This is just sad. The State Newspaper has livestreaming coverage

His Beatitude, the Archbishop of Washington, Metropolitan of All America and Canada of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) announced recently that his church has ended its ecumenical relations with The Episcopal Church, and will establish instead formal ecumenical relations with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).

Metropolitan Jonah of the OCA made the announcement June 24 at a plenary session of the ACNA’s founding convocation at St Vincent’s Cathedral, Bedford, Texas.

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North Korea threatened Wednesday to wipe the United States off the map as Washington and its allies watched for signs the regime will launch a series of missiles in the coming days.

Off China’s coast, a U.S. destroyer was tailing a North Korean ship suspected of transporting illicit weapons to Myanmar in what could be the first test of U.N. sanctions passed to punish the nation for an underground nuclear test last month.

The Kang Nam left the North Korean port of Nampo a week ago with the USS John S. McCain close behind. The ship, accused of transporting banned goods in the past, is believed bound for Myanmar, according to South Korean and U.S. officials.

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The disconnection between public treasuries and local domestic needs drawing upon them does not exist within taxpayers’ pockets or bank accounts. The same taxpayers supply money for all layers of government. Rather, the disconnection is purely administrative and governmental. It is a political artifact with the strength of bureaucratic tradition. That being so, the dumbed-down result should be simple to mend but, if experience in Canada is a guide, it can’t be mended.

–Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 105-106

Gov. Mark Sanford arrived in the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning, having wrapped up a seven-day visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, he said. Sanford said he had not been hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as his staff said in a Tuesday statement to the media.

Sanford’s whereabouts had been unknown since Thursday, and the mystery surrounding his absence fueled speculation about where he had been and who’s in charge in his absence. His emergence Wednesday ended the mystery.

Sanford, in an exclusive interview with The State, said he decided at the last minute to go to the South American country to recharge after a difficult legislative session in which he battled with lawmakers over how to spend federal stimulus money.

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The Rev. Rick Warren brought hundreds of former Episcopalians to their feet in applause Tuesday when he called their exodus from the denomination “a historic event” and said God was “calling you out” of the Episcopal Church.

“I jumped at the chance to come here,” Mr. Warren, evangelical pastor of the 24,000-member Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., told delegates to the constitutional convention of the newly created Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). “We will stand with you in solidarity as God does something new in your midst.”

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The Pentagon will create a Cyber Command to oversee the U.S. military’s efforts to protect its computer networks and operate in cyberspace, under an order signed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday.

The new headquarters, likely to be based at Fort Meade, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., will be responsible for defending U.S. military systems but not other U.S. government or private networks, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

Asked if the command would be capable of offensive operations as well as protecting the Department of Defense, Whitman declined to answer directly.

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Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will make a presentation addressing the world’s economic crisis during a panel discussion webcast live July 8 from the Episcopal Church’s 76th General Convention, scheduled to take place July 8-17 in Anaheim, California.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson will host the event, to be called “Christian Faithfulness in the Global Economic Crisis” at the Anaheim Hilton from 6:15 to 7:30 p.m. PDT (10:30 p.m. EDT).

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An amended 2009 budget was approved by the diocesan Executive Board on Thursday, May 7 that reflected an adjustment for the $335,000 shortfall from the anticipated budged presented during the 2009 Annual Council. The significant decrease in pledges from congregations to the diocese made it necessary to adjust the programs and services provided, reorganize and reduce staff and decrease support of the national church, Chanco on the James, communications and other programs. Only the financial support from the diocesan budget for youth ministry services was not considered for adjustment.

Based on the needs of the congregations in the diocese for services and support programs, and after factoring in income from investments, the Executive Board in the Fall of 2008 requested that each parish contribute nine percent of its previous year’s pledge and plate income to support the programs, outreach, education and parish services provided through the diocese. The 2009 budget approved at Annual Council reflected the move to a permanent bishop, a youth missioner, an increase in the contribution toward the ministry of the national church, chaplains, outreach, and other programs.

Read it all from the front page of the diocesan newspaper (and note the article continues over on page 8).

Love God and love people, the Rev. Rick Warren told founders of the new Anglican Church in North America on Tuesday as he advised them not to focus on property disputes caused by the exodus from their mother churches.

“You may lose the steeple, but you won’t lose the people,” Warren said to long applause from about 1,000 packed into a tent outside St. Vincent’s Cathedral. “Christ did not die for property.”

