Climate change expert Ross Garnaut believes the federal government is on the right track with its climate change policies.

At a public discussion on the sustainability of the future, hosted by the Anglican church in Melbourne, Professor Garnaut praised the government.

“It’s a great relief to me that the government has put the 25 per cent by 2020 target back on the table,” Mr Garnaut told his audience.

“It would have been a regretful thing in the international context if we did not set a very ambitious target.”

Read it all.

Eric Cieslewicz has spent the last couple of months drumming up business.

Faced with dismal employment prospects at traditional teen-friendly employers, the 18-year-old has turned his passion for percussion into a money-making venture.

The Milford, Ohio, high school senior set up a website promoting his services as a drum instructor, printed business cards and spread the word that he was open for business.

Read it all.

Read it all.

I know that heaven is not a place so much as it is an attitude. I know that in some real theological sense speculation about heaven is a foolish and wasteful exercise, and yet, despite the best efforts of the modern scientific age, I continue to be fascinated by the idea of heaven, and I suspect that I am not alone. To go “out there,” to think of “up there,” to recover an imagination beyond the paltry “realities” of this life – all of that is stimulated when one uses this language of spiritual geography. Is it real? Is it a place?

You may recall the story that circulated upon the death of Professor Paul Tillich. Some of his friends called Karl Barth with the sad news that Paul Tillich had at last died, and Barth’s immediate response, we are told, was “Well, now he knows.” The knowledge of heaven is not for us, at least not yet, and that is why we have been given the idea and the imagery, and the vivid descriptions, and that is why on Ascension Day we must give some thought to the idea, for that is where we are told Jesus now is.

–Peter Gomes, “Ascension: The Absent and Present Christ,” Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1998), pp. 93-94.

The times demand Christian courage. These days, courage means that preachers and Christian leaders must set an agenda for biblical confrontation, and not shrink from dealing with the full range of issues related to homosexuality. We must talk about what the Bible teaches about gender”“what it means to be a man or a woman. We must talk about God’s gift of sex and the covenant of marriage. And we must talk honestly about what homosexuality is, and why God has condemned this sin as an abomination in His sight.

Courage is far too rare in many Christian circles. This explains the surrender of so many denominations, seminaries, and churches to the homosexual agenda. But no surrender on this issue would have been possible, if the authority of Scripture had not already been undermined.

And yet, even as courage is required, the times call for another Christian virtue as well”“compassion. The tragic fact is that every congregation is almost certain to include persons struggling with homosexual desire or even involved in homosexual acts. Outside the walls of the church, homosexuals are waiting to see if the Christian church has anything more to say, after we declare that homosexuality is a sin.

Liberal churches have redefined compassion to mean that the church changes its message to meet modern demands. They argue that to tell a homosexual he is a sinner is uncompassionate and intolerant. This is like arguing that a physician is intolerant because he tells a patient she has cancer. But, in the culture of political correctness, this argument holds a powerful attraction.

Biblical Christians know that compassion requires telling the truth, and refusing to call sin something sinless. To hide or deny the sinfulness of sin is to lie, and there is no compassion in such a deadly deception. True compassion demands speaking the truth in love”“and there is the problem. Far too often, our courage is more evident than our compassion.

—Dr. Albert Mohler

Please in your entries do not only name the show but give us your reasons–KSH.

After a journey through seven games of mood swings, turns in the story line and questions about just who these Lakers are, Kobe Bryant said he finally learned something about his team.

“That we’re bipolar,” Bryant said with an ear-to-ear grin.

–From Lakers Beat Rockets to Advance to Western Conference Finals in yesterday’s New York Times, by Billy Witz

Brazil and China will work towards using their own currencies in trade transactions rather than the US dollar, according to Brazil’s central bank and aides to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president.

The move follows recent Chinese challenges to the status of the dollar as the world’s leading international currency.

Read it all.

Rod Dreher interviews Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage, who draws a positive outlook for the future based on past experience.

