The TEC Diocese’s material is here and the Anglican Diocese’s material is there.

Taxpayers are on the hook for an extra $55,000 a household to cover rising federal commitments made just in the past year for retirement benefits, the national debt and other government promises, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

The 12% rise in red ink in 2008 stems from an explosion of federal borrowing during the recession, plus an aging population driving up the costs of Medicare and Social Security.

That’s the biggest leap in the long-term burden on taxpayers since a Medicare prescription drug benefit was added in 2003.

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[Linda] Seale, who has been a warden and a trustee at St. Matthew’s among many other positions, said that even before the issue of same sex blessings came to the fore, she had been disturbed by what she called Bishop Ingham’s “pluralist approach to religion, that there are many ways to God.”

She recalled once at the Sorrento Retreat Centre near Kamloops, BC, while taking a course taught by the bishop, she had been alarmed by the direction of his thought.

Walking beside him to a meal one day, she asked him about the passage in John’s Gospel which says “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)

She told the court the bishop replied: “There are some things you have to let go of.”

Read the whole article.

Bishop Don Harvey was under cross-examination for the first half of the morning session. Mr George Macintosh, counsel for the diocese, asked questions focused on the “legitimacy” of Archbishop Venables’ intervention in Canada, the response of the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) and the Archbishop of Canterbury to this intervention, and whether Bishop Harvey had been invited to the 2008 Lambeth Conference – to which Bishop Don replied, “no, but nor was Bishop Gene Robinson”. Another line of questioning revolved around how Bishop Don has changed his mind on the issue of women’s ordination over the last 30 years; previously against it, he is now for it. There were also extensive questions about the conscience clause in respect of women’s ordination and the one offered by Bishop Ingham to the parishes in New Westminster as well as discussion of Shared Episcopal Ministry.

Bishop Ron Ferris then took the stand for the rest of the day, although his cross-examination will continue tomorrow morning. He is another cradle Anglican who was baptized, confirmed, married, ordained and consecrated in the church. He was Bishop of the Yukon from 1981-1994 and Bishop of Algoma from 1995 until he retired in 2008 and moved to Langley, BC for family reasons. He joined ANiC in 2009 and is currently planting a church in the Langley area.

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The Supreme Court of British Columbia began hearing arguments this week to decide who owns disputed church buildings and resources: the Anglican diocese of New Westminster or parishes that have split away from the Anglican Church of Canada.

Two lawsuits were filed against the diocese of New Westminster and its bishop, Michael Ingham, by clergy who cut ties with the Anglican Church of Canada and individuals who say they are the lawful trustees of church properties and resources for several congregations that also voted to leave the church. Other hearings have resulted in decisions about interim possession and sharing of Anglican church buildings in British Columbia as well as Ontario, but this trial, which is scheduled to last three weeks, is the first in Canada to rule on which side owns the buildings and resources.

One suit was filed by Rev. David Short, Rev. Trevor Walters, and Rev. Simon Chin who lead congregations at St. John’s (Shaughnessy) in Vancouver, St. Matthew’s in Abbotsford, B.C. and St. Matthias and St. Luke in Vancouver, respectively, and 14 other individuals. The other was filed by Rev. Stephen Leung of Good Shepherd Church in Vancouver and four other people.

The clergy left their ministries with the Anglican Church of Canada in 2008 over theological differences, including issues such as the blessing of same-sex unions, and they were asked to vacate their former parishes. …

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At a press conference late Thursday afternoon, Archdiocese of Miami officials expressed disappointment in Cutié and had strong words for the Episcopal Church, especially Bishop Frade.

”This is truly a setback for ecunemical relations and cooperation between us. The Archdiocese have never made a public display when for doctrinal reasons Episcopal priests have joined the Catholic Church and sought ordination,” said Archbishop John Favalora. He said he had not heard from Frade about the transition and had not spoken to Cutié since May 5, adding that Cutié never told the archbishop he wanted to get married.

”Father Cutié is removing himself from full communion with the Catholic Church and thereby forfeiting his rights as a cleric,” Favalora said, later adding that Cutié is still “bound by the promise to live the celibate life which he freely embraced at ordination. Only the Holy Father can release him from the obligation”

Not so, Bishop Frade said Thursday afternoon. ”That promise is not recognized by our church. If you can find it in the Bible that priests should be celibate, that will be corrected,” Frade said. “The only thing we can say is that we pray for ecumenical relations. . .I am sorry they are sorry, and we love them.”

I am going to leave comments open on this, having had a night to pray on it, but I would request please that you be respectful. Read it all

Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church in the same neighborhood as Simeon, is outraged at the violence.

“What kind of crazy day do we live in, where our children are afraid to come home and go to school?” Pfleger says.

