But here we have the story of a man who deeply believes in Jesus and deeply believes in the church. The Lambeth Conference of 2008””largely devoid of divisive resolutions and designed instead to be a genuine meeting of souls, minds and hearts””is the prime exhibit of his political philosophy. It is all about the exercise of authority. Williams exercises authority by speaking to God on behalf of the Anglican Communion and, as best he understands it (which is better than almost anyone else), speaking to the communion and the listening world on behalf of God. Prayer is the center of his politics. His roles in guiding his flock are to seek the common mind of his people and to model a form of attentive but courageous dialogue with the issues and people in whom Christ is made flesh and the Spirit is speaking today.

What Williams stubbornly, persistently and relentlessly refuses to do is to become an executive leader who charges forward fueled by nothing but the strength of his own intuition and armed only with his own self-righteousness. The result is, from those who seek such leadership, scorn and misunderstanding. But having read this book””a detailed and sympathetic review of an extended experiment in theologically considered authority””I cannot think of another figure, in church or world, who ever embarked on such an extraordinary program of servant leadership.

Read it all.

General Convention 2009, in adopting Resolution D035, proclaimed the doctrine outmoded in this day and age, even though there has been no example of its application in recent times. The Resolution calls for the governing bodies of ECUSA to write a letter to the Queen of England, Elizabeth II:

Resolved, that The Episcopal Church . . . directs the appropriate representatives of the House of Bishops and House of Deputies . . . to write to Queen Elizabeth II, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, requesting that her Majesty disavow, and repudiate publicly, the claimed validity of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery . . .

It is, as already noted, unclear how or why the Queen should repudiate a doctrine which she herself has not personally espoused. Moreover, the Presiding Bishop has recently declared a new Episcopalian form of the Doctrine in a letter to the House of Bishops not yet published on the official ENS site, but released elsewhere. In her letter, she declares it her policy not to allow any Episcopalian Diocese or bishop to sell any of their parish property without a clause that would exclude the setting foot on it by any bishop or other clergy of another church in competition with ECUSA for a period of at least five years from the date of sale:

I will continue to uphold two basic principles in the work some of us face in dealing with former Episcopalians who claim rights to church property or assets. Our participation in God’s mission as leaders and stewards of The Episcopal Church means that we expect a reasonable and fair financial arrangement in any property settlement, and that we do not make settlements that encourage religious bodies who seek to replace The Episcopal Church.

Pragmatically, the latter means property settlements need to include a clause that forbids, for a period of at least five years, the presence of bishops on the property who are not members of this House, unless they are invited by the diocesan bishop for purposes which do not subvert mission and ministry in the name of this Church.

It is worthy to note how the Presiding Bishop simply assumes, without any discussion, that she has the authority to impose these requirements on the bishops responsible for the lawsuits brought….

Read it all.

The nascent recovery in global economic activity could yet be derailed by rising oil prices, with Brent crude hitting $76 a barrel last week, its highest levels of the year to date.

In a blunt warning last week, Goldman Sachs called for a co-ordinated policy response to resolve the problems of commodity shortages, noting: “Although the financial crisis had been addressed, the commodity crisis has not.”

Francisco Blanch, commodity strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, says that just as the rise in oil prices last year was an under-appreciated cause of the recession, this year’s collapse for crude prices has been an under-appreciated source of stimulus.

Read it all.

Does it matter that the Obama administration is now involved in “overseas contingency operations” rather than “fighting terror”? Is it important that our Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, refers to man-caused disasters rather than terrorism? And how about the news made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, when she was asked about the elimination of the phrase war on terror: “The administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself,” Clinton said. “It was controversial here [in Europe].”

The New York Times often used quotation marks around the war on terror during the Bush administration. National Public Radio commentators sometimes referred to “the so-called war on terror.”

The rhetorical struggle isn’t just about the war on terror, of course. It’s about the very notion of terrorism. To modify Burleigh Taylor Wilkins’ excellent definition, terrorism is violence against the property or lives of noncombatant civilians, whose purpose is to promote the terrorist’s cause by preventing moderate solutions or provoking extreme countermeasures. But when someone commits such an act, he usually graduates to militant status within a couple of days, if not immediately. Several months ago Judea Pearl, the father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, asked the question this way: “When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?”