Rod Dreher: Maggie, you and I are on the same side of the gay marriage issue, but I am pessimistic about our chances for success. You, however, are optimistic. What am I missing?

Maggie Gallagher: Vaclav Havel mostly. “Truth and love wlll prevail over lies and hate.” On that basis Havel took on the Soviet empire. Where is that invincible empire now?

Same-sex marriage is founded on a lie about human nature: ‘there is no difference between same-sex and opposite sex unions and you are a bigot if you disagree’.

Political movements can–sometimes at great human cost and with great output of energy–sustain a lie but eventually political regimes founded on lies collapse in on themselves.

I don’t think of myself as optimistic: just realistic. What does losing marriage mean? First the rejection of the idea that children need a mom and dad as a cultural norm–or probably even as a respectable opinion. That’s become very clear for people who have the eyes to see it. (See e.g. footnote 26 of the Iowa decision).

Second: the redefinition of traditional religious faiths as the moral and legal equivalent of racists. The proposition on the table right now is that our faith itself is a form of bigotry.

Despair is gay marriage advocates’ prime message point. All warfare, including culture war, is ultimately psychological warfare. You win a war when you convince the other side to give up.

So now you want to decide we’ve lost on an issue where, in the March 12 CBS News poll two-thirds of Americans agree with us. I mean, does this make sense?

Read it all.

If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.

But in 2004, I joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages. Nobody duped or hypnotized me. Like so many others ”” borrowers, lenders and the Wall Street dealmakers behind them ”” I just thought I could beat the odds. We all had our reasons. The brokers and dealmakers were scoring huge commissions. Ordinary homebuyers were stretching to get into first houses, or bigger houses, or better neighborhoods. Some were greedy, some were desperate and some were deceived.

Read it all.

South Koreans became hooked on plastic so dizzyingly fast that by 2003 they owned on average four credit cards each and their collective debts amounted to about $100 billion.

The cards had an additional allure as a status symbol, because previously in South Korea only the elite had them. “When I used credit cards, I somehow felt that others regarded me highly and that gave me confidence ”” and I forgot that I needed to pay it all back later,” said Kang Hee-yun, an office worker in her mid-40s, who eventually had to resort to “card kiting,” the trick of using one card to repay the debt on another.

The bill soon came due for many South Koreans. In 2003, a 34-year-old housewife harassed by creditors leapt to her death from her high-rise apartment after pushing out her three children. Families unraveled as their breadwinners lost their savings. A sudden surge in crime and prostitution led South Koreans to bemoan their “bankrupted society.” Finally, after millions had defaulted on payments, the government stepped in to help bail out LG Card, then the country’s largest issuer.

“The excess was similar to what’s happening with the American housing market today,” recalled Song Ji-hoon, a Rolex-wearing lawyer in his mid-30s who worked on behalf of one of the credit card companies. “Koreans wanted fancy cars, bigger TVs ”” although there was no real money to buy them ”” much the way those Americans thought that they could own houses with nothing but loans. Of course, in both instances, banks got greedy extending credits and mortgages to people who couldn’t pay back.”

This is a very fine piece from today’s New York Times op-ed (I am blessed today since I am with Dad–I have a paper copy on the day of publication). Here is your pre-reading quiz. In 1998, the household savings rate in South Korea was 25 percent. What was it in 2007? Guess before you click-KSH.

Check it out.

A quick note from the elves: I’m not quite sure when he did it, but at some point in the last week or so, Greg G. solved the problem we’ve had for several months with links in the comments. You can now post embedded links in the comments again. Thanks Greg!

