[Katharine] Jefferts Schori seems to delight in drawing such unexpected connections between her scientific background and her religious duties. She compares Episcopal bishops to humpback whales because they gather for a few days each year, learn to sing a new song together, then head home to teach the song to others. She says “gravity” is an apt translation of “kabod,” the Hebrew word for God’s glory, because it suggests something pervasive, substantial, and inescapable. And while God shouted down Job’s doubts by pointing to His awesomely fashioned hippopotamus, Jefferts Schori urges Episcopalians to consider the anableps (left). These four-eyed fish can see above and below water simultaneously””a good example for Christians conflicted about whether to salvage this world or just wait for the next one. The point of such examples, Jefferts Schori says, is to encourage the church to see itself with new eyes, stop bickering about finer points of doctrine, and get about the business of healing the sick, clothing the naked, and relieving the impoverished.

Ultimately, religion and science speak the same language, and impart the same lesson, she says. Each teaches that the world is made of connections and that actions in one place have consequences, often unforeseen, in other places and times. And nowhere are the effects of our deeds as grave as in how we care for the environment, a dear subject for the nature-loving presiding bishop who once trolled the seas. Numerous times, she has passionately urged believers, politicians, and all people of good will to make care of God’s creation their topmost priority. As she explained in testimony before the U.S. Senate in 2007, “As a priest, trained as a scientist, I take as a sacred obligation the faith community’s responsibility to stand on the side of truth””the truth of science as well as the truth of God’s unquenchable love for the world and all its inhabitants.” In the beginning, Katharine saw the world, and saw that it was good; in the end, she is trying to save it.

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The economic downturn is forcing a return to a culture of thrift that many economists say could last well beyond the inevitable recovery.

This is not because Americans have suddenly become more financially virtuous or have learned the error of their free-spending ways. Instead, these experts say, Americans may have no choice but to continue pinching pennies.

This shift back to thrift may seem to be a healthy change for a consumer class known for spending more than it earns, but there is a downside: American businesses have become so dependent on consumer spending that any pullback sends ripples through the economy.

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As millions of people seek government aid, many for the first time, they are finding it dispensed American style: through a jumble of disconnected programs that reach some and reject others, often for reasons of geography or chance rather than differences in need.

Health care, housing, food stamps and cash ”” each forms a separate bureaucratic world, and their dictates often collide. State differences make the patchwork more pronounced, and random foibles can intervene, like a computer debacle in Colorado that made it harder to get food stamps and Medicaid.

The result is a hit-or-miss system of relief, never designed to grapple with the pain of a recession so sudden and deep. Aid seekers often find the rules opaque and arbitrary. And officials often struggle to make policy through a system so complex and Balkanized.

Across the country, hard luck is colliding with fine print.

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The financial outlook for Medicare and Social Security has significantly worsened, as the bad economy and mounting job losses have pushed both programs years closer to insolvency, according to a grim report issued Tuesday by the Obama administration.

The new projection, in an annual report from the programs’ trustees, says that Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund will be exhausted in 2017, just a year after President Obama would leave office if re-elected to a second term. Last year the trustees said they expected the fund to last until 2019.

The trustees also said that Social Security’s reserves now face depletion in 2037, four years sooner than the previous projection of 2041. The projections assume that there are no changes in current benefits, policies and tax rates.

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The Catholic faith is not simply a collection of doctrines and ideas, or a body of knowledge, or even a system of beliefs, although all those things are important. At its root, Christianity is an experience: a life-changing, personal experience of the risen Jesus Christ. Everything else in the writings of St. Paul, and everything else in our life as Catholics, flows from that personal encounter with Jesus Christ. If we truly seek him, then we will always find him. But when we find him, we need to be ready for the consequences, because nothing about our lives can be the same.

Let me share a story with you to explain what I mean. It’s about a young man named Franz who lived about sixty years ago in a small village in Austria. Franz was the illegitimate son of a farmer who later died in World War I. He was a wild teenager. Local people recall that he was the first one in his village to drive a motorcycle. And it’s not because he drove safely or kept to the posted speed limits.

Franz was the leader of a gang that used to fight rival gangs in neighboring towns with knives and chains. He was something of a cad, too, and a womanizer. He got a girl pregnant and was forced to leave town. People said he went to work for awhile in an iron mine.

