivate major donors, and respond to extreme poverty around the world.
The meeting at the Wyndham Portland Airport Hotel is taking place in the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine. Council will hear about the mission and ministry of the diocese and of Province I on the evening of April 22.
Council began its meeting April 20 with an organizational plenary session, followed by private conversation. During the plenary session, Council members heard updates from the church’s Mission Funding Initiative, the committee investigating a long-term strategy for the Archives of the Episcopal Church and the work of Episcopal Relief and Development.
The Diocese of Pennsylvania has filed suit against the flagship parish of the Forward in Faith movement in the US, the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont, seeking control of the property.
Last month’s pleading, filed on behalf of the diocesan standing committee, asked a suburban Philadelphia court to eject the Rt Rev David Moyer and his congregation from the property, arguing the parish’s secession from the diocese violates canon law which requires parish property to be “held or used for the work of the Episcopal Church.”
The battle between Rosemont’s rector and the Bishop of Pennsylvania, Charles Bennison, began in 2002, when Bishop Bennison deposed Fr Moyer for “abandoning the communion” of the Episcopal Church for contumacy.
My first cheer then is for the doctrinal substance of the Cambridge Ridley Draft. It is orthodox and consistent in the main with the “providential ordering of Anglican history and mission.” While I might wish to express the essence of Anglican Christianity somewhat differently, I do not find myself wincing at glaring deviations from the faith once for all delivered to the saints such as one finds routinely in the speeches and writings emanating from The Episcopal Church. My second “50/50” cheer is for setting forth constitutional principles that might lead to the ultimate reform of the Communion and discipline of those who have thrown it into confusion. Whether the Covenant, as currently proposed, will lead to such a reform is contingent on many twists and turns of ecclesiastical politics, including the response of the GAFCON churches and the willingness of the Instruments, especially the Archbishop of Canterbury, to allow certain churches to self-select themselves out of the Covenant and ultimately the Communion. For let it be clearly stated, there is no future for a vibrant and coherent Anglican and Christian body that includes The Episcopal Church (TEC) and Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) as they now exist.
Gallup’s recent update of its long-standing trend question on whether big business, big labor, or big government will be the biggest threat to the country in the future finds Americans still viewing big government as the most serious threat. However, compared to Gallup’s last pre-financial-crisis measurement in December 2006, more now see big business and fewer see big government as the greater threat.
These shifts in attitudes have occurred even as the government has taken on an expanded role in regulating U.S. financial institutions in response to the financial crisis, under the Bush and Obama administrations.
The fear all along has been that the United Nations conference on racism would be manipulated into yet another forum for demonizing Israel. All too predictably, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ”” who has called the Holocaust a myth and has advocated Israel’s destruction ”” did just that.
In an ugly speech on Monday that served to divide and incite rather than find constructive solutions to racism, Mr. Ahmadinejad said the formation of the state of Israel left “an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering” in order “to establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine.”
We commend France and other European nations for walking out in protest.
When Danna Walker left the second-floor conference room and returned tearily to her desk ”” where someone had already deposited a packing box for her belongings ”” her first thought was not of the 14 years she had worked for DHL or the loss of her $37,000-a-year salary.
It was of Jake. In three months, once her benefits ran out, how in the world would she provide health insurance for Jake, her mountainous, red-headed 21-year-old son, who had learned three years earlier that he had metastatic testicular cancer?
Since the day she was laid off in October, Ms. Walker and her husband, Russ, co-owner of a struggling feed store here on the outskirts of Houston, have mounted a largely fruitless quest to find affordable coverage for Jake’s pre-existing condition. Their odyssey has become all too familiar to millions of newly uninsured Americans who suddenly find themselves one diagnosis away from medical and financial devastation.
In many ways, it was like hundreds of pep talks and locker room speeches he’d given in nearly three decades as an NFL coach. Tony Dungy’s message was one of responsibility, of motivation, of not letting down others ”” or yourself. As always, he was pointed and analytical yet smooth and laid-back.
This time, however, Dungy’s audience wasn’t a highly paid collection of elite athletes.
On this day, Dungy ”” a little more than two years removed from becoming the first African-American coach to win a Super Bowl and less than three months after retiring as the leader of the Indianapolis Colts ”” was in a prison yard, a Bible tucked under his left arm.
This is Tony Dungy’s new world, the one he has embraced since walking away from cheering crowds, a salary that exceeded $5 million a year and a team that was equipped for another Super Bowl run.
Last week, in one of those autophagous moments that we in the media indulge in, it transpired that this last anonymous person was none other than the wicked Damian McBride, although we weren’t told that at the time. The creature McBride had busied himself – with the complicity of some journalists – in punishing the Chancellor for having been uneconomical with the actualité. No wonder that the former Blair aide, Matthew Taylor, was amused to receive calls from “Sunday journalists” asking to be told more about McBride’s unpleasantnesses. It was, he said, “a bit like someone saying: ”˜Me and my mates have for years been having a very intimate relationship with someone you might vaguely know – what was it like?’.”
