There is no firm evidence that sexual orientation can be changed through therapy, so mental health professionals should not tell conflicted gay clients that they can become heterosexual with such treatments, the American Psychological Association declared today.

In adopting a resolution, the APA’s governing council said some research suggests such “reparative therapy” could induce depression or suicidal tendencies.

A task force recommended that mental health professionals “avoid misrepresenting the efficacy of sexual orientation change efforts when providing assistance to people distressed about their own or others’ sexual orientation,” usually as a result of religious doctrine.

Read it all.

The men who seek help from evangelical counselor Warren Throckmorton often are deeply distressed. They have prayed, read Scripture, even married, but they haven’t been able to shake sexual attractions to other men — impulses they believe to be immoral.

Dr. Throckmorton is a psychology professor at a Christian college in Pennsylvania and past president of the American Mental Health Counselors Association. He specializes in working with clients conflicted about their sexual identity.

The first thing he tells them is this: Your attractions aren’t a sign of mental illness or a punishment for insufficient faith. He tells them that he cannot turn them straight.

But he also tells them they don’t have to be gay.

Read it all.

So now we come to the big and final issue…How will Christianity as a whole fare in the world of the twenty-first century–and beyond?

The big issue is pluralism. Call it diversity, the one and the many, inclusion versus exclusion. This is the future of Christianity. It is also the world’s task.

–Paul F.M.Zahl, The Christianity Primer (Birmingham: Palladium Press, 2005), page 299

The liberal backlash has begun against the statement by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, criticising the Episcopal Church’s move to consecrate more partnered gay Bishops and bless same-sex unions.

The English liberal groups have put on a united front in allegiance with the Episcopal Church to face the axis of traditionalists seeking to expel them from the Communion.

In Communion, Covenant and our Anglican Future, Dr Williams relegated liberal Churches like the Episcopal Church to an inferior position in a two-tier Communion.

An alliance of 13 liberal Church groups have now asked: “Whether the voices of those within the Church of England who are or who walk alongside lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people have been adequately heard within the recent discussions.”

Read it all.

[Leslie] Van Houten, who was 19 at the time of the murders, refused to comment for Waters’ article. She said she had no interest in being in a magazine for what she had done, and that she was greatly ashamed by it. Nonetheless, she and the director struck up a friendship.

“[Van Houten is] well read. She’s smart. She cares about people,” Waters says of the woman who has spent the past 40 years in prison for the murders of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca.

Waters says he was so inspired by Van Houten’s patience ”” she has been denied parole 16 times ”” and her intelligence and remorse that he devoted a chapter to her in his upcoming book, Role Models. He recently posted an excerpt of the book in which he argues for Van Houten’s release on the Huffington Post.

This is a must-listen-to (there is much more on the audio than the small text summary). I caught it on the way home last night after an all day meeting and it still haunts me. A very profound illustration of the consequences of one sinful act. Did (could) she contemplate at the time that she would be living with the incredibly serious results of her decisions more than four decades later–KSH?

Like the United States, Canada adopted a stimulus plan. But while the U.S. plan amounted to 5 percent of GDP over three years, Canada’s plan gave a jolt of 2.5 percent, in only a little more than one year. So Canada got more bang for less buck. If both country’s projections prove accurate, Canadians in 2015 will shoulder only about one-third as much debt per person as Americans.

More and more, the $800 billion stimulus plan is looking like a great mistake — too much long-term debt for too little immediate benefit, all of it too closely tied to the Democratic party’s political imperatives in the 2010 election cycle.

The result: an unemployment rate in the United States fully one point higher than in Canada. To paraphrase a television commercial familiar to Canadians of a certain age, “Only in Canada? What a pity.”

Read or listen to it all.

This is a wonderful piece! Watch it all.

The Rev. Michael Owens says nothing compares with dunking someone toward salvation.

Owens, the pastor at New Hope Baptist Church in this small church-crowded hamlet in northeast Louisiana, recently joined a dozen other pastors in leading outdoor baptisms in Lake Providence. They baptized 40 white-robed children, ages 4 to 15, plus three adults who waded in unannounced.

“Spirit’s in that water,” Owens said after the ceremony, his white robe still drenched from the waist down.

Read it all.

In response to the decisions taken at general convention, The Archbishop of Canterbury, has outlined a “two track” future for provinces in the Anglican communion, with a choice of covenantal or associate status. One track is for those who are willing to intensify their relationships of interdependence in the communion, through signing the proposed Anglican covenant, and the other is for those who prefer federal automony, not signing the covenant.

The Anglican communion is involved in “intensifying” its current relationships and those who do not wish to continue on that “intensifying” trajectory may remain where they are, which will become track two, while the centre of the Communion moves on with glacial gravity into track one. Not exclusion, but intensification: not force, but choice.

Who cares? God does: for communion mirrors the love of the trinity better than a loose federation ”“ the federation of the holy trinity? Hardly. Who cares? Those in the precarious positions of Tutu and Gitari, in Pakistan and Sudan today, and all those who support them in solidarity, such as the 36-year interweavings of the Episcopal church of Sudan with the diocese of Salisbury, in which I now serve.