For reasons nobody knows, Franz came back a changed man. He had always gone to church, even during his wildest days. But when he returned, he was a serious Catholic, not just a Sunday Catholic. He started making payments to support the child he had fathered out of wedlock. He married a good Catholic woman and settled down to become a good farmer, husband and father, raising three children and serving as a lay leader in his local parish….

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The Vatican on Tuesday sought to defend Pope Benedict XVI against criticism that his speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial on Monday was a disappointment coming from a German who experienced the Nazi terror firsthand.

But in seeking to clarify the pope’s wartime past, the Vatican further muddied the waters, appearing to revise ”” then retract ”” Benedict’s wartime history in the middle of his first visit to Israel as pontiff.

At a news conference on Tuesday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, seemed to contradict the pope’s own previous statements when he said that Benedict, growing up in Bavaria during World War II, “never, never, never” belonged to the Hitler Youth.

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President Obama’s decision to deliver a speech here next month has given significant encouragement to a once powerful ally that has grown increasingly frustrated over its waning regional influence and its inability to explain to its citizens why it remains committed to a Middle East peace process that has failed to produce a better life for Palestinians.

After eight years in which Egypt felt unappreciated and bullied by the Bush administration, Egyptian officials were gleeful about Cairo’s selection last week for the president’s address to the Muslim world. They said that it proved Egypt remained the capital of the Arab world and that it eased concerns that Washington might undermine its Arab allies in exchange for a grand deal with their rivals in Iran.

“The aptest choice was Cairo,” the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, told the state-owned daily newspaper Rose Al-Yousef. “It is the capital of moderation in Islam and the capital of cultural sway in the Arab and Muslim worlds.”

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As a resident, my greatest pride was in never having missed a day for illness. I’d drag myself in and sniffle and cough through the day. Once, I’m embarrassed to admit, I trudged up York Avenue to the hospital making use of my own personal motion sickness bag every few blocks while horrified pedestrians looked on.

Now, though, I see the foolishness of this bravura. And I confront it almost daily in my primary care practice. No one can miss a day ”” a minute, even ”” of work, carpooling, volunteering, vacation, anything. “I don’t have time to be sick!” my patients wail. Everyone must soldier on, leaving sick days to those with less important things to do.

And many patients aren’t satisfied with sympathy and friendly advice. They have come to the office for that little piece of blue paper, the antibiotic prescription. “I would never ask for this under normal circumstances,” I’m told ”” except (pick one) I’m getting married tomorrow; leaving for a month in the Amazon; having 25 houseguests for the weekend.

Never mind that antibiotics are useless in treating colds and viral illnesses, and that they have their own dangers and side effects. Some doctors will write the prescription just to get on with their day.

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California’s budget deficit has grown so severe that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said he may be forced to release 40,000 prisoners or lay off 51,000 teachers if voters next week reject three budget balancing measures.

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Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in his presidential address to the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) here May 11 compared the Anglican Communion’s long-standing divisions to those in the Holy Land.

“The other day we were giving quite intense attention to the situation in the Holy Land and in that discussion I thought there are echoes of language we hear nearer home,” Williams said. “Well, thank God, our divisions and our fears are not as deep and as poisonous as those between communities in the Holy Land, but I think you may see why some of the same language occasionally awakes echoes.”

It was also through the lens of Holy Land politics that Williams suggested during his address a possible way forward.

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One can only reflect, that when there is no clear procedure, the door is open for the arbitrary use of power. That does not empower people, since they have no access to appeal to what all have agreed on. In this case, when the chairman sought to follow the normal rules of procedure he was trumped by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The question remains: what confidence can the Anglican Communion have in a body where those who come to make decisions have no given ground rules for how those debates and decisions are going to be conducted ahead of time, but rather are dependent entirely on the will of the chairman and above him of the president to interpret their mind?

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“We have not in this meeting given evidence of any belief that we have no future together,” said Archbishop Rowan Williams in his presidential address, delivered on the eve of the last day of the ACC meeting. “The question is, of course, what that future will look like.”

Archbishop Williams said that Anglican provinces are “a bit reluctant” to engage the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant in greater detail because it “does underline for us that the possibility of division is there, the possibility at least of certain kinds of division.” He said people have spoken of the future of the communion as a federation, “an association within which some groups are more strongly bound to one another and some groups less strongly bound.” He added, “I suspect that will be more inevitable if not all provinces do sign on to the covenant. And I hasten to add that’s not what I hope. It is what I think we have to reflect on as a real possibility.”