Using our blogging software, Bulletin Board code generally works better than traditional HTML anchor tags. The way to make a link is this:
1) In square brackets, type “url=” (without quotation marks) and then paste in your URL link
2) Give the link any reference or title you want
3) And then to close the tag, in square brackets type “/url” (without quotation marks)

To make a link to TitusOne Nine it would look like this:
[url=http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/]The best blog on the internet![/url]

With the result being this: [url=http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/]The best blog on the internet![/url]

There’s something a little strange about our reflexive recoiling from the mere mention of Jesus in settings like high school graduation. Whatever Americans might think of Christians and Christianity ”” yes, there’s a partly deserved image problem ”” almost no one has a problem with Jesus. The point comes through vividly in Dan Kimball’s 2007 book They Like Jesus But Not the Church, which explores how young Americans, in particular, tend to have a negative idea about organized Christianity yet express near-universal openness to spirituality and fascination with Jesus.

Like so many things, it boils down to good sense, wise judgment, an eye toward effectiveness, respect for others ”” traits and practices that Christians call discernment. Believers of whatever stripe ought to put this discernment to prayerful use in navigating the tricky waters of what to say, and what not to say, to captive audiences at events such as public school graduations.

But, please, let’s not pull the plug on Christian valedictorians or anyone else who would have the temerity to use the J-word in public. “Jesus,” after all, is not a dirty word.

Read it all.

Members of Congress have been told in confidential briefings that Pakistan is rapidly adding to its nuclear arsenal even while racked by insurgency, raising questions on Capitol Hill about whether billions of dollars in proposed military aid might be diverted to Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the assessment of the expanded arsenal in a one-word answer to a question on Thursday in the midst of lengthy Senate testimony. Sitting beside Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, he was asked whether he had seen evidence of an increase in the size of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

“Yes,” he said quickly, adding nothing, clearly cognizant of Pakistan’s sensitivity to any discussion about the country’s nuclear strategy or security.

Read it all.

Marriage has a particular meaning for me as a clergy person.

But as I see it, whether New York state should allow its civil, state-issued marriage licenses to go to same-sex couples is an entirely separate issue from whether marriages of same-sex couples will happen in a church.

My faith teaches me that all people are children of God, deserving of love, dignity and equal treatment.

When same-sex couples are treated as less than anyone else, it is my problem; my spiritual problem.

Read it all.

Simple and to the point.

Last night I went with Dad to a benefit concert at Fort Ticonderoga(they did Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom, hence the earlier post). We had dinner afterwards and I was chatting with Kay Barton, one of Dad’s many friends, whose son-in-law is the Lake George water keeper. I got quite an education It is a fascinating and demanding job. Find out more about it here–KSH.

You started out on Monday questioning why we were being so opposite of George Bush in all these questions. And on Friday I’m answering questions about why are we so much like George Bush on all these questions.

I’ll let you guys discern what period of day that all changed.

—Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama’s Press secretary, as quoted in this morning’s Globe and Mail

Watch it all courtesy of Stephen Sizer.

The words may be found here.

I spent eight years at the Episcopal Church Center’s communication office, and I’d say about 60 percent of the time (a conservative estimate!) the intrepid and much-maligned journalists in our office first found out what was going on just two floors above us…through somebody’s blog.

—Jan Nunley (emphasis hers)

Nearly three million Americans are now aligning themselves with other religious movements, such as New Age and Wicca. And the number of self-declared Muslims has doubled over the last two decades from .3 to .6 percent.

Bishop Michael Curry of North Carolina’s Episcopal Diocese says America is going through a cultural change.

“I would argue that people are more profoundly religious and expressing it, but it’s coming out in new ways,” he said. “You hear it in language about ‘spirituality.’ You may not hear it as consistently in terms of institutional religion, but the spiritual quest (is there), the hunger.”

To feed that hunger, the Episcopal Diocese has launched a new ad campaign to help attract worshippers, particularly younger ones.

Read it all.

A group of American Muslims, led by two prominent scholars, is moving closer to fulfilling a vision of founding the first four-year accredited Islamic college in the United States, what some are calling a “Muslim Georgetown.”

Advisers to the project have scheduled a June vote to decide whether the proposed Zaytuna College can open in the fall of next year, a major step toward developing the faith in America.

Read it all.