Outside of his church, Pfleger flies the American flag upside down ”” something the U.S. Flag Code states should only be done as a signal of distress and a dire need for help.

“Well, this is a dire need,” Pfleger says. “This is a distress signal we’re putting up saying we need help. We want to sound the alarm; we want a call for helping us deal with children being shot down in our city streets.”

I caught this last night in the car on the way to an appointment–heartbreaking. Read or listen to it all.

For Theodore the Studite, an important virtue, together with obedience and humility, is philergia, that is, love for work, which he sees as a criterion to prove the quality of personal devotion. One who is fervent in material commitments, who works assiduously, he maintains, is the same in the spiritual realm. In this regard, he does not allow that with the pretext of prayer and contemplation, the monk dispenses with work, including manual work, which in reality is, according to him and to the monastic tradition, the means to encounter God.

Theodore is not afraid to speak of work as the “sacrifice of the monk,” of his “liturgy,” even of a type of Mass through which the monastic life converts into angelical life. And precisely in this way the world of work is humanized and man, through work, becomes more himself, closer to God. A consequence of this singular vision deserves to be considered: Precisely because it is the fruit of a form of “liturgy,” the riches that come from common work should not serve the comfort of the monks, but should be destined for the help of the poor. In this, all of us can see the need for the fruit of work to be a good for everyone. Obviously the work of the “studites” was not only manual: They had great importance in the religious-cultural development of the Byzantine culture as calligraphers, painters, poets, educators of youth, teachers in schools, librarians.

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Of old thou didst lay the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They will perish, but thou dost endure; they will all wear out like a garment. Thou changest them like raiment, and they pass away; but thou art the same, and thy years have no end.

–Psalm 102:25-27

They’re back. We refer to the global investors once known as the bond vigilantes, who demanded higher Treasury bond yields from the late 1970s through the 1990s whenever inflation fears popped up, and as a result disciplined U.S. policy makers. The vigilantes vanished earlier this decade amid the credit mania, but they appear to be returning with a vengeance now that Congress and the Federal Reserve have flooded the world with dollars to beat the recession.

Treasury yields leapt again yesterday at the long end, with the 10-year note climbing above 3.7%, its highest close since November. Treasury yields had stayed low, and the dollar had remained strong, as long as investors were looking for the safest financial port amid the post-September panic. But as risk aversion subsides, and investors return to corporate bonds and other assets, investors are now calculating the risks of renewed dollar inflation.

They have cause to be worried, given Washington’s astonishing bet on fiscal and monetary reflation. The Obama Administration’s epic spending spree means the Treasury will have to float trillions of dollars in new debt in the next two or three years alone….

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Father Alberto Cutie, an internationally known Catholic priest who admitted having a romantic affair and breaking his vow of celibacy, is joining the Episcopal Church to be with the woman he loves.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Shrinking mainline Protestant denominations are turning to marketing to help stem decades of membership losses and stay afloat.

The United Methodist Church recently unveiled a $20 million rebranding effort aimed at attracting younger members to the large but diminishing Protestant group. The new ads will appear over the next four years as part of the denomination’s “Rethink Church” campaign.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has invested nearly $1.2 million over the past two years launching a similar branding effort based on the theme, “God’s Work, Our Hands.”

The denominations are trying to bounce back from losses that began in the mid-1960s.

Read it alll/a>.

A ministry of the Reformed Episcopal Church in the town in which I live (Summerville, South Carolina) worth checking out.

Also, the general course requirements are here.

Read it all (15 page pdf) and follow this link to some very important commentary thereon.

[BARRY] RITHOLTZ: Most of Wall Street is furious at what happened. Most of Wall Street aren’t involved in mortgage securitization or derivatives or any of the other bad assets that have been blowing up. The average guy — you know Wall Street is a meritocracy, eat what you kill, as much as you can earn in profits you get to take as a bonus — and I know a lot of guys, everywhere from Merrill Lynch to Bear Stearns to Lehman, that actually were really profitable. But because this one division was run by rogue pirate traders and reckless derivatives salesmen, they wiped up the entire bonus pool for the entire firm, and then some, all the while engaging in really reckless behavior.

[Kai] Ryssdal: Do you figure we’re stuck now as a bailout nation? We’re going to be subsidizing banks and car companies and insurance companies for some time to come.

RITHOLTZ: You know we’ve already seen the trucking industry make hints they want stuff. And we’ve seen the homebuilders who are key players in this, who just overbuilt everything. They’ve been asking for a bailout. That’s the slippery slope. Once you reward people for their worst behavior, for speculative, irresponsible investing and punish the prudent and the people who are careful with that money. Everybody seems to think it’s a free for all. Hey, you’ve got yours. How do I get mine?