It appears that those luminaries have won the war on the war on terror. Scores of innocents will continue to be killed by terrorists but their lives will no longer be part of a narrative that we understand as the fight against terrorism.

Read it all.

So exactly how could any Deputy challenge President Anderson’s “joyful” ruling in favor of seating the deputation from Pittsburgh, “immediately after [the] decision [is made]”, when that ruling was made in January and the Convention would not open until July?

And there you have it — a little window into how the insiders at ECUSA get things done.

Read it all.

Two-timing politicians, take note: cheating has never been easier. AshleyMadison.com, a personals site designed to facilitate extramarital affairs, now boasts slick iPhone and Blackberry versions that help married horndogs find like-minded cheaters within minutes. The new tools are aimed at tech-savvy adulterers wary of leaving tracks on work or home computers. Because the apps are loaded up from phones’ browsers, they leave no electronic trail that suspicious spouses can trace.

Even as public outrage boils up over the infidelity of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Nevada Senator John Ensign, millions of Americans are sneaking online to do some surreptitious cheating of their own.

Unlike Craigslist’s plain-Jane listings, AshleyMadison lets cheaters customize profiles, chat anonymously and trade messages about adulterous preferences ”” all in an effort to make cheating as simple as using Match.com.

The formula is working. AshleyMadison’s membership has doubled over the past year to 4 million.

Two weeks ago I preached on David and Bethsheba and this morning a parishioner handed this to me. Ugh. Read it all. (Hat tip: BR)

There are rules of etiquette on the social web, too – rules derived from developing social and cultural norms that businesses likely should be aware of before taking the plunge.

Scott Monty, the head of social media at Ford Motor Co., explained it this way: “It’s just like offline social networking.”

“You wouldn’t show up at a cocktail party, burst through the door, hand your business card to everyone and leave,” he said. “You see what the atmosphere is, do a lot of listening, work your way into conversations, and understand how you can provide value.”

Mihaela Vorvoreanu, a former Clemson University professor soon to be teaching at Purdue, recently authored a paper on social norms she observed and studied among a select group of college students.

“Just from what I read and hear about among public relations circles, it seems that everybody wants to get on Facebook, and that Facebook is trying to build all these features so corporations can get on – but nobody quite understands what to do there,” Vorvoreanu said. “It’s uncharted territory.”

Read the whole article.

Bishop Robert has published a total of 78 recommendations for change in the way the Anglican Church operates in the Isle of Man.

They come under 17 numbered sections, and include the establishment of four Mission Partnerships across the Island, to replace the existing Rural Deaneries.

Another suggestion is the setting up of on-Island training courses for all levels of church leadership, including lay people.

Read it all.

For the first time in P.E.I., a married man was to be ordained as a Roman Catholic priest on Sunday.

Martin Carter, 63, said the Pope occasionally grants special permission for married men to become priests in cases where they’ve converted from other Christian churches.

The former Anglican clergyman said the church has made provisions for some cases, but he doesn’t anticipate a shift in the traditional approach to priests marrying.

“Not that there is anything wrong with marriage, it’s a status of life, but for the work of the church, the church becomes your bride in a sense,” he said.

Read it all.

From here:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, in his office, is accorded a place of honour among the bishops of the Anglican Communion as ”˜primus inter pares’. Much is expected of Archbishops of Canterbury in giving leadership in the Communion, especially in times of controversy. The personal reflections, therefore, of Archbishop Rowan Williams about the future direction and internal structures of the Anglican Communion are always to be welcomed, especially as he was among the many guests drawn from around the Anglican Communion who attended the recent General Convention of The Episcopal Church.