Read it all.

“Coming so soon after the slate announced by the Diocese of Minnesota,” said Integrity President Reverend Susan Russell in a written statement, “today’s announcement by the Diocese of Los Angeles is another sign that the ‘season of fasting’ at the expense of the vocations of gays and lesbians in the Episcopal Church is at an end.”

Reached by phone, Russell added, “for Minnesota and California to move so quickly after our convention, what they are doing is signaling that the resolution that we passed in Anaheim is not just a resolution but reality. The Episcopal Church is in a place where it is able to be broadly inclusive. That is good news not only for the diocese, but also the whole church.”

Integrity is an Episcopalian LGBT advocacy group.

Meanwhile, what can be said of the three candidates?

“He’s a great pastor and we’ll be sorry to lose him,” said Sarah Lawton, senior warden, a St. John’s lay leadership position, referring to Kirkley.

Read it all.

Note carefully what this proposal represents. Dr. William’s strategy would produce a communion of churches that includes, on the one hand, a majority of churches that are firm in understanding the sinfulness of all homosexual behavior and, on the other hand, a minority of churches that are firm in believing that homosexuality is not only not a sin, but that it is also morally insignificant. According to Dr. Williams plan, these two groups of churches would continue to exist in some sort of formal communion. As he sees it, this would avoid “apocalyptic terms of schism and excommunication.”

Without doubt, churches and denominations can remain healthy even as they experience disagreement over any number of non-fundamental issues. Nevertheless, when an issue as fundamental as the sinfulness of homosexuality becomes the fulcrum of division, no church or denomination can maintain a divided mind. Given the Bible’s clear statements regarding homosexuality, those who honor the authority of Scripture must see a division on this question as a test of their church’s commitment to the Scriptures as the Word of God.

While in this case it is the Episcopal Church that provides the object lesson, similar issues and questions of ecclesial integrity can and will arise within every church and denomination. In this light, these recent developments in the Episcopal Church demand the careful attention of every committed Christian.

Read it all.

The Nigerian bishops’ conference is calling for a new beginning so as to save the country from “collapse” in the wake of recent violence.

This was affirmed in a statement distributed Thursday by the Nigerian Catholic Secretariat, signed by Father Louis Odudu, the deputy secretary general.

The statement responded to a wave of violence that claimed hundreds of lives and displaced thousands in the north of the country.

The confrontation began Sunday when a fundamentalist Islamic group called “Boko Haram” staged a raid on a police station in an effort to establish a Taliban-style regime based on a strict observance of Shariah law.

Read it all.

Massachusetts is proud of its landmark 3-year-old health insurance law. It has brought the state’s proportion of uninsured down from around 10 percent in 2005 to only 2.6 percent ”” the lowest in the nation.

But the achievement is in jeopardy. Massachusetts has the highest health costs in the country.

“The critical point is whether or not we can begin to do something about cost control,” says Dolores Mitchell, who heads a state commission that buys coverage for 310,000 government workers and their families. “We’ve just got to do it.”

Read it all.

This spring in Massachusetts, a Catholic hospital system announced a joint venture with a secular company to provide insurance to the poor under the state’s universal health-care program.

The venture fulfilled one pillar of Catholic social teaching — caring for the needy.

But it violated another principle, because the state-run health plan for low- and moderate-income adults subsidizes abortion. The Catholic hospital didn’t perform abortions but was required to refer patients to clinics that would, an act the church considers immoral.

The tension between Catholicism’s commitment to the poor and opposition to abortion touched off weeks of debate, prompting Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston to consult with Catholic bioethicists — and, eventually, to insist the joint venture be scrubbed.

Read it all.

To no one’s surprise, this summer’s Convention in Anaheim, California, decided to wriggle out of the very loose restraints which it had imposed upon itself in the 2006 Resolution B033. In that resolution it had accepted a certain form of the moratoria on the election of partnered gay clergy as bishops and on liturgical recognition of same-sex partnerships, as requested by the Anglican Communion’s Instruments of Unity. This resolution was not technically repealed at Anaheim. Nonetheless, in the view of almost every observer, Resolution D025 has opened the door to the ordination of such persons; Resolution C056 has opened the door to liturgies for quasi-marital blessings of their unions. (The Presiding Bishop insisted that these resolutions are “descriptive” rather than “prescriptive” in force, but it is to be doubted whether such gossamer-fine distinctions will be maintained, even by her. What is acknowledged is permitted, and what is permitted soon becomes mandatory ”“ that is the pattern of most innovations over the past forty years.)
Because these resolutions authorize what the Bible and the Church catholic have not authorized, they cannot be reconciled with the fundamental constitutional commitments of the Episcopal Church to “uphold and propagate the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer”, and to do so as “a constituent member of the Anglican Communion”. Nor can they be reconciled with the teaching of the Communion articulated in Resolution 1.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference.

