Watch it all-makes the heart glad.

On Thursday, Standard & Poor’s said Britain may have its rating cut because of rising debt levels. Though the ratings agency reaffirmed the country’s actual long-term credit rating at “AAA,” it said the outlook had deteriorated because of massive borrowing to deal with the recession and the banking crisis.

Because Britain is pursuing similar policies to the U.S.””with both the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve injecting billions of dollars in their economies by buying assets from banks””the move also weighed on U.S. assets and the dollar. Treasurys sold off Thursday, and continued to do so Friday.

S&P’s announcement “wound up creating more problems for the U.S. dollar than for the British pound,” HSBC analysts said in a research note.

“The problem for the U.S. is particularly acute because of its reserve status,” said UBS analyst Brian Kim in an e-mail to investors Friday. Major holders of U.S. debt, such as Middle Eastern sovereign funds and the Chinese government, have not been shy about calling the U.S. out for what it sees as policies that will trigger inflation, shrinking the value of their Treasury holdings.

Read it all.

Coins are a medium of exchange. They should be relatively standard, universally identifiable units of money. On a deeper level, coins are also representations of the country that issues them. Our currency has become a shifting, unidentifiable mess that tries to recognize everything and ends up symbolizing nothing.

—Michael Zielinksi, “Change we Don’t Need,” in yesterday’s New York Times op-ed (p. A27) which I caught last night on the plane

Q: Many stories have been emerging about the pro-life response to the Notre Dame commencement ceremony. What kind of response did Notre Dame see that day from students and others who came together for the pro-life cause?

Reilly: The response to the Notre Dame scandal was immense and unprecedented.

More than 367,000 Catholics signed the Cardinal Newman Society’s petition against the honor at NotreDameScandal.com.

Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, the local ordinary for Notre Dame, boycotted the commencement ceremony.

Nearly 80 bishops, representing about one-third of the dioceses in the United States, spoke out against the honor, and none publicly supported it.

Mary Ann Glendon, the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, who was to receive Notre Dame’s prestigious Laetare Medal, declined the honor rather than share the stage with America’s pro-abortion leader.

Read it all.

The Primate, Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, who attended the meeting as a member of the joint standing committee, said while there were reports of much confusion about the process by which the Covenant decision was delayed, “the people he spoke to were aware of what was proposed and what was voted on”.

The ACC is a significant body within the Anglican Communion, composed of representative bishops, clergy and laity from each of the 38 member churches. Australia ’s representatives are Bishop Andrew Curnow ( Bendigo ), Archdeacon Dr Sarah Macneil (Canberra & Goulburn) and Robert Fordham (Melbourne & Gippsland). It is one of the four Anglican “instruments of unity”, the other three being the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference and the Primates’ Meeting.

Dr Aspinall has commented that “if all goes smoothly”, the Anglican Church of Australia should have the final form of the Covenant in readiness for debate at the next meeting of General Synod, to be held in Melbourne in September next year.

“I hope that the Anglican Church of Australia will decide to adopt the Covenant, and that all or nearly all of our Anglican Communion sister and brother churches will do so also,” he said.

Read it all.

Check it out.

Ever since the Pilgrims crossed an ocean in search of freedom from the religious doctrines of the Old World, their descendants in the Congregational Church have prided themselves on independence. Now that sense of independence is on trial. A regional body of the United Church of Christ has sued to oust a tiny congregation here from its property. The plaintiff: the Southeast Conference of the UCC, whose 1.2 million members make it the nation’s largest Congregational fellowship. The defendant: Center Congregational Church, 36 members on a good Sunday.

“As far as I can see, the UCC just wants to bully us,” says Rick Langdon, chairman of the trustees at Center Congregational. But there’s more here than a David-and-Goliath story. The dispute involves doctrinal issues, legal complexities and conflicting personalities. A church breaking away from its denomination is something like a divorce, with all the attendant messiness of property division. Each case is unique — yet similar — and dissident churches everywhere will be watching this one for clues about how far a denomination will be allowed to go legally when things get ugly.

Read the whole thing.

This warning was summarily ignored. A single accusation of child molestation was not going to gum up the gears of the fund-raising machine.

But about ten years later, another accusation surfaced. And another. And then another, this one from the Episcopal church and school in Houston where Tucker worked after St. Stephen’s.