Ryssdal: What’s the alternative to these bailouts? I mean should we have just done nothing?

RITHOLTZ: What you do is what the FDIC does when a bank is found to be insolvent. Look what happened with Washington Mutual….

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The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Secretary General have now announced the names of the Working Group. They are:

* The Most Revd Dr John Neill, Archbishop of Dublin (Chair);
* The Most Revd Dr John Chew, Primate of South East Asia;
* Dr Eileen Scully, Anglican Church of Canada;
* The Rt Revd Dr Gregory Cameron, Bishop of St Asaph in the Church in Wales and former Deputy Secretary General of the Anglican Communion.

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Bishop Colin Johnson is encouraging Anglicans to take part in the national church�s Vision 2019 initiative, saying that one person�s voice can make a difference.

�As a unique voice, you might say something that sparks an idea in somebody else and it just takes off,� he says. �In Christian theology, Mary�s voice that said �Let it be� allowed for the Incarnation of Christ. One person makes a difference.�

Vision 2019 is a nation-wide exercise to discern, dream and decide where Anglicans think God wants the Anglican Church of Canada to be in 2019. The national church has designated June 7 as Vision 2019 Sunday and is sending out a resource kit to all parishes.

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Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other ”” the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days. Teachers joke about “one hour” and “six hour” hugs, saying that students hug one another all day as if they were separated for the entire summer.

A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching ”” or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class ”” have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.

Parents, who grew up in a generation more likely to use the handshake, the low-five or the high-five, are often baffled by the close physical contact. “It’s a wordless custom, from what I’ve observed,” wrote Beth J. Harpaz, the mother of two boys, 11 and 16, and a parenting columnist for The Associated Press, in a new book, “13 Is the New 18.”

“And there doesn’t seem to be any other overt way in which they acknowledge knowing each other,” she continued, describing the scene at her older son’s school in Manhattan. “No hi, no smile, no wave, no high-five ”” just the hug. Witnessing this interaction always makes me feel like I am a tourist in a country where I do not know the customs and cannot speak the language.”

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Family integrity will be restored only when families are de-politicized and protected from government invasion. This will demand morally vigorous congregations that are willing to take marriage out of the hands of the state by intervening in the marriages they are called upon to witness and consecrate and by resisting the power of the state to move in. This is the logic behind the group Marriage Savers, and it can restore the churches’ authority even among those who previously viewed a church’s role in their marriage as largely ceremonial.

No greater challenge confronts the churches””nor any greater opportunity to reverse the mass exodus””than to defend their own marriage ordinance against this attack from the government. Churches readily and rightly mobilize politically against moral evils like abortion and same-sex “marriage,” in which they are not required to participate. Even more are they primary stakeholders in involuntary divorce, which allows the state to desecrate and nullify their own ministry.

As an Anglican, I am acutely aware of how far modernity was ushered in not only through divorce, but through divorce processes that served the all-encompassing claims of the emerging state leviathan. Politically, this might be seen as the “original sin” of modern man. We all need to atone.

Read it carefully and read it all.

The Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin on Wednesday deposed 61 clergy from Lodi to Bakersfield because they have left the national Episcopal Church and aligned themselves with the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Episcopal Bishop Jerry Lamb, who called the action “heartbreaking,” said from his Stockton headquarters that such clergy will have their retirement assets frozen and no longer can participate as Episcopal priests. But, he added, “this action is not taken for any ethical or moral concerns.”

The news didn’t seem to matter to the priests, who are now under Anglican oversight.

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As long as we’re talking about getting people to pay for what they value online, Edward Gottesman suggests in the British magazine Prospect, what about taxing everyone a few cents per e-mail to cut down on the estimated 90 percent of it that is unwanted spam choking the Web?

Yuck. Read it all.

Received via email–KSH.

It is with a mixture of sadness and joy that we received today a letter from Bishop Lamb wherein he purports to depose 36 priests and 16 deacons as of May 22, 2009. It is heartbreaking that The Episcopal Church chooses to take such a punitive action and condemn 52 active clergy with “Abandonment of the Communion” when all of these men and women are recognized around the world as priests and deacons in good standing within the Anglican Communion.Clearly, the traditional understanding of what it means to be a member of this historic Communion has been tragically altered by this action; and thereby The Episcopal Church needlessly isolates itself from their brothers and sisters around the world.