All this is a symptom of the mutual catastrophe of trust, in which politicians and journalists are not trusted by the public, and the public is not trusted by politicians and journalists. The public want many things, the almost subliminal logic runs – reassurance, emotional connection, a satisfying narrative – but not the truth.
Read it all. Also, if you haven’t seen The Wire, you are really missing out..
The country edged into deflation last month as the RPI (Retail Price Index) measure of inflation tumbled to -0.4 per cent from 0 per cent in February, official figures showed this morning.
This is the first time that RPI inflation, which includes housing costs and is used as a benchmark for UK wage deals, has turned negative since 1960.
CPI (Consumer Price Index) inflation, the Bank of England’s target rate, also fell from 3.2 per cent to a one year low of 2.9 per cent is tipped to decline further in the coming months. The Bank of England has forecast that CPI inflation will drop close to zero and stay there until 2011.
Popular explanations for the terror Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wreaked on their Colorado high school often mention bullying. But Dave Cullen has been following the story since that deadly day, and in his new book, Columbine, he reveals the real story of their rampage.
In his interview with Neal Conan, Cullen warns of the pitfalls of reaching quick conclusions about the “why” behind tragedies like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech. “Key information doesn’t come out for months or even years,” he cautions, “so if you start to come to a determination of why within hours, it may be years before you have the information to make that conclusion.”
Cullen does believe, however, that in the years since Columbine, “people have been much much better about just holding off and saying, ‘we don’t know why yet.'”
Thus the proposed Covenant’s pedigree is in fact an attempt in our days to begin to answer the questions posed by the Virginia Report. The mostly tacit koinonia that had kept the Communion together had begun to crumble, due to the centrifugal forces that began pulling at the Communion since the 1960s (remembering that the Communion doubled in size since “Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence” in 1963). These have only gotten stronger with the passage of time. It is worth noting that the Covenant does not try to define how the four Instruments should interact. It only pushes back to them a perceived threat to the integrity of the Covenant, not the Communion, from among the signatory churches.
A classic Anglican formulary, to which all Anglicans pay homage, is the Sixth of the Thirty-nine Articles, that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation, though it does not spell out what those necessary things are. Similarly, this Covenant tries to define a “containment area” in which decisions on the Virginia questions can be made, without spelling out the particulars. Having made this Covenant, in other words, Anglicans could then work toward defining structures and procedures for a global communion of churches.
Two more undiscussed aspects are the blessing of same-sex unions and ordination of people in them, and the incursions by other provinces into The Episcopal Church. Furthermore, a new group has come into being, the Anglican Church of North America, competing with The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. In March 2009, the Church of Nigeria recognized it, and a few days ago a group of Primates (the “Global Anglican Future Conference Primates”) meeting in London did so as well.[5] The ACNA claims to unite under one jurisdiction a disparate cluster of churches, missions of other provinces, and dioceses calling themselves Anglican.
To read this provocative account is to think that America’s relationships are in chaos. Even when we live together without marrying, we break up faster than in other places, he says. In one of the book’s surprising findings he says that American children whose parents are married are more likely to experience the turmoil of a parental break-up than Swedish children whose parents live together without being married.
Marriage is nevertheless an American ideal. We are the only Western nation that actually spends government money to support it. The 2005 federal Healthy Marriage Initiative now allocates $100 million a year to promote marriage. It doesn’t seem to be working; marriage rates are declining precipitously, though most Americans are still expected to marry.
Marriage is our battleground. Only in America, Mr. Cherlin says, are gay people campaigning so determinedly for the right to marry. Most gay men and lesbians in Europe, he maintains, view marriage as another oppressive heterosexual institution.
How to explain this peculiar paradox ”” we idealize marriage and yet we’re so bad at it.
Abide With Me, Amazing Grace and Jerusalem have been eclipsed by the strains of Frank Sinatra, Celine Dion and Robbie Williams, according to the latest figures.
A survey of 30,000 funerals conducted last year found that hymns were the most popular requests at only 35 per cent of services, down from 41 per cent in 2005. Contemporary songs accounted for 58 per cent of requests, up from 55 per cent, with classical pieces making up the remaining seven per cent (from 4 per cent).
Roxana Saberi, an Iranian-American, has been jailed for eight years for espionage in Tehran. Yet she is not a spy. She is a journalist, arrested for possession of a bottle of wine and convicted after a parody of a trial that was held in secret and lasted a few minutes.
This process was not due process, despite the intervention of an apparently embarrassed President Ahmadinejad, whose chief of staff wrote to the prosecutor to insist that Ms Saberi be allowed to defend herself. Nor is her sentence anything but a ham-fisted provocation.
It is not yet clear who within the Iranian regime is responsible for hounding Ms Saberi. But it is clear who and what will suffer. Until her release has been secured it will be politically impossible for President Obama to proceed with his efforts to break the 30-year impasse in US-Iranian relations.
As Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, has written, Israel was supposed not only to take the Jewish people out of exile but ensure that exile was “taken out of the Jewish people.” In this, 61 years after its creation, Israel has fallen short.
Uncertainty does not so much hang over the country as inhabit its very fiber. Existential threats ”” from Iran, from Hamas and Hezbollah, from demography ”” are forever invoked. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses ”” for now ”” to support even the notion of Palestinian statehood.
Four IN 10 Britons believe in ghosts and the supernatural according to research by a theology think tank.
Theos also found that more than half of people believe in life after death and that London has the highest number of people who believe in ghosts.
Carried out by ComRes on behalf of Theos, the poll of 2,000 shows that 70 per cent of people believe in the human soul, 55 per cent believe in heaven and 53 per cent believe in life after death.
The first openly gay Episcopal bishop told a Los Angeles gathering yesterday that the church should begin mending divisions over the issue of same-sex marriage by getting out of the civil marriage business altogether.
During a visit to St. Michael and All Angels Church, the Rev. Gene Robinson said he favored the system used in France and other parts of Europe in which civil marriage – performed by government officials – is completely separate from religious vows. In the United States, the civil and religious ceremonies often are combined by the cleric signing the government marriage license.
“In this country, it has become very confusing about where the civil action begins and ends and where the religious action begins and ends, because we have asked clergy to be agents of the state,” said Robinson, bishop of New Hampshire.
President Obama’s top economic advisers have determined that they can shore up the nation’s banking system without having to ask Congress for more money any time soon, according to administration officials.
In a significant shift, White House and Treasury Department officials now say they can stretch what is left of the $700 billion financial bailout fund further than they had expected a few months ago, simply by converting the government’s existing loans to the nation’s 19 biggest banks into common stock.
Converting those loans to common shares would turn the federal aid into available capital for a bank ”” and give the government a large ownership stake in return.
The headline grabber is that Thew Forrester is both an Episcopal priest and an ordained ”” whatever that means ”” teacher of Zen Buddhism. However, it is also interesting that, when he was elected, Thew Forrester was the only nominee. In an attempt to derail the election, conservatives are asking, “Who anointed him in this manner and why?”
The bishop-elect has avoided mainstream coverage, in part, by declining interviews from publications such as the respected Anglican periodical The Living Church. The lack of info has allowed his supporters to simply say he is being attacked by people who have no interest in understand the complex nature of his approach to these faiths.
However, Frank “Bible Belt Blogger” Lockwood of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has marched into the gap, landing an interview that may be just as hot as his famous ”” on the record, nicely recorded ”” interview with former President Carter in which he called the George W. Bush administration the “worst in history.”
You’ll need to check it out. But here is the top of the story, which is a rare mainstream news report that asks basic doctrinal questions and then prints the answers. Note that Lockwood assumes that this controversy actually centers on religious doctrines and liturgical issues, not simply politics. What a concept.
At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, [Gregory] Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
“I’ve figured it out, I think,” Cochran typed. “Pardon my crazed excitement.”
The “faulty” genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.
That provocative — some would say inflammatory — hypothesis has landed Cochran and Harpending in the middle of a charged debate about the link between IQ and DNA.
As a 26-year-old, I feel a lot like others within my generation. I have deep sympathy for my friends who are gay. They often suffer as societal pariahs at the hands of misinformed Christians who believe that gays have chosen their sexual orientation. Though I unashamedly believe that God desires a better path for their lives, I also understand that my obligation to love them is not dependent upon their capitulation to a particular belief system.
When I hear younger evangelicals address homosexuality, they speak with compassion, sympathy and love that have been uncommon among the Falwells and Robertsons. But this change in tone isn’t surprising because rising generations are twice as likely to be in close community with someone who is gay. It is a lot easier to fight a faceless “agenda” than it is to war against a friend.
Now is the time for those who bear the name of Jesus Christ to stop merely talking about love and start showing love to our gay and lesbian neighbors. It must be concrete and tangible. It must move beyond cheap rhetoric. We cannot pick and choose which neighbors we will love. We must love them all.
Authors of an ambitious survey of hazing in colleges and universities have turned their attention to high schools and discovered that many freshmen arrive on campus with experience ”” with 47% reporting getting hazed in high school.
As in college, high school hazing pervaded groups from sports teams to the yearbook staff and performing arts, according to professors Elizabeth Allan and Mary Madden of the University of Maine’s College of Education and Human Development.
Not everything people see on Twitter is gospel — but some of it is.
In an effort to spread its message in the world of social networking, Trinity Wall Street Episcopal Church married microblogging and social networking with the Gospel Friday when it told the Passion of Christ, the story of the crucifixion, in posts of 140 characters or fewer.
From noon-3 p.m., a church worker posted 18 tweets adapted from the Gospel of Mark. The story was largely told through the eyes of six characters: Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Peter, a serving girl and Pontius Pilate.
One tweet read, ”ServingGirl: is so tired. Caiaphas and the priests have been up all night questioning a man who claims to be the Messiah. And I wait on them.”