Anglicans from across the world are at the conference, where church members upset over the ordination of gays and other issues formed the new Anglican church. They had split from the Episcopal Church U.S.A. and the Anglican Church of Canada.

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Seated on the dais at the inaugural assembly of the Anglican Church in North America, alongside Archbishop-elect Robert Duncan, evangelical mega-pastor Rick Warren and Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America was a woman in a clergy collar.

The Rev. Mary Hays, canon to the ordinary — chief of staff — of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh (Anglican) had one of the most visible roles of an ordained woman in this assembly representing 100,000 people who broke with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. She moderated a discussion among 900 people and led them in prayer for the Rev. Warren, a Southern Baptist who addressed the gathering.

Once a prominent leader within the conservative movement in the Episcopal Church, she is the sort of woman who might have been called to be a bishop. But her new church, which hopes to join the 80-million member global Anglican Communion, forbids female bishops pending some future consensus by the Anglican Communion to permit them. Each of the 28 dioceses in the Anglican Church in North America can choose whether or not to ordain women as priests and deacons. Most don’t do so.

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The Rev. Rick Warren used his Southern Baptist preaching skills to fire up a gathering of conservative Anglicans in Bedford on Tuesday.

“We stand with you in solidarity as God does something new in your midst,” said Warren, author of the mega-bestseller The Purpose Driven Life, pastor of massive Saddleback Church in California, and invocation-giver at the Obama inaugural.

The Anglican Church in North America invited Warren to be one of the headline speakers for its first provincial assembly, which continues through Thursday at St. Vincent’s Cathedral in Bedford.

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China has begun a concerted effort to keep its export economy humming, even as demand for its goods has plummeted with the global downturn.

Risking the ire of the United States and other trading partners, the Chinese government has quietly started adopting policies aimed at encouraging exports while curbing imports, even though China, as one of the world’s largest exporters, has aggressively criticized protectionism in other countries.

The government has sharply expanded three programs to help exporters, giving them larger tax rebates, more generous loans from state-owned banks to finance trade, and more government-paid travel to promote themselves at trade shows around the world.

At the same time, Beijing has banned all local, provincial and national government agencies from buying imported goods except in cases where no local substitute exists.

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The world is being remade but the West is only very slowly waking up to this new reality. In 2027 Goldman Sachs estimates that the size of the Chinese economy will overtake America’s and by 2050 will be twice as big.

But we still think of the rise of the developing countries and the relative decline of the developed nations in almost exclusively economic terms. China’s rise is seen as having momentous economic implications but being of little political and cultural consequence. This is a profound mistake.

In the past – Britain and the US being obvious cases in point – the economic rise of a country has always been the prelude to the exercise of much wider political and cultural influence. So why should China be different?

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At the invitation of the Archbishop Christian and Islamic scholars from both theological and scientific backgrounds met for reflection and dialogue on the relationship between religion and science. As in previous Building Bridges seminars a number of scriptural texts, supplemented by historical and contemporary texts from the Christian and Islamic traditions, were used as the basis for discussion in a programme that included public lectures and private sessions. The proceedings of the Seminar will be published in due course.

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We’ve built an entire health care system (maybe an entire government) on the illusion of something for nothing. Instead of tackling that basic logic, we’ve got a reform process that is trying to evade it.

This would be bad enough in normal times. But the country is already careening toward fiscal ruin. We’ve already passed a nearly $800 billion stimulus package. The public debt is already projected to double over the next 10 years.

Health care reform is important, but it is not worth bankrupting the country over. If this process goes as it has been going ”” with grand rhetoric and superficial cost containment ”” then we will be far better off killing this effort and starting over in a few years. Maybe then there will be leaders willing to look at the options staring them in the face.

Read it all. Thank God for the CBO, I say.

Take a look.

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A survey of leaders in the Anglican Church in North America reveals a need for a greater emphasis on Christian training ”“ traditionally known as “catechisis” ”“ in the church. Among the survey’s findings are:

* Only 17% of respondents are very satisfied with the overall effectiveness of catechesis in the Church;< * Where catechesis is offered, respondents believed it was often highly effective among adults, but generally saw it as less effective among children and, especially, adolescents; * When asked, “What is missing from current catechetical content?” the most frequent answer was the inability to move from belief to action. Read it all.

Watch it all thanks to BabyBlue.