Christ Episcopal Church will celebrate its 150th anniversary at 10 a.m. June 7.

S.C. Bishop Mark Lawrence of Charleston will lead the service at the quaint church, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Father Michael Burton is the rector of Christ Episcopal, located at 2305 U.S. 327. He is assisted by Deacon Hiram Moseley.

Christ Episcopal’s building is in the shape of a cross, originally painted white. The outside walls are boarded and battened. The boards are 10 inches wide running up and down, every seam covered with a beveled board about four inches wide and two inches in the center.

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The first poll of Britain’s churchgoers, carried out for The Sunday Telegraph, found that thousands of them believe they are being turned down for promotion because of their faith.

One in five said that they had faced opposition at work because of their beliefs.

More than half of them revealed that they had suffered some form of persecution for being a Christian.

Read the whole aritcle.

The Church of England is turning away trainee clergy for the first time in history after £1.3billion of its investments were wiped out in the financial crisis.

Up to a dozen graduates of theological colleges will miss out on their ordination next month and may end up on the dole as there are no parish jobs for them.

The Church has previously given all graduates placements in parishes as curates, which they need before they can become ordained as priests.

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Reporting from Oakland — Not many schools in California recruit teachers with language like this: “We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply.”

That, it turns out, is just the beginning of the ways in which American Indian Public Charter and its two sibling schools spit in the eye of mainstream education. These small, no-frills, independent public schools in the hardscrabble flats of Oakland sometimes seem like creations of television’s “Colbert Report.” They mock liberal orthodoxy with such zeal that it can seem like a parody.

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To change the bulbs in the 60-foot-high ceiling lights of Buckingham Palace’s grand stairwell, workers had to erect scaffolding and cover precious portraits of royal forebears.

So when a lighting designer two years ago proposed installing light emitting diodes or LEDs, an emerging lighting technology, the royal family readily assented. The new lights, the designer said, would last more than 22 years and enormously reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions ”” a big plus for Prince Charles, an ardent environmentalist. Since then, the palace has installed the lighting in chandeliers and on the exterior, where illuminating the entire facade uses less electricity than running an electric teakettle.

In shifting to LED lighting, the palace is part of a small but fast-growing trend that is redefining the century-old conception of lighting, replacing energy-wasting disposable bulbs with efficient fixtures that are often semi-permanent, like those used in plumbing.

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As the Administration and the Congress consider health care reform and work to expand access to the 45 million Americans without coverage, it is worth noting that the largest amount of federal and state spending on the burden of substance abuse and addiction–$207.2 billion, or 58 percent””was for health care, and that health care is 74.1 percent of the federal shoveling up burden. With health care costs by far the biggest cost of shoveling up, for the Administration and Congress to attempt health care reform without providing for prevention and treatment of substance abuse and addiction is like trying to make a Reuben sandwich without corned beef and sauerkraut.

Some key 2005 findings of the report are:

* For every dollar federal and state governments spent to prevent and treat substance abuse and addiction, they spent $59.83 in public programs shoveling up its wreckage.
* If substance abuse and addiction were its own state budget category, it would rank second just behind spending on elementary and secondary education.
* If substance abuse and addiction were it own federal budget category, it would rank sixth, behind social security, national defense, income security, Medicare, and other health programs including the federal share of Medicaid.
* Federal and state governments spend more than 60 times as much to clean up the devastation substance abuse and addiction visits on children as they do on prevention and treatment for them.

This report is the second in CASA’s analysis of the impact of tobacco, alcohol and other drug abuse and addiction on government. Our first report, Shoveling Up: The Impact of Substance Abuse on State Budgets, was released in 2001 and was limited to state spending. Such spending has increased since CASA’s 2001 report. In 2005, states spent 15.7 percent of their budgets on substance abuse and addiction compared with 13.3 percent in 1998, up more than 18 percent.

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Mr. [DAN] GILGOFF: Well, we know that she has a record of siding with those who are alleging violations of their religious liberty. And I think that’s been another bright spot for conservatives. It’s interesting in that conservatives came out roundly against her as soon as her nomination was announced this week, and at the same time, I mean, in the analysis that they were releasing before Obama made his choice, she kind of received the warmest treatment. And I think some of that was because of her rulings over the religious liberty cases.

Mr. [TOD] LINDBERG: I think you’d also have to draw the distinction between the conservative commentary crowd and actually the members of the Senate, who have taken a very cautious view of this. I mean they promised, the Republicans promised full scrutiny, full assessment, but certainly no one has leapt out to be an opposition figure. Certainly no one has said this nominee is unacceptable where it really matters, which is in the Senate.

[DEBORAH] POTTER: So the presumption at this point is that she will be confirmed?

Mr. LINDBERG: I think the presumption is exactly that, in the absence of some unknown, unexpected revelation or disclosure.

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CHARLIE ROSE: All right. That segues perfectly into this. So, but I’m interested…

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Became passionately in love with America as much as the Americans. What did you fall in love with?

SIMON SCHAMA: Oh, you know, the division of powers. Isn’t that the dullest question — the dullest answer to the most interesting question? By which I mean the liveliness of American politics.

Watch it all (just over 30 1/2 minutes). Look for the comments on Europe’s view of this administration and the previous one and for the wonderful Hamlet quote.

When a new crop of future business leaders graduates from the Harvard Business School next week, many of them will be taking a new oath that says, in effect, greed is not good.

Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.

What happened to making money?

That, of course, is still at the heart of the Harvard curriculum. But at Harvard and other top business schools, there has been an explosion of interest in ethics courses and in student activities ”” clubs, lectures, conferences ”” about personal and corporate responsibility and on how to view business as more than a money-making enterprise, but part of a large social community.

I much prefer “the common good,” yet appreciate the effort. Read it all.

Trinity Episcopal Church, established in 1849 before moving into its current, fortress-like digs on the corner of Gough and Bush streets in 1892, potentially has a seismic safety problem, an official there said.

But here’s the real issue: the church doesn’t have the funds to find out, or fix it.

As a result, church leaders decided the 350-capacity main sanctuary is going to be mothballed, likely by the end of September. Services are moving to the smaller chapel on the property, a separate building that holds about 75 people.

“What we’re trying to avoid is the use of the word closing,” interim rector Otis Charles said. “The congregation is alive and functioning.”

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Update: A chart of some parish statistics is here.

Tonight you have another opportunity for a similar discussion, not leading to a vote but leading to an opportunity to give advice and feedback. The College of Bishops met together in January at our annual retreat, and just before we began that retreat, we decided that we needed to sit down together and talk out what it might mean in the Diocese of Toronto to exercise generous pastoral care which the House of Bishops of the Canadian church had set as guidelines for the life of the Anglican Church of Canada. Having been together at Lambeth, having engaged in conversations with the House of Bishops in the Canadian church, and having had partnerships with various places across the world, we had a full, frank conversation and discovered that we had a whole lot more consensus than we originally thought.

Part of that consensus was that the way forward at this time, when there is no consensus within the life of the church, was not to engage in a legislative vote that sets policy, that enshrines things in legislation, but rather thatwe needed to recognize that in this period of time as we engage in a period of gracious restraint, when it is quite clear in the teaching of the church that marriage at this time is a holy relationship between a man and a woman in solemn matrimony and that that is a subject for the General Synod and not the Diocese of Toronto to define.

In that period of time when there are pastoral needs that are evident within our parishes amongst faithful people, how might we deal with those pastoral, individual circumstances in the most generous and gracious way possible while holding open the opportunity for further discussion and consideration by the wider church?

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