Archbishop Rowan’s reflections need to be seen in the context of the current discussions intended to lead to an ”˜Anglican Covenant’, the ”˜design group’ for which is currently headed by the Archbishop of Dublin. It remains to be seen whether, or to what extent, what the Archbishop of Canterbury describes as a ”˜two track’ model will recommend itself to the autonomous provinces of the Communion. These matters all call for the most careful and unhurried scrutiny at representative provincial level and it is to be hoped that they receive the consideration they rightly deserve.

A Rock Island County judge Tuesday upheld an earlier decision blocking Moline’s Christ Church from its endowment.

The church is a parish of the Diocese of Quincy which elected last year to leave the larger Episcopal Church because of differences on a variety of topics, from interpretations of Scripture to homosexuality.

Read it all.

Here ++Rowan Williams offers a generous recognition of those, such as TEC, who proceed down a pathway in which it proves that ‘local autonomy’ is greater than participation in a ‘covenantal structure’: each way is respected for they constitute “two ways of witnessing to the Anglican heritage” or “two styles of being Anglican”. When he then goes onto deny the possibility that each way can be represented at “ecumenical interchanges and processes”, he is simply noting that the majority viewpoint rather than the minority needs to represent the whole of the Anglican Communion at such meetings. This is not ‘two tier’ Anglicanism, but conciliar Anglicanism in which the council of Anglican views and doctrines is represented by the majority (i.e. those signing up to the Covenant) and not by the minority.

Of course, there is another alternative, in which the minority breaks away from the majority, or the majority expels the minority. But, with respect to ecumenical ventures, would that be advantageous to the minority? I think not. It is hard to see Rome or Constantinople opening up negotiations with both Canterbury and New York! (Even if Canterbury, following some posturing of English liberals, folded into TEC’s camp, would a New York-Canterbury Anglicanism be invited to Rome or Constantinople?)

In turn, this takes us to the extraordinary effort of ++Rowan to be realistic rather than idealistic. With phrasing such as “It helps to be clear about these possible futures, however much we think them less than ideal, and to speak about them not in apocalyptic terms of schism and excommunication but plainly as what they are” and “if the prospect of greater structural distance is unwelcome, we must look seriously at what might yet make it less likely”, the Archbishop offers the unremarkable assessment that this is the best we can do under the circumstances by way of a Communion in which disagreement has already led to a degree of schism. Tina, girlfriend of many a political leader is at hand here, ‘there is no alternative’!

If there is an alternative, ++Rowan’s critics have not produced it. Blathering on about taking on the conservatives, selling the LGBT movement down the creek, etc, are simply recipes to split the Communion not only in two, but in an irrevocable way. ++Rowan’s respectful yet realistic way of describing the future, two Anglican ways, but both will not pretend to be the mind and voice of the Communion, has the singular advantage of keeping the door open to a renewed unity in the future.

But a question or three remains….

No doubt you remember very well the two “Call to Faithfulness” conferences held at St. Olaf College in 1990 and 1992, the latter at which you spoke. Three Lutheran journals sponsored the conferences, Dialog, Lutheran Quarterly, and Lutheran Forum. Already alarms were going off that the ELCA was moving in the direction of liberal Protestantism on many fronts. One thousand people attended the first conference and eight hundred the second, so we were not alone in detecting early signs of trouble in the ELCA. Although the theologians addressing the two conferences held different views amongst themselves on ecclesiology and ecumenism, almost all agreed that the commitment of the ELCA to teach according to the Lutheran Confessions was becoming nominal at best. Even the name of the Holy Trinity was up for grabs in some circles.

During those two conferences I do not recall that one word was spoken about sexuality or homosexuality. The controversy over sexuality arose later. In the last ten years it has become the all-consuming issue in the ELCA, arising not from the people at the grassroots but driven by the leadership at many levels. It should be clear that the theologians who signed the CORE Letter (around 60 of them) hold the same views concerning the slide of the ELCA toward liberal Protestantism as those journal theologians who issued the “call to faithfulness” in 1990 and 1992.