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But the higher deficit figures and additional proposed taxes, along with details of corporate tax breaks the Obama administration wants to ax, led to sharp criticism of the White House from some Republican lawmakers and business groups. It was a taste of the battle to come on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers and lobbyists have prevented some of the proposed changes in the past.

“The administration’s displayed an insatiable appetite for spending and they need to get money wherever they can. So they use the tax code the way Willie Sutton used a gun,” said Martin A. Regalia, vice president for economic and tax policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, referring to the famous bank robber.

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Senate leaders are considering new federal taxes on soda and other sugary drinks to help pay for an overhaul of the nation’s health-care system.

The taxes would pay for only a fraction of the cost to expand health-insurance coverage to all Americans and would face strong opposition from the beverage industry. They also could spark a backlash from consumers who would have to pay several cents more for a soft drink.

On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee is set to hear proposals from about a dozen experts about how to pay for the comprehensive health-care overhaul that President Barack Obama wants to enact this year. Early estimates put the cost of the plan at around $1.2 trillion. The administration has so far only earmarked funds for about half of that amount.

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On the eve of the closing of the Anglican Consultative Council 14 meeting in Kingston, Jamaica the Archbishop Of Canterbury delivered his presidential address. The Council has a chair and the Archbishop functions as the president. The address came after the evening worship and was followed by an opportunity to express thanks to Bishop John Paterson who retires as the chair at the end of this meeting, Mr. George Kosay who retires as the deputy chair and Bishop Gregory Cameron who was recently consecrated as the Bishop of St Asaph in Wales and attended the meeting to complete his work as the deputy Secretary General of the Anglican Communion.

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Ms Saberi’s release shows that while Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad likes to wave a big stick, he is also capable of talking softly. It indicates that relations between Washington and Tehran need not be poisoned permanently by a sense of hostility. It suggests that Iran – and, crucially, President Ahmadinejad, given expectations of his victory in next month’s elections – are ready to respond to America’s wooing.

That does not mean the diplomatic path from here will be either straight or easy. Suspicion that hangs like a fog between the two countries will not lift like a summer morning mist. It will not bring a swift end to the two countries’ friction over the aims of Iran’s nuclear programme.

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So you might expect the mood in the Middle East to be awful, bordering on desperate. Although it is sombre, those who know the region feel that there is all to play for. There are two reasons for this.

The first is the complex personality of Mr Netanyahu. I have met him several times and had informal conversations with him. He is usually reticent on strategy but a master at tactics. I have no doubt that he deeply dislikes the concept of a Palestinian state but that is not the same as saying that he could never endorse one….

That brings me to the second and, perhaps, decisive reason why the situation is more fluid than might first be apparent. Unlike George W. Bush, Barack Obama is engaging himself in the Israel-Palestine issue from the very outset of his presidency. He is doing so with more goodwill from the Arab world than any recent president.

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Eleven weeks after Congress settled on a stimulus package that provided $135 billion to limit layoffs in state governments, many states are finding that the funds are not enough and are moving to lay off thousands of public employees.

The state of Washington settled on a budget two weeks ago that will mean 1,000 layoffs at public colleges and several times that many in elementary and high schools.

The governor of Massachusetts, who cut 1,000 positions late last year, just announced 250 layoffs, with more likely to come soon.

Arizona has already laid off 800 social service workers this year and is facing the likelihood of deeper cuts over the next two. The state no longer investigates all complaints of child or elder abuse.

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The White House on Monday projected 2009 and 2010 federal budget deficits far higher than it forecast just two and a half months ago, even as it continued to defy most experts and predict that the economy is headed for a strong comeback starting late this year.

Economists scoffed at the latest administration predictions.

“If they keep playing this game, they’re going to have real credibility problems,” predicted Brian Bethune, the chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight, an economic research firm.

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Council of General Synod (CoGS) wrestled with the blessing of same-sex unions and marriage when it met here May 8 to 10 and in the end decided not to ask General Synod 2010 to amend the marriage canon to allow for the marriage of same-sex couples.

The discussions focused on responding to two new documents produced by the Primate’s Theological Commission and the Faith, Worship and Ministry Committee. There was also a report about an international dialogue about sexuality that was initiated between Canadian dioceses that have taken steps toward the blessing of same-sex unions and dioceses in Africa. CoGS responded in a written statement, “A Word to the Church on Questions of Human Sexuality from the Council of General Synod Meeting, May 2009.”

