Divided Christendom has yet to be that vision of reconciliation through which human kind can believe. Nevertheless ecumenism has come a long way. When we are downcast it is worth looking backwards to see how far we have come. That progress slow as it is may not yet have produced full reconciliation – it has encouraged us to stand where others stand and in so doing to begin the process of understanding God’s purpose for this world.

In my work within the Anglican Communion I have been left with little doubt as to the centrality of the need for reconciliation not just between fractured Christendom but between members of the same world family of believers. What is known as ”˜The Windsor Report’ – as I have said a recognition that we did much of our work within these walls of St Georges’ – sought to produce a road map for greater understanding of the divisions within Anglicanism. Much of that division centred on and stemmed from questions of sexuality, but my experience at that time and since has left me with little doubt that behind the headlines of the main agenda there were significant questions to be asked to do with authority, power and influence. Certainly there were sharp divisions over the question of a practising gay bishop, division that represented contrasting interpretation of Scripture and the understanding of Tradition ”“ but whatever lies ahead for Anglicanism I am convinced that reconciliation must take account of what I have termed those other agendas. What this illustrates for me is that the process of reconciliation often involves the less obvious issues.

I am reminded of the words of the late Lord Hailsham during his lecture on Morality and the Law here in 1984: ”˜One of the great evils of the present day is the tendency to sound off about specifics without an examination of first principles.’

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Why are jobs lost and which industry groups are the hardest hit? Is there a relationship between age and education levels and unemployment? Are rural areas more vulnerable? Are vocational retraining programs readily available ”” and effective? And what about this engaging irony: 78,000 South Carolina workers are receiving unemployment benefits, yet thousands of job openings are posted in various forums every day. The Web site Indeed.com lists more than 32,000 open positions throughout the state. Financial assistance is critical to the jobless, but so are counseling, guidance and retraining.

Has the crush of processing jobless benefits overtaken the S.C. Employment Security Commission’s mandate to match jobs with job hunters? How many willing workers are finding jobs with the commission’s assistance? How many unwilling workers are collecting unemployment benefits?

Spiraling unemployment is the state’s critical current challenge. Dealing with it must involve more than just processing applications and passing out checks. Surely, the commission would agree.

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Read it all and check out the pictures also.

For patients with prostate cancer, it is a common surgical procedure: a doctor implants dozens of radioactive seeds to attack the disease. But when Dr. Gary D. Kao treated one patient at the veterans’ hospital in Philadelphia, his aim was more than a little off.

Most of the seeds, 40 in all, landed in the patient’s healthy bladder, not the prostate.

It was a serious mistake, and under federal rules, regulators investigated. But Dr. Kao, with their consent, made his mistake all but disappear.

He simply rewrote his surgical plan to match the number of seeds in the prostate, investigators said.

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The Arch-Bishop of the Province of West Africa and Accra Diocese of the Anglican Church Most Rev. Dr. Justice Offei Akrofi has declared that the Diocese of Accra has finally agreed to the ordination of women as Priests of the Church. He said the issue which has been on board for almost 10 years is a breakthrough for the Accra Diocese. He made this known at the closing ceremony of the 20th Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Accra.

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The nation’s foreclosure crisis ”” once largely confined to only a few corners of the country ”” is spreading to new areas as the economy teeters. The foreclosure rates in 40 of the nation’s counties that have the most households have already doubled from last year, a USA TODAY analysis of data from the listing firm RealtyTrac shows.

Most were in areas far removed from the avalanche of bad mortgages and lost homes that have hammered the U.S. housing market. Among the new areas: Boise and Green Bay, Wis.

“The ripple effect is just broadening out to cover a lot more places,” says Susan Wachter, who studies real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

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Several hundred former Episcopalians, meeting in a school gym near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, ratified a constitution Monday for the fledgling Anglican Church in North America as a direct challenge to the Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church of Canada.

About 800 people jumped to their feet and sang the Doxology, a hymn of praise, after the ACNA’s new leader, Archbishop-designate Robert Duncan, told the group that it had “done the work.”

“The Anglican Province of North America has been constituted,” he said.

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In a Texas cathedral where the liturgical nuances of Anglo-Catholicism mingled with the joyous shouts of Pentecostalism, Archbishop-elect Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh called together a body representing 100,000 people who had left the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada.

Yesterday they adopted the constitution of the new Anglican Church in North America, which they hope will eventually be recognized as a province of the 80 million-member global Anglican Communion. The 2.1 million-member Episcopal Church is the U.S. province of the communion.