That call went unheeded. It is clear that what ails the ELCA, in our view, is not all about sexuality. It is about the underlying pervasive theological condition that gave rise to the possibility that a Lutheran denomination could devote more than a decade’s worth of its time, money, and energy to an issue that has always been deemed beyond consideration by all orthodox (small “o”) churches from the first century until now. Only a few North American liberal Protestant denominations made the issue of sexuality their cause célèbre, starting approximately one generation ago. This is only further convincing evidence that the ELCA has bought into the kind of theological methodology (reasoning) that has always characterized liberal Protestantism. You make clear what that is. Of the four principles of a sound theological method””Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience””you assign to reason and experience the place of pre-eminence. Luther called “reason” the whore of Babylon. And in the name of “experience” every crime and heresy known to humankind have been committed. So we have to ask, “whose “reason” and whose “experience” should we trust? Not mine, all by myself. Not the “reason” and “experience” of late-North American Christians who have been marinated in the culture of what Pope John XXIII called a “culture of death and decadence.” The Germans have a word for the kind of ecclesial phenomenon that results from elevating “reason and experience” at the expense of “Scripture and Tradition”””“Kulturprotestantismus.”

Read it all.

When General Convention decided to let plans go forward to switch the Episcopal Church’s monthly newspaper to a quarterly feature-oriented magazine without further study, the decision was about more than the loss of a newspaper. In fact, it never was strictly a debate between parchment and pixels, per se.

Undergirding the discussion about dramatically shifting the communication strategy of the Episcopal Church is the question of editorial integrity — which I quickly grant is neither guaranteed nor necessarily imperiled in any specific vehicle of communication.

With action taken at General Convention, however, the Episcopal Church is embracing a clear priority for branding, marketing, messaging and public relations over news dissemination, and this raises significant questions about the credibility of our story told in a world in which people are letting authenticity guide their religious choices.

How and where do we now tell our stories with revelatory honesty?

Read it all.

The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back, in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When He said, ”˜Be perfect,’ He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder – in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

–C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Macmillan,1943), Chapter Eight

From here, a motion passed August 3rd:

Whereas The Episcopal Church in its most recent General Convention has once again exhibited a disregard for Holy Scripture and failed to submit to the Anglican Communion, we the Vestry of Christ St. Paul’s Parish, Yonges Island, SC, hereby request that the Diocese of South Carolina be placed under a spiritual authority which holds to the clear teaching of the Holy Scripture and the Bonds of Affection within the Anglican Communion which will give our Diocese a place to thrive.

What in the recent past seemed exotic and foreign is now almost routinely folded into “the fold.”

Buddhism is not only accepted as a mainstream American religion, it is a path increasingly trod by faithful Christians and Jews who infuse Eastern spiritual insights and practices such as meditation into their own religions.

When John Weber became a Buddhist at age 19, his devout Methodist parents were not particularly pleased.

In recent years, however, they’ve invited their son, a religious studies expert with Boulder’s Naropa University, to speak at their church about Buddhism.

“That never would have happened before,” Weber said. “They would have been embarrassed.”

Read it all.

The Anglican Church in North America unites 700 Anglican parishes in 12 Anglican jurisdictions in North America into a single church, according to an ACNA press release sent out last spring after recognition by the Standing Committee of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion). The jurisdictions coming together include the Anglican Coalition in Canada, the dioceses of Fort Worth, Texas, Pittsburgh, Quincy and San Joaquin, Calif., the Anglican Mission in the Americas, the Anglican Network in Canada, the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, the Reformed Episcopal Church and several missionary initiatives.

By forming the new Anglican Church in North America and seeking recognition from African provinces, the province of the Southern Cone of South America and other Anglican provinces, the ACNA hopes to join the worldwide Anglican Communion, but separately from the Episcopal Church U.S.A.

The Most Rev. Robert William Duncan Jr., former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh (Episcopal Church U.S.A.), now serves as the first archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America.

In mid-June, at a conference in Texas attended by about 900 church leaders, the ACNA formally adopted a constitution and canons. Zampino attended and when he returned, he said, his small congregation unanimously voted to join the movement, joining an estimated 100,000 church members in the U.S. and Canada.