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The Chicago Consultation released this statement today from its co-convener Ruth Meyers in response to the Anglican Consultative Council’s affirmation of the recommendations made by the Windsor Continuation Group and its decision to postpone the release of the Anglican Covenant for consideration by provinces:

The Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), meeting now in Kingston, Jamaica, has committed itself to the hard work of debating recommendations and documents that seek to define the Anglican Communion. We are grateful for the efforts of its representatives, and we especially commend the decision to delay sending a draft of the proposed Anglican Covenant to the provinces until more work has been done that might strengthen, rather than tear down, our common life.

However, we believe that the ACC and the Windsor Continuation Group have made a grievous error by concluding that God is calling us to exclude baptized Christians who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender for the sake of communion. These moratoria, which were requested in the Windsor Report and by the primates, have not been formally agreed to by the democratic structures of the Episcopal Church and are inconsistent with both the Anglican tradition of seeking unity through diversity and with scripture’s mandate to do justice.

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Delegates from the Church of Nigeria stated they were perplexed by Dr Williams’ actions. “All of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s contributions were positive” up until the last moment of the meeting, Bishop Ikechi Nwosu of Nigeria said.

Nigerian Archdeacon Abraham Okorie said there was a “satanic” spirit of confusion in the air. He noted it was hypocritical of the ACC to make a great noise of using African ways of decision making in addressing the covenant, but then resorting to slippery parliamentary tricks to thwart the will of the meeting.

Dr Williams was a “very weak leader,” Bishop Ikechi Nwosu of Nigeria observed. “Of course we pray for him, but couldn’t he be courageous for once?”

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What a pretty bird.

To understand what the controversy surrounding Obama’s invitation is about, it is important to understand what it is not about.

Most important, the issue is not, as some commentators have suggested, whether Notre Dame should welcome, engage, debate and explore a wide range of viewpoints. Of course it should. It was, after all, a central message of the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council that “nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo” in Christians’ hearts, and the same can be said for the work of a Catholic university. Such a university has nothing to fear from ”” indeed, it has the best possible reasons to welcome ”” inquiry, investigation, argument and testing. And so, no one could reasonably oppose inviting the president to Notre Dame for discussion and dialogue on immigration, education, health care ”” or even abortion.

The question on the table is not whether Notre Dame should hear from the president but whether Notre Dame should honor the president. A Catholic university can and should engage all comers, but in order to be true to itself ”” to have integrity ”” it should hesitate before honoring those who use their talents or power to bring about grave injustice. The university is, and must remain, a bustling marketplace of ideas; at the same time, it also has a voice of its own. We say a lot about who we are and what we stand for through what we love and what we choose to honor. The controversy at Notre Dame is not about what should be said at Catholic universities, but about what should be said by a Catholic university.

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Things went only downhill from there. In the first place, there was no clear plan on how to present and to vote on the differing resolutions dealing with the Covenant that had been prepared by the Resolutions Committee. Three of its members, as I mentioned, favored putting off adoption of the entire Covenant at this meeting. Because of ECUSA’s strong opposition to it, expressed in one of the small indaba groups, they wanted the ACC to send Part IV of the Covenant back for a rewrite before it would be presented to the churches of the Communion. They accordingly drafted a Resolution to accomplish this, and it was presented as “Resolution A”:

The ACC:

a) resolves that section 4 of the Ridley Cambridge Draft be detached from the Ridley Cambridge Draft for further consideration and work;
b) asks the Archbishop of Canterbury, in consultation with the Secretary General, to appoint a small working group to consider and consult with the Provinces on Section 4 and its possible revision, and to report to the next meeting of the Joint Standing Committee;
c) resolves that the reconsidered Section 4 may, at the request of the JSC, be offered for adoption as an addendum to the Covenant text.

Simultaneously, in order to reflect the position favored by the great majority of the discussion groups, they presented a second Resolution, which they called “Resolution B”:

The ACC:

a) thanks the Covenant Design Group for their faithfulness and responsiveness in producing the drafts for an Anglican Communion Covenant and, in particular for the Ridley Cambridge Draft submitted to this meeting;
b) recognises that an Anglican Communion Covenant may provide an effective means to strengthen and promote our common life as a Communion;
c) asks the Secretary General to send the Ridley Cambridge draft, at this time, only to the member Churches of the Anglican Consultative Council for consideration and decision on acceptance or adoption by them;
d) asks those member Churches to report to ACC-15 on the progress made in the processes of response to, and acceptance or adoption of, the Covenant.

