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.

As I considered the controversy surrounding my visit here, I was reminded of an encounter I had during my Senate campaign, one that I describe in a book I wrote called “The Audacity of Hope.” A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an e-mail from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the Illinois primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life — but that was not what was preventing him potentially from voting for me.

What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my website — an entry that said I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” The doctor said he had assumed I was a reasonable person, he supported my policy initiatives to help the poor and to lift up our educational system, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable. He wrote, “I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.” Fair-minded words.

After I read the doctor’s letter, I wrote back to him and I thanked him. And I didn’t change my underlying position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that — when we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe — that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.

That’s when we begin to say, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually, it has both moral and spiritual dimensions.

Read it all.

I believe that both history and theology offer warrants for respecting the belief and practice of Jews rather than seeking their conversion to Christianity. Yes, I know in John’s Gospel Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (xiv, 6). I know that in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus mandates, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit . . .” (xxviii, 19). But we should not read these texts without attentiveness to how we have used them against Jews (and others as well). In the nearly 2,000 years since the evangelists wrote these texts, Christians have vilified Judaism and persecuted Jews as “Christ killers”. Ours is a shameful history: denigration of a people, compulsory baptisms, the crusades and Inquisition, confining Jews in ghettos and attacking them in pogroms. Particularly after the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered in the most barbaric ways, we must not use our sacred texts in ways that would mean the end of Judaism. Yet to seek conversion of Jews to Christianity is ultimately to seek Judaism’s demise.

It is fundamental to Christianity that God entered into covenant with the Jewish people ”” a covenant that, as Pope John Paul II said many times, was “never revoked”. God is faithful to covenants, and, therefore, the way of Judaism is salvific for Jews. Torah is a path to holiness.

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As Lou Gehrig’s disease sapped Joshua Thompson of his ability to move and speak last fall, he consistently summoned one question from within the prison of his own body. “Iplex,” he asked, in a whisper that pierced his mother’s heart. “When?”

Iplex had never been tested in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the formal name for the fatal disease that had struck Joshua, 34, in late 2006. Developed for a different condition and banished from the market by a patent dispute, it was not for sale to the public anywhere in the world.

But Kathy Thompson had vowed to get it for her son. On the Internet, she had found enthusiastic reviews from A.L.S. patients who had finagled a prescription for Iplex when it was available, along with speculation by leading researchers as to why it might slow the progressive paralysis that marks the disease. And for months, as she begged and bullied biotechnology companies, members of Congress, Italian doctors and federal drug regulators, she answered Joshua the same way:

“Soon,” she said. “Soon.”

Read it all.