Read it all.

Unlike officials in the (U.S.) Episcopal Church, who are elected in a democratic process, the Archbishop of Canterbury is appointed to his post by the Crown of England and the prime minister.

Williams, then, can express his concern over the current conflict between the Episcopal Church and other Anglicans, but he cannot demand that doctrinal changes be made, nor can he force Episcopal Church leaders to embrace a new “covenant,” which is still being drafted. That covenant’s purpose is to signal a national church’s intention “to act in a certain level of mutuality with other parts of the Communion.”

Williams is suggesting in his comments that the future of Anglicanism might consist of a “covenanted” population in full communion with Canterbury and a second population of Anglicans who relinquish their voting rights at international church meetings, explained the Rev. Dan Clarke, vicar at the Church of the Holy Communion in Charleston….

The Rev. Canon J. Michael A. Wright, rector of Grace Episcopal Church, said disagreement is not new among Anglicans, and dissenting views should not prevent anyone from being “in full communion.”

“If loyalty is about agreeing, it really has no value,” he said. “It’s clear the church is not of one mind. But why is it we must be of one mind on every issue to have a relationship and be in communion with one another?”

Wright said the archbishop’s comments are valuable and should be taken seriously.

Read it all.

Few United States senators have a more unusual CV than Virginia’s Jim Webb. He’s a Democrat who was once a Republican and served as Navy Secretary under Ronald Reagan. He’s a decorated Vietnam veteran and the highly successful author of Fields of Fire, which is said by many to be the best novel ever written about that war. When he made his senate bid in 2006, his Republican opponent ran adverts criticising some explicit sexy passages in other Webb works. Now he is embarked on perhaps his most improbable mission: the senior senator, from one of the toughest law-and-order states, wants to restore humanity, and proportionality, to the punishment of criminals.

All the focus, right now, is on reforming the US healthcare system. Think prisons, and you think Guantanamo Bay, and the bizarre debate over whether the transfer of its inmates to the mainland would see alleged Islamist terrorists burst out of fearsome maximum-security jails such as Florence, Colorado, and run amok across the Rockies.

When it comes to sending people to jail, America is the undisputed world champion. In 1970, a mere 200,000 people were behind bars. Last year, 2.3 million were held in federal, state and county prisons, more than 1 per cent of all adults in the US and five times the international average. Blacks, predictably, bear the brunt of this compulsion to incarcerate, accounting for 40 per cent of the prison population. This punishment industry gives work to more than two million, more even than the 1.7 million employed in higher education.

Read it all.

Read it all.

Last year, five per cent of the total population of the 27 EU countries was Muslim. But rising levels of immigration from Muslim countries and low birth rates among Europe’s indigenous population mean that, by 2050, the figure will be 20 per cent, according to forecasts.

Data gathered from various sources indicate that Britain, Spain and Holland will have an even higher proportion of Muslims in a shorter amount of time.

Read it all.

Regulators on Friday shut down two banks in Florida and one in Oregon, bringing to 72 the number of federally insured banks to fail this year under the weight of the weak economy and rising loan losses.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was appointed receiver of the banks: First State Bank, of Sarasota, Fla.; Venice, Fla.-based Community National Bank of Sarasota County, and Community First Bank (FRBA) (CFBN), of Prineville, Ore.

First State Bank had total assets of $463 million and deposits totaling $387 million. Community National Bank had $97 million in assets and $93 million in deposits. Community First Bank had $209 million in assets and $182 million in deposits.

Read it all.

On July 18th Bishop Mark Lawrence responded to the 2009 General Convention in a letter which concluded as follows:

There is an increasingly aggressive displacement within this Church of the gospel of Jesus Christ’s transforming power by the “new” gospel of indiscriminate inclusivity which seeks to subsume all in its wake. It is marked by an increased evangelistic zeal and mission that hints at imperialistic plans to spread throughout the Communion. This calls for a bold response. It is of the utmost importance that we find more than just a place to stand. Indeed, it is imperative that we find a place to thrive; a place that is faithful, relational and structural””and so we shall!