With a May 27 court hearing drawing closer, lawyers for the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh in The Episcopal Church filed a motion on May 8, arguing that a 2005 stipulation order between the diocese and the rector and wardens of Calvary Church, Pittsburgh, makes clear “that only a diocese that is part of The Episcopal Church may continue to hold and administer property.”

In a related development, lawyers representing The Episcopal Church filed a separate motion on May 12 arguing that all property is subject to the constitution and canons of The Episcopal Church and may only be used by it for mission.

The Episcopal Church was permitted to file its motion after it sought permission to be added to the case through complaint-in-intervention at a hearing April 17. At that same hearing the two sides agreed that the hearing on May 27 would proceed “assuming arguendo for the purposes of such hearing that the withdrawal of the Diocese was valid.” That issue will be considered later, if necessary.

Read it all.

From here:

The modern period has never been especially devoted to reason as such; the notion that it ever was is merely one of its ‘originary’ myths. The true essence of modernity is a particular conception of what it is to be free, as I have said [in chap. 2]; and the Enlightenment language of an ‘age of reason’ was always really just a way of placing a frame around that idea of freedom, so as to portray it as the rational autonomy and moral independence that lay beyond the intellectual infancy of ‘irrational’ belief. But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed to ‘my truth’ than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead. The myth of ‘enlightenment’ served well to liberate us from any antique notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills; but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric. And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant. Freedom for us today is something transcendent even of reason, and we no longer really feel that we must justify our liberties by recourse to some prior standard of responsible rationality. Freedom–conceived as the perfect, unconstrained spontaneity of individual will–is its own justification, its own highest standard, its own unquestionable truth. It is true, admittedly, that the modern understanding of freedom was for a time still bound to some concept of nature: many Enlightenment and Romantic narratives of human liberation concerned the rescue of an aboriginal human essence from the laws, creeds, customs, and institutions that suppressed it. Ultimately, though, even the idea of an invariable human nature came to seem something arbitrary and extrinsic, an intolerable limitation imposed upon a still more original, inward, pure, and indeterminate freedom of the will. We no longer seek so much to liberate human nature from the bondage of social convention as to liberate the individual from all conventions, especially those regarding what is natural.”

–David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies (New Haven, Connecticut:Yale University Press, 2009), 104-105. [Hat Tip: SPIW]

If a company as powerful and well-positioned as Bank of America in the late 1970s could fall so far, so hard, so quickly, then any company can. If companies such as Motorola (MOT), Circuit City (CCTYQ), and Fannie Mae (FNM)””icons that once served as paragons of excellence””can succumb to the forces of gravity, then no one is immune. If companies such as Zenith and A&P, once the unquestioned champions in their fields, can plummet from great to irrelevant, then we should be wary about our own success.

Every institution is vulnerable, no matter how great. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall, and most eventually do.

But all is not gloom. By understanding the five stages of decline we uncovered in our research for How the Mighty Fall, leaders can substantially increase the odds of reversing decline before it is too late””or even better, stave off decline in the first place. Decline can be avoided. The seeds of decline can be detected early. And decline can be reversed (as we’ve seen with notable cases such as IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Merck (MRK), and Nucor (NUE)). The mighty can fall, but they can often rise again.

Read it all. I am a huge fan of Mr. Collins’ earlier book Good to Great which I have recommended in numerous leadership settings, including parish vestries–KSH.

Around half-a-million people are expected to attend Back to Church Sunday in the UK on September 29.

Billed as one of the largest co-ordinated evangelism events to take place in recent history, it is hoped that this year’s event will be the biggest yet.

Every one of the Church’s 44 dioceses is taking part in inviting someone they know who used to attend church.

Read it all.

Mitchell Wiener, 55, died at 6:17 p.m., just hours after his family optimistically told The Post his condition had stabilized.

The somber news came as city officials ordered five more schools closed today in an attempt to stop the spread of the deadly virus – bringing the total number to 11 citywide that will be shuttered this week.

Read it all.