That’s when the Episcopal Diocese of Texas went back and looked at Woodruff’s notes from his 1993 talk with Haslanger. And that’s when diocesan officials figured they had a problem on their hands: It looked like, for the past 40 years, a series of diocesan and school authorities had conspired to cover up allegations of sexual abuse. Now the school and diocese are facing a $45 million lawsuit for that cover-up. And now, say Haslanger and the other two plaintiffs, the diocese is abusing them all over again.

Read it all.

it wasn’t voters who decided to increase the number of state government and public school jobs paid for by taxpayers from 719,000 in 1997 to 895,000 in 2007 ”“ an additional 176,000 employees. That translates into 48 added jobs a day every day for 10 years.

It wasn’t voters who changed laws to allow public employees to retire with extravagant pensions equal to 90 percent of their final pay ”“ without resolving how to pay the eventual tab.

It wasn’t voters who approved a 37 percent pay hike for prison guards and bizarre, unprecedented concessions to the guards that gave them a management say in Corrections Department decisions ”“ helping make California prisons more than twice as expensive per-inmate than Florida’s.

It wasn’t voters who refused to look at ways to relieve costly overcrowding at prisons, even as states such as New York enjoyed great success with reform measures.

Read it all.

As President Obama defends his national security strategy, he faces a daunting challenge. He must convince the country that it is in safe hands despite warnings to the contrary from the right, and at the same time persuade the skeptical left that it is enough to amend his predecessor’s approach rather than abandon it.

Arguably on the defensive over policy for the first time since taking office, Mr. Obama is gambling that his oratorical powers can reassure the public that bringing terrorism suspects to prisons on American soil will not put the public in danger.

At the same time, he must explain and win support for a nuanced set of positions that fall somewhere between George W. Bush and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Read it all.

“IT is my mission in life to get this job,” said Amanda Casgar, who is better known to executives at Murphy-Goode Winery in Sonoma County as applicant No. 505.

Three weeks ago Murphy-Goode began a search for a “social media whiz,” a wine enthusiast interested in moving to Healdsburg, Calif., for six months to promote the vineyard’s malbec and chardonnay on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. The job ”” which comes with the official title “lifestyle correspondent” ”” pays $10,000 a month, plus free accommodations at a private home within walking distance of the tasting room. Ms. Casgar, a former magazine marketing executive, has been endorsing herself as enthusiastically as she would a bottle of petit verdot.

Already an occasional Twitterer, she increased the number of tweets she posts; they are mostly about wine. She created a Web site, “Goode Times With Amanda Casgar,” to chronicle her job quest. Like about a half-dozen other eager applicants, she has started a fan group on Facebook, buying ads for 50 cents a click to generate traffic.

And last week Ms. Casgar spent two days filming her video résumé, rejecting the idea to sing a rap song (“I want to demonstrate my personality without being too cheesy or a loser,” she explained) in favor of a sketch dubbed “random acts of wineness.”

Talk about investing in the future. The position of social media specialist, introduced by companies like Comcast, General Motors and JetBlue Airways, has become the hottest new corporate job among the Twitterati.

Read it all from yesterday’s New York Times.

The 76th General Convention this July will be asked in various ways to continue the Episcopal Church’s mission of living out the baptismal covenant vow to “strive for justice and peace.”

Already-filed resolutions, most contained in the triennial reports of the church’s commissions, committees, agencies and boards, address social justice issues and echo the baptismal promise to “respect the dignity of every human being.”

Leading the list of new domestic initiatives to be considered at the convention in Anaheim, California, is one from the Executive Council’s Jubilee Advisory Committee to establish a program to alleviate domestic poverty.

Arising from Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s May 2008 summit on domestic poverty, the resolution focuses on the poorest counties in the United States that encompass federal reservations for Native Americans.

Read it all.

It was an unusual showdown pitting present and former leaders, live on national television, with President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney dueling in back-to-back speeches Thursday over how to best protect the nation against terrorism.

Obama pressed his case for closing the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and for discarding interrogation techniques he described as brutal, while Cheney warned that doing so would endanger the country.

But beyond the discord over those issues, the clash represented the latest round in a larger and fast-changing fight for the public’s confidence on national security.

Americans for decades have seen the Republican Party as more trustworthy when it comes to waging war and keeping the country safe. But after sweeping the GOP into the minority in 2008, Obama is trying to forge a doctrine that would upend that view and cement his credentials — and those of his party — as a defender of the country’s security, even as he takes a more moderate course on civil liberties.