“There is a great reformation of the Christian Church under way. We North American Anglicans are in the midst of it,” their new archbishop told a standing-room only crowd gathered in St. Vincent Cathedral in Bedford, Texas. It was the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth which, like the Diocese of Pittsburgh, had broken with the Episcopal Church, taking the majority of its parishes with it.

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Fueled by disputes over many issues ”” including ordaining a gay bishop ”” conservatives who have left the national Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada approved a constitution Monday creating a new Anglican Church in North America.

After nearly unanimous adoption of the constitution, some 800 Anglicans ”” representing 700 dioceses and other groups with some 100,000 parishioners in the U.S. and Canada ”” stood and sang PraiseGod From Whom All Blessings Flow, in celebrating the new organization.

New canons and bylaws will be voted on Wednesday at the convention, being held at St. Vincent’s Cathedral in Bedford.

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Especially for those of our readers who are attending the ACNA assembly, we’d love to have you share your impressions and perspective on the gathering.

For those who are watching from home via the live feed, feel free to share as well, but we’d like to ask you to focus on what you “saw and heard” (to borrow a theme from well-known blogger Amy Welborn).

So far here are some of the blogs we’re following for the news and views from Bedford:

Peter from Anglican Essentials Canada
BabyBlue
TexAnglican
Wannabe Anglican

And of course the ACNA Assembly website with live streaming from AnglicanTV and much more is here.

One interesting tidbit of info offered is that one-quarter of the voting delegates are 25 or younger.

There are lots of purple shirts (bishops), all of whom have been booted out by the Episcopal Church – or they have volunteered to leave – due to the massive theological differences between the two camps. Some of us are looking around to see if Peter Beckwith, bishop of Springfield, Ill., and an Episcopal bishop in good standing, is there. I asked Bishop Beckwith last week if he was going to come after a spokeswoman for the denomination criticized him for being a liaison to the ACNA.

“If I came,” he said, “it’d be as an observer. I will not become a member of the ACNA. The only reason I’d be there is to support and encourage people.”

He added, “Apparently there are folks calling for my head. There is an effort to purse the Episcopal Church of orthodox people.”

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Given that even these daily digests are faltering, how is it that a notionally similar weekly news digest””The Economist””is not only surviving, but thriving? Virtually alone among magazines, The Economist saw its advertising revenues increase last year by double digits””a remarkable 25 percent, according to the Publisher’s Information Bureau. Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively. (The Economist’s revenues declined in the first quarter of this year, but so did almost every magazine’s.) Indeed, The Economist has been growing consistently and powerfully for years, tracking in near mirror-image reverse the decline of its U.S. rivals. Despite being positioned as a niche product, its U.S. circulation is nearing 800,000, and it will inevitably overtake Newsweek on that front soon enough.

Unlike its rivals, The Economist has been unaffected by the explosion of digital media; if anything, the digital revolution has cemented its relevance. The Economist has become an arbiter of right-thinking opinion (free-market right-center, if you want to be technical about it; with a dose of left-center social progressivism) at a time when arbiters in general are in ill favor. It is a general-interest magazine for an ever-increasing audience, the self-styled global elite, at a time when general-interest anything is having a hard time interesting anybody. And it sells more than 75,000 copies a week on U.S. newsstands for $6.99 (!) at a time when we’re told information wants to be free and newsstands are disappearing.

All of this suggests that although digital media is clearly supplanting everything analog, digital will not necessarily destroy analog. A better word might be displace. And The Economist’s success holds a number of lessons for dead-tree revanchists on how to manage this displacement.

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Why does Wimbledon leave so much money on the table, easily tens of millions a year, when other sporting properties do everything short of look behind bleachers for extra change to boost revenue? When I asked a tournament official, he laughed gently and said, “While there are plenty of offers for sponsorship, if the tournament hung banners behind the baseline or sold naming rights to center court, Wimbledon wouldn’t be Wimbledon, would it?”

Yes, there’s money to be made from having a business sponsor your mascot or from carving out luxury suites. But there’s also equity in tradition and dignity. Wimbledon “doesn’t do costings” — that is, make its financials available to gauche journalists — but profits from 2008 exceeded $50 million. This suggests that protecting the brand, and keeping “Wimbledon, Wimbledon,” has plenty of value as well. In short, a sporting event’s soul is worth something, too.

It sure would be nice if more franchises adopted this philosophy. Even if meant that home runs were to brought us by the actual batter that hit them; not by an insurance company.

I caught this one by podcast on the morning run. Read or listen to it all.

Last week the four leaders of the Bric countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) formally met together in their first summit. I have been asked a number of questions about the event. First, did I really think this would ever happen? Second, would it have happened if I hadn’t created the acronym? Third, what real purpose did it serve, and fourth, where do I think the Bric path is heading?