The Diocese of San Joaquin continues to reach out to the central third of California in active ministry.It will become one of 23 founding Dioceses, along with 5 more in formation, within the new Province of the Anglican Church in North America at its first Provincial Assembly in Bedford, Texas, June 22-25. Despite The Episcopal Church’s disregard for valid Anglican Orders and ongoing legal actions against us, the bold vision to bring all to an ever expanding knowledge and joy of the Lord Jesus Christ remains unchanged within the diocese. We rejoice over the growing number of ministries seeking to join themselves with us in the mission field God
has put before us.
~
We are, however,~grieved that the leadership of The Episcopal Church feels compelled to create this unprecedented division between the ministries of The Episcopal Church and their brothers and sisters throughout the rest of the Anglican Communion. For our part, we continue to recognize the orders of those who are properly ordained according to the Book of Common Prayer and who have chosen to continue to serve Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior within TEC.~~May God bless~all of us who share a common vision of ministry.~

–The Rt. Rev. John-David Schofield, is Bishop of the Diocese of San Joaquin

A quick follow up to yesterday’s post With Each Interest Rate Tick Higher Another “Green Shoot” Dies….

We are drowning under the weight of near term supply for sure but I guess I think something else is afoot here.

Look at the breakeven spread on the 10 year TIPS bond. That spread is currently 185 basis points. I do not believe that we have been that wide since the advent of the financial crisis in 2007. I think that investors are uttering a gigantic and collective nyet regarding the implementation of monetary policy and fiscal policy in the US.That is why the curve is steepening so dramatically.

Yuck. Read it all and follow the links.

In the U.K., a Web site called…allows married people who are planning to play a few matches away from home to meet up with each other. It has at least 300,000 members, indicating that the British have more on their minds than just the work expenses of politicians and the threat of unemployment.

The Web site crunched its traffic and membership numbers and found that there was a big increase in both when there was a turning point in the FTSE-100 index, which measures the leading companies listed in London. When the market collapses, people plot affairs. And when the bulls rage, the same thing happens. When it is trading sideways, they stick with their partners.

“It has to do with people’s confidence levels,” says Rosie Freeman-Jones, a spokeswoman for the site. “When the markets are up, they think they can have an affair because they feel they can get away with anything. When the market hits the bottom, they are looking for a way to relieve the pressure.”

I happened to catch this because of a Bloomberg Television report this morning, it goes in the category of things of which I would not have thought.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

A “dirty tricks” campaign has blown up in the faces of liberal activists in the Episcopal Church, as the publication of purloined e-mails has led to allegations of “conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy” being lodged against the leader of the gay-pressure group Integrity and a member of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council.

Bishops associated with the Anglican Communion Institute (ACI) have asked the bishops of Los Angeles and Delaware to look in to the conduct of the Rev Susan Russell and the Rev Canon Mark Harris for having surreptitiously obtained and then posting on their blogs the text of private correspondence exchanged among the ACI and its attorney.

A request has also been made to Bishop John Chane of Washington to review the actions of one of his staffers in the anti-ACI campaign. The dispute centres around e-mails published by Canon Harris and Ms Russell though written and exchanged by the ACI leadership on the crafting of a position paper entitled the “Bishops’ Statement on the Polity of the Episcopal Church”, released last month by the ACI and subsequently endorsed by 14 bishops.

Read it all.

A senior Pakistani Taliban leader has claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s deadly suicide attack in the eastern city of Lahore.

Taliban official Hakimullah Mehsud told news agencies Thursday that the attack on police and intelligence offices was revenge for the ongoing military offensive in northwestern Pakistan’s Swat Valley.

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Sir Alex Ferguson conceded that Manchester United performed poorly last night after his dream of becoming the first manager to retain the Champions League perished at the hands of an outstanding Barcelona team who made history of their own.

Goals in each half, from Samuel Eto’o and Lionel Messi, were enough to give Pep Guardiola’s side a 2-0 victory that their performance merited, making them the first Spanish club to complete a treble of league, domestic cup and European Cup.

However, while Ferguson had the good grace to acknowledge that Barcelona deserved to win, he is likely to be infuriated to learn that his tactics were criticised by Cristiano Ronaldo. “We only had ten minutes [on top] and then we never found ourselves again,” the United forward said. “We were not well, the tactics were not good and everything went wrong.”

Congratulations to Barcelona. I was disappointed with Man U.’s performance. After a strong start by Ronaldo, they looked dazed when their opponents scored. Read it all—KSH.

The big influx of highly educated workers into finance in the last two decades has been the subject of some national hand-wringing lately. President Obama, college presidents and economists have all worried aloud that Wall Street has hoarded human resources that might otherwise have gone to science, education, medicine or other fields.

Now, new research is suggesting that the shift also brought another cost ”” a cost that fell mainly on the people, especially women, who took jobs in finance. Among elite white-collar fields, finance appears to be uniquely difficult for anyone trying to combine work and family.

Read it all.

Check it out.