It should have been obvious that these resolutions were mutually incompatible, and could not both have passed. Therefore, proper parliamentary awareness should have required the Resolutions Committee to (a) decide upon the order in which the various parts of the Resolutions should have been taken up, and (b) in the process present a coherent choice between possible outcomes. For example, paragraphs (a) and (b) of Resolution B could have stood on their own, and been presented for approval at the very outset. Then the choice would have been between detaching section 4 or not, and a clear vote could have been taken which would decide which approach the group as a whole preferred to follow.

Instead, what the ACC representatives got was a parliamentary mishmash, by the end of which no one could follow what was happening.

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I would go further than saying “procedural confusion.” It is, as reports from Professor Stephen Noll and others are calling it: PERFIDY. It is a betrayal of every Anglican who has looked to the Covenant process to bring desperately needed order to our life as a Communion. …

It is painfully obvious to observers in many quarters that the continuation of the Communion depends on your actions in this matter.

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THE leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland has pledged his full support for work with Irish Anglicans in combating the joint challenges of sectarianism, racism and secularism.

Cardinal Sean Brady made this solemn commitment yesterday when he spoke officially in the Church of Ireland cathedral of St Patrick in Armagh at a Eucharist ceremony closing its annual General Synod.

The Cardinal made his pioneering inter-church pledge in response to an earlier address by the Anglican Bishop of Limerick, Trevor Williams, who informed him of a three-year ‘Hard Gospel’ project by the Church of Ireland to tackle a range of problems that have divided Catholics and Protestants in the North.

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Pope Benedict XVI called for the establishment of an independent Palestinian homeland immediately after he arrived in Israel Monday, a stance that could put him at odds with his hosts on a trip aimed at improving ties between the Vatican and Jews.

The pope also took on the delicate issue of the Holocaust, pledging to “honor the memory” of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide at the start of his five-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Benedict touched down in Israel on the second leg of a weeklong pilgrimage to the Holy Land, after spending three days in neighboring Jordan. He is using the tour to reach out to both Muslims and Jews.

In his first public comments upon arriving, Benedict urged Israelis and Palestinians to “explore every possible avenue” to resolve their differences.

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There is a book that everyone will be talking about — when it appears over a year from now. “American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives,” being written by Robert Putnam and David Campbell, is already creating a buzz. Putnam, the author of “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” is the preeminent academic expert on American civic life. Campbell is his rising heir. And the book they haven’t yet finished will make just about everyone constructively uncomfortable.

At a recent conference of journalists organized by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Putnam outlined the conclusions of “American Grace,” based on research still being sifted and refined. Against the expectations of hard-core secularists, Putnam asserts, “religious Americans are nicer, happier and better citizens.” They are more generous with their time and money, not only in giving to religious causes but to secular ones. They join more voluntary associations, attend more public meetings, even let people cut in line in front of them more readily. Religious Americans are three to four times more socially engaged than the unaffiliated. Ned Flanders is a better neighbor.

Against the expectations of many religious believers, this dynamic has little to do with the content of belief. Theology is not the predictor of civic behavior; being part of a community is. People become social joiners and contributors when they have friends who pierce their isolation and invite their participation. And religious friends, says Putnam, are “more powerful, supercharged friends.”

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The covenant decision came after a day of polite debate that, at times, included accusation, exasperation, impatience, and intense and confusing parliamentary maneuvering, both on the floor and behind the scenes.

On one end of the debate spectrum, Dato Stanley Isaacs of the Church of South East Asia, voiced the opinion of many when he said that the council faced “a defining moment for the communion, a moment that we either grab it or we don’t.”

He called the covenant “a hope in Christ that this will be a way of finding a just solution to the realization of a communion that is once again united in the bond of Christ ”¦ we long for that unity again.”

Isaacs said it would give “a ray of hope to us finding a resolution to the problem that has not only divided the communion, but has embarrassed the churches in many, many parts of the world outside of the United States.”

On the other hand, Sarah Tomlinson, ACC youth representative from Scotland, urged the council to allow the communion the time it needs to formulate a covenant whose terms are clearly defined.

“Whatever we decide now, my generation is going to have to deal with it. We’re going to have to bear the burden of dealing with this long after — no offense — you guys aren’t running the church,” she said. “So I know we’re all keen to get this finished and get it to come to an end, but let’s take the time to consult just a bit more ”¦ otherwise, I am going to have to be sorting out this mess and the rest of the youth are going to be sorting out this situation a lot longer.”

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