I’ve also beeen asked a couple of supplementary questions: why these four countries and why not Indonesia, Turkey or indeed Iran? And do I think the global credit crisis has changed the picture from our prediction a number of years ago, that the combined GDP of the Bric economies could exceed that of the G7 countries before 2040?

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Catholics are humbled by the stories of former Anglicans who were faced with a decision and stepped out in faith to join the Catholic Church, said Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of Galveston-Houston.

“The Catholic Church understands and appreciates the sacrifices made by former Anglican clergy and laity who have made the journey as individuals or as communities to full communion with the Catholic Church,” he said June 12.

“Truly, Rome is home and a place of abiding in our pilgrimage to the father,” noted the cardinal in a keynote address at the 2009 Anglican Use Conference in Houston.

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Tehran in 2009, however, was a struggle between two main factions, both of which supported the Islamic republic as it was. There were the clerics, who have dominated the regime since 1979 and had grown wealthy in the process. And there was Ahmadinejad, who felt the ruling clerical elite had betrayed the revolution with their personal excesses. And there also was the small faction the BBC and CNN kept focusing on ”” the demonstrators in the streets who want to dramatically liberalize the Islamic republic. This faction never stood a chance of taking power, whether by election or revolution. The two main factions used the third smaller faction in various ways, however. Ahmadinejad used it to make his case that the clerics who supported them, like Rafsanjani, would risk the revolution and play into the hands of the Americans and British to protect their own wealth. Meanwhile, Rafsanjani argued behind the scenes that the unrest was the tip of the iceberg, and that Ahmadinejad had to be replaced. Khamenei, an astute politician, examined the data and supported Ahmadinejad.

Now, as we saw after Tiananmen Square, we will see a reshuffling among the elite. Those who backed Mousavi will be on the defensive. By contrast, those who supported Ahmadinejad are in a powerful position. There is a massive crisis in the elite, but this crisis has nothing to do with liberalization: It has to do with power and prerogatives among the elite. Having been forced by the election and Khamenei to live with Ahmadinejad, some will make deals while some will fight ”” but Ahmadinejad is well-positioned to win this battle.

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Bishop Duncan is about to become archbishop of these groups who believe that the Episcopal Church and its Canadian counterpart have failed to uphold biblical authority and traditional doctrine on matters from the divinity of Christ to sexual ethics. Many of those present at the gathering are at risk of losing their church buildings, or have already lost them, in property disputes with their former denominations.

“I think there is no one who would go back,” Bishop Duncan said, to cries of “No! No!” from the congregation in St. Vincent Cathedral, the seat of the Diocese of Fort Worth, which, like the Diocese of Pittsburgh, voted to break with the Episcopal Church.

“I hear this everywhere I go. There is no one who would go back. There has been suffering and loss. Some of it was very wounding. But we are so much better off than we were before.”

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The whereabouts of Gov. Mark Sanford was unknown for nearly four days, and some state leaders question who was in charge of the executive office.

But Sanford’s office told the lieutenant governor’s office Monday afternoon that Sanford has been reached and he is fine, said Frank Adams, head of Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer’s office on aging.

Neither the governor’s office nor the State Law Enforcement Division, which provides security for governors, had been able to reach Sanford after he left the mansion Thursday in a black SLED Suburban SUV, said Sen. Jake Knotts and three others familiar with the situation but declined to be identified.

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So we begin in worship and end in worship, and there is much doxology in every part of these days together. And we are here to learn and to be stretched and to be re-committed. That’s what our plenaries are all about.

We are here to grow in fellowship and trust, to deepen in love and respect for one another, and to receive healing and forgiveness, all the while acknowledging our differences in Christ.

We are also here to prove that a Christian Assembly ”“ at least one that wants to reach the cultures and the peoples of its increasingly lapsed and unconverted continent ”“ does not have to focus on resolutions and legislation, nor does it have to be overwhelmingly gray-headed. [More than 20% of the voting delegates of the Provincial Assembly are 25 years of age or younger!] Even in organizing this emerging Anglican Province ”“ a Province in the mainstream of both global Anglicanism and biblical Christianity ”“ we are here to illustrate that a system of ratifying or sending-back is an alternative to spending disproportionate amounts of time on things that are, in fact, not the “main thing.”

We are also here to show what God’s people have always known: just how much Godly business can be done in a tent (especially a tent) or a gym or a school or in simple accommodations.

We are here, above all, to proclaim to the world what our God has done among us, among us sinners”¦

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