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It intrigues me that Church of England bishops seem to be regarded by the public today much as they were when I was consecrated to be one in 1970: namely as “a good thing for the country” at best, and at worst an amiable irrelevance. Perhaps this is because (as current polls suggest) most people still perceive themselves as believers in God.

None the less, I have come to the conclusion that too many bishops are being appointed for the health of the Church. As it is difficult for serving clergy to agree openly with this view (partly out of loyalty to their bishop, partly because some of them might become bishops themselves), I hope that among the million-or-so faithful in the pews, someone might ponder my argument.

A few statistics first:

1. In 1961, there were 13,500 full-time parochial clergy in our Church; currently there are 8616.

2. In 1961, there were the same number of dioceses as there are now, 44; so there were and are 44 diocesan bishops. But the number of suffragan/area/provincial bishops (all full-time) has grown from 44 in 1961 to 70 now. Thus there are now 114 bishops responsible for 9000 clergy, whereas, less than 50 years ago, there were 88 bishops shepherding 13,500 clergy.

Read it all.

In 1991 he moved to the US to teach at the very High Church and conservative theological college of Nashotah House, Wisconsin. He was appalled by what he saw as the excessive liberalism of most of the Episcopal Church and worked for the Prayer Book Society, defending The Book of Common Prayer against the newly authorised American Prayer Book. He was opposed to the use of inclusive language in liturgy. In 2001 he moved to the diocese of Lichfield and he spent five years in the north Staffordshire parishes of Biddulph Moor and Brown Edge, where his highly sympathetic pastoral expertise was much appreciated.

The research which lay behind his writings was monumental and he tried to put opposing views in a clear and fair way. His eccentric, warm and humorous style concealed a strong and determined faith.

Read it all.

Take a look.

Take a look.

It’s the putting right that counts”¦

The Anglican-Methodist Covenant, to be signed this Sunday, May 24, is a significant step towards the healing of a broken relationship.

Read it all.

Secularists, such as Richard Dawkins, who try to rubbish religion are encouraging intolerance, the archbishop told a congregation of 2,000 at Westminster Cathedral.

“Faith is never a solitary activity nor can it be simply private,” he said.

“Some today propose that faith and reason are crudely opposed, with the fervour of faith replacing good reason. This reduction of both faith and reason inhibits not only our search for truth but also the possibility of real dialogue.”

Read it all.

Dennis Buchholtz spent a lifetime in the automotive industry, working at companies that supplied parts to America’s automakers. For more than three decades, he spent his days casting iron dies used to turn sheet metal into fenders, roofs and hoods.

He left the business with no pension and no 401(k) — only an unshakable faith in the ability of Detroit’s Big Three to survive even the worst of economic times.

So when he and his wife, Judy, were weighing how to safely invest their retirement savings, they instinctively turned to the industry’s biggest player, General Motors Corp.

Read the whole thing.

Army commanders are failing to punish or seek treatment for a growing number of soldiers who test positive for substance abuse, possibly because they don’t want to lose any more combat troops, the Army’s vice chief of staff has warned.

In a May 8 memo to commanders provided to USA TODAY, Gen. Peter Chiarelli said hundreds of soldiers involved in “substance abuse-related misconduct (including multiple positive urinalyses)” were not processed for possible discharge. He also noted that many are not referred to the Army Substance Abuse Program for help.

Read it all.

In an unexpected move that raised a new hurdle for same-sex marriage in New Hampshire, the state’s House of Representatives on Wednesday rejected changes that Gov. John Lynch had ordered for the same-sex marriage bill.

The House, dominated by Democrats, voted 188 to 186 against amending the bill to make clearer that religious opponents of same-sex marriage would not have to participate in ceremonies celebrating it.

The vote made the bill’s survival less certain, but the measure is not dead yet. It will now go to a joint committee of the legislature, which will try to come up with language acceptable to the House and Senate. But it is unclear whether Governor Lynch, a Democrat, would sign it.

Read it all.

Bishop Wendell Gibbs and the Diocesan Council continued the movement of the Diocese of Michigan toward a sustainable mission and budget, which has been underway for six months, when it reduced the current 2009 diocesan budget by $450,639. A significant area of cost reductions comes in the wake of Bishop Wendell Gibbs’s announcement on April 2 that five staff positions would be eliminated.

While the greatest impact of the employment termination for four present staff persons will not be felt until 2010–due to severance policy obligations–removing the one unfilled position from the budget and tangential costs of the other positions does have an impact on the 2009 budget.

Read it all and Greg Griffith has further comments there.