Later on July 28th I wrote a blog post asking for prayer for the Diocese of South Carolina and its leadership. A follow up on that meeting appeared here.

I now wish to update those posts and sincerely request your prayers for the Diocese of South Carolina for the upcoming week.

This past Wednesday, August 5th, the same group of people who met with Bishop Lawrence met again (you can find the list of names through the links already provided). Although not quite as long as the first meeting, it went for the whole day (roughly 10:30-6:30). Both of these meetings were to help Bishop Lawrence to prepare for the special clergy day this coming Thursday, August 13th, when he will be given the very challenging task of articulating to the clergy his sense of where the diocese is called to be and live in response to recent developments in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.

I think all of us have a tendency to mistake our place in history, and such things are only properly seen in retrospect (hence my sense of the importance of history and reason for a 19th century post today). But by any reasonable measure this is an important time in this diocese, for her bishop, for her people and for her future. The spiritual warfare is intense. Speaking for myself, the sense of anxiety and expectation in the phone calls and emails that are streaming in is quite high, and I am sure that is true for many other diocesan members as well. While there is a large degree of theological consensus in the diocese, we are now talking about the issue of strategy, and it is in that area where reasserters have had significant differences over the last 7-10 years.

We need your prayers, especially for the Bishop, Mark Lawrence, and for the Standing Committee under the leadership of the Rev. Jeff Miller. Pray that the truth may be spoken in love and that as a diocese we will come together in the direction the Lord wants us to go in. Many thanks–KSH.

Something is afoot in the Diocese of South Carolina. It is difficult to discern exactly what it will eventually be, except to say that DioSC will respond to what transpired at Gen Con 09. And whatever they do will bear our observation and analysis, and our respect, for it will not be done lightly, and it will be done in a Godly, spiritual manner, with all due consideration for Scriptural guidance.

Read it all.

I am posting this by way of background for the next post, so there will be no comments on this thread–KSH.

Bishop Nick Baines wrote:

“At a purely pragmatic level, TEC should never have proceeded to the consecration of Robinson before having addressed theologically and ecclesiologically the matter of the blessing of same-sex relationships. The fact that they put the cart before the horse has led not only to the problems we now face, but also to an inner incoherence within TEC itself. As an outsider, I wonder why no one had the intelligence to spot this one earlier.”

And I responded:

With respect, this is not true. Indeed I said exactly this at the hearing in a packed house on Friday night in Minneapolis in 2003 BEFORE the General Convention vote on the New Hampshire election:

“As if all this isn’t enough, there are three more matters which make this resolution so crucial. Everyone here knows that the questions raised by THIS resolution are inextricably intertwined with the vote on the New Hampshire election. But the questions raised here tonight are the ones which must be settled BEFORE, as the resolution itself recognizes, the liturgies can be developed and therefore the relationships can be approved. We are in the midst of a debate and we need to decide the debate as a debate to respect the dignity of the people and the process involved.
Let us be quite clear. If Gene Robinson is confirmed by General Convention, it would bring through the back door a practice that the Episcopal Church has never agreed to approve through the front door. If we do that, it will be an end run around the debate before the debate itself has been settled. It will be a process in the name of justice and integrity which has no justice or integrity. (And please just so there is no confusion: this is not a comment on the New Hampshire process, but on the national process. If we are going to change church teaching, then let us be forthright and honest and open and change church teaching and THEN vote on an election in accordance with the change in church teaching).”

(http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/957253/posts)

It is hard to describe the degree of incoherence in the Episcopal Church to those who are not part of it. Not only was what we did wrong (in the view of many in the Communion) but how we did it was wrong. For those who FAVOR changing the church’s teaching in this area the Episcopal Church have been set back years by how the Episcopal Church went about this decision, and ample warning was given at the time.

This situation continues down to this today. Numerous descriptions of TEC I read in Fulcrum are far out of touch with what is actually happening here. Consider this, we still have not changed our teaching as a church on the matter of same sex blessings, but some 20-25 dioceses at least enourage and/or allow for and in some cases have official liturgies for same sex blessings.

Part of the reason all these blessings need to stop is that if they do not the Episcopal Church will be well on its way to exporting its ecclesiological dysfunction into the rest of the Communion.

–From Monday 28 July 2008

In the year 1849 I was stationed at Baton Rouge, and married Miss Frank E. Stuart, whose honored sons and one living daughter now rise up and call her blessed.

Passing over several years in which I was engaged as the pioneer of temperance and prohibition work, I found myself the pastor at Macon, Miss[issippi], during the war, where a singular episode occurred.

The Mississippi Legislature, driven out of Jackson by the Federal army, took refuge at Macon. In the course of legislation, a bill putting all ministers in the State up to sixty years of age in the army, and favored by Governor Clarke, passed to its third reading, before the final vote was taken. Hon. Locke Houston, speaker of the House of Representatives, invited me to open the session with prayer.

In the course of the prayer I invoked the Divine Father: “Have compassion on the members of the Mississippi Legislature, who, without the fear of God before their eyes, have laid violent hands upon the ordained ministry of Thy church, placing carnal weapons in their hands, bidding them to go forth to war as instruments of wrath and blood, instead of messengers of love and peace.”

“O Lord, for this wicked act, which stands out in all its gloomy isolation without any parallel among the civilized nations of the earth, we invoke pardoning mercy.”

“O Lord, let not this vile act of legislation fall in dire disaster upon the lives of our people.”

Continuing in this strain of thought, and holding them up before the great Jehovah of all worlds, was somewhat startling in its nature.

Their indictment before the august Chancery Court of Heaven was something unexpected, and greatly surprised them; and when the final vote was taken they reversed their previous action and struck out of the bill all ministers engaged in their regular work.

This prayer, and its results, invoked the wrath of the governor, and much of the secular press.

–The Rev. John W. Harmon, Select Sermons (Paulding, Mississippi, 1894), pp.2-3. The author is my great great grandfather (!)–KSH.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner formally requested that Congress raise the $12.1 trillion statutory debt limit on Friday, saying that it could be breached as early as mid-October.

“It is critically important that Congress act before the limit is reached so that citizens and investors here and around the world can remain confident that the United States will always meet its obligations,” Geithner said in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that was obtained by Reuters.

A Treasury spokeswoman declined to comment on the letter.

Read it all.

We have viewed the Windsor Report as an important, even defining, part of the Communion’s ongoing conversation about matters of sexuality. Others in the Communion, notably the Bishop of Durham, have seen it as the rules by which we can continue to be in the conversation at all. ”˜Stop making any progress on the affirmation of gays and lesbians or be gone with you.’ What strikes me as I read the posturing that is attempting to spin the meaning of these resolutions is that conservatives and liberals on the matter of sexuality are continuing to talk past each other, often in shrill ways. According to some we have ”˜renounced the Bible and the entire Tradition of the Christian Faith’ and to others have ”˜struck a blow for justice and full inclusion of a persecuted minority’. It is wearying and tiresome to keep at this. I have some instinct which I keep in check for the most part, that schism would not be so bad and then we could begin planting Episcopal Churches in England and elsewhere. The instinct that usually wins out however is the one that says there must be a way for people of goodwill to stay together in difference on this issue.

What I notice is that the ”˜liberal’ argument is dependent on recognizing that GLBT people are made and formed as such and that ’orientation’ is bound up with fundamental identity, neither chosen nor in most instances, subject to change. As such we are talking about something fundamentally new, –as new as when the solar system was first described to people who believed the sun revolved around the earth. This position is usually (or so it seems to me) dismissed in favor of something like ”˜we’ve always known about sexual proclivities and been counter cultural in saying that they are not in accord with God’s intentions for humanity’ or ”˜It doesn’t matter what you claim about this ”˜new’ thing. The Bible is clear that sex is reserved to one man and one woman in lifelong committed relationship.’ Neither statement acknowledges the seriousness of the claim which is at the root of the actions of TEC in the past two weeks.

Read it all.