Take a look.

President Obama will attempt today to answer critics of his dismantling of Bush-era policies on detention and interrogation, in a speech reminding Americans that strong national security and adherence to laws and national values are not mutually exclusive.

Beyond this lofty reassurance, senior administration officials said, Obama will also repeat the case he made on his third day in office that the Bush administration’s system of dealing with “enemy combatants” — resulting in three prosecutions in seven years and challenged by U.S. courts and allies — was not sustainable.

Four months ago, Obama announced his intention to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; release, transfer abroad or try all its remaining inmates; and outlaw the harsh interrogation techniques he defined as torture. But the implementation of those executive orders has proved far more complicated than he expected.

Read it all.

Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s lowered its outlook on Britain to negative on Thursday, citing government debt that would be hard to rein in and political uncertainty about the policy response with an election looming.

The agency affirmed Britain’s ‘AAA’ long-term and ‘A-1+’ short-term sovereign credit ratings.

“We have revised the outlook on the UK to negative due to our view that, even assuming additional fiscal tightening, the net general government debt burden could approach 100 percent of GDP and remain near that level in the medium term,” Standard & Poor’s credit analyst David Beers said in a statement.

Read it all.

If one thinks of a true hierarchy like the Roman Catholic Church, there would be no question as to who could authorize a bishop to speak for it in court: it would be the Pope, and nobody but the Pope. Since ECUSA, however, lacks any metropolitan archbishop (the Presiding Bishop is called a “Primate” without the word signifying anything other than that the Presiding Bishop represents ECUSA to the other Churches in the Anglican Communion), there is a very nice question as to just who has sufficient authority under its Constitution to represent it in a court of law. If it were a regular corporation, like General Motors, the matter would be clear: its Chief Executive Officer (or President, as the case may be) would be authorized by the Board of Directors to speak for the corporation in court; or the Board could give him the authority to delegate the task of spokesperson to some other officer of the Corporation.

Nothing like that, however, has happened here. General Convention, ECUSA’s only legislative body, has not met since 2006, and has never (to my knowledge, at least) specifically authorized any official within the Church to file suit in its name and to speak for it in court. Even if it had purported to do so, there is no provision in the Constitution to which General Convention could point as granting it the authority from the member dioceses to designate a spokesperson to represent the views of all of the dioceses in court—as though they were one. Elementary common sense suggests that the members of a group have to vote on an issue in accordance with their procedures before the position of the group as a whole on that issue may be stated. Even then, there is usually provision made for some means by which any division of opinion can be exhibited: by a “minority report”, or by a “statement of the views of the minority”, which always accompanies any presentation of the views of the majority.

The recent publication of the Statement by the (Communion Partner) bishops is evidence that just such a minority viewpoint exists in ECUSA today.

Read it all.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and lawmakers scrambled Wednesday to avert a financial meltdown, and public officials across California braced for annihilating cuts on the day after voters trounced their leaders’ rescue plan for the state.

Within two hours of returning from Washington, D.C., the governor huddled behind closed doors with Democratic and Republican legislative leaders to grapple with a projected $21.3-billion budget shortfall for the coming fiscal year and stop state government from running out of money by July.

What a mess. Read it all.

I wish [Newsweek editor Jon] Meacham Godspeed, but there’s almost no hope for him or Newsweek, and here’s why. If there were a market for an opinion journal that could sell in excess of a million copies, it would have revealed itself before this. The advantage journals of opinion possess is that their readers are extremely loyal and they have a personal stake in them that no newsmagazine has ever generated. The disadvantage they have is that the audience for journals of opinion is small.

More important, they are published for people who are passionate about abstract ideas, and find it invigorating, thrilling, and exciting to see them batted about. This is not the profile of the general mass reader.

Finally, Meacham has trapped himself in a false premise. In his editor’s letter and in interviews, he says that Newsweek is not partisan and cannot be perceived as partisan if it is to succeed. Well, first of all, that is an absurdity.

Read the whole piece.

The case of a missing Minnesota mother and her cancer-stricken son has rekindled the debate over parents who reject conventional medical treatments for their sick children because of religious beliefs.

Authorities nationwide searched Wednesday for Colleen Hauser and her 13-year-old son, Daniel, who has Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The family refuses chemotherapy for Daniel. The two disappeared from rural Sleepy Eye, Minn., after a doctor’s appointment and court-ordered X-ray Monday showed his cancer had grown. They did not show up for a court hearing Tuesday.

Read it all.