In an age of social tolerance like ours the controversy these resolutions stir up may seem inexplicable. It is worth attending to the recent reflections of the Archbishop of Canterbury ”“ a theologian who cannot be accused of reactionary views, and indeed is considered by many conservatives to concede too much to the liberal position (the complete statement may be read at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2502). He argues convincingly that the action of General Convention destroys the very communion that is intrinsic to the Church’s mission:

“the issue [he writes] is not simply about civil liberties or human dignity or even about pastoral sensitivity to the freedom of individual Christians to form their consciences on this matter. It is about whether the Church is free to recognise same-sex unions by means of public blessings that are seen as being, at the very least, analogous to Christian marriage.

“In the light of the way in which the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years, it is clear that a positive answer to this question would have to be based on the most painstaking biblical exegesis and on a wide acceptance of the results within the Communion, with due account taken of the teachings of ecumenical partners also. A major change naturally needs a strong level of consensus and solid theological grounding.
“This is not our situation in the Communion. Thus a blessing for a same-sex union cannot have the authority of the Church Catholic, or even of the Communion as a whole. And if this is the case, a person living in such a union is in the same case as a heterosexual person living in a sexual relationship outside the marriage bond; whatever the human respect and pastoral sensitivity such persons must be given, their chosen lifestyle is not one that the Church’s teaching sanctions, and thus it is hard to see how they can act in the necessarily representative role that the ordained ministry, especially the episcopate, requires. (…) … a person living in such a union cannot without serious incongruity have a representative function in a Church whose public teaching is at odds with their lifestyle. (…)
“When a local church seeks to respond to a new question, to the challenge of possible change in its practice or discipline in the light of new facts, new pressures, or new contexts, as local churches have repeatedly sought to do, it needs some way of including in its discernment the judgement of the wider Church. Without this, it risks becoming unrecognisable to other local churches, pressing ahead with changes that render

it strange to Christian sisters and brothers across the globe.
“This is not some piece of modern bureaucratic absolutism, but the conviction of the Church from its very early days. The doctrine that ‘what affects the communion of all should be decided by all’ is a venerable principle.”
Where then does the schismatic unilateralism of the General Convention leave the diocese of Georgia? Since our communion with the wider church is through the local bishop and not the General Convention or the Presiding Bishop, we must be grateful that Bishop Louttit in conscience voted against these resolutions. Moreover, the lay delegation of the diocese voted 4-0 against both resolutions. Less happily, the clergy (hereby dubbed the weakest link) voted 3-1 in favour of C056 and was divided 2-2 on D025. Since two of the clergy delegates are candidates for bishop (William Willoughby and Frank Logue), how they voted is a matter of legitimate public interest which the report on the diocesan website coyly withholds. As for Saint John’s, at the next Vestry meeting I trust the State of the Church committee will propose a resolution declaring where we stand as a parish.

–The Rev. Gavin Dunbar is rector, Saint John’s, Savannah, Georgia

Californians have dramatically shifted their views on the controversial issue of same-sex marriage from overwhelming opposition a generation ago to supporting it by a five-point margin today, a new Field Poll shows.

The latest Field Poll, which examined the changing California electorate over the last three decades, shows that state voters have become far more tolerant than they were three decades ago on some controversial social issues – including abortion rights and assisted suicide, both of which they now overwhelmingly support.

Major shifts on such social issues are tied to demographic changes and in large part to the growing ranks of independent voters, who now make up one-fifth of the state electorate, said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll.

Read it all.

The main difference I see is the difference between a post-Christian American society and a post-Western Christianity rising in Africa and elsewhere. The one is in decline, at least intellectually, and the other is in spate. The taming of Christianity in North America requires very different tools from those required by the conditions favoring expansion in Africa. Christians are not afraid to go to church for prayer and healing when they are ill, for instance, whereas in North America prayers may be said for people who are ill but only in absentia.

Africans trust God for their spiritual, physical, social, and medical needs; Americans don’t.

—Lamin Sanneh, D. Willis James Professor of Missions &World Christianity and Professor of History at Yale Divinity School

A week of brutal violence in northern Nigeria has spurred questions over whether an obscure homegrown religious fundamentalist group represents a broader threat to national security in Africa’s most populous nation.

More than 800 people were killed last week during fighting between an Islamic fundamentalist group calling itself Boko Haram, and Nigerian security forces. The clashes spread across several northern states.

A Red Cross worker in the northern city of Maiduguri, where most of the fighting occurred, said that 780 bodies had been collected in the past few days, and that at least 3,600 Maiduguri residents had been displaced. Officials in Bauchi, where the violence began, had earlier confirmed more than 50 deaths.

Read it all.

She wrote that budget concerns also played a role in her discernment.

“There have been funds for the Diocese of Olympia to pay me when I was needed in this diocese,” she wrote. “The income budget for 2010 brings a new reality that makes these other longings come into clearer focus.” The diocese announced in late July that its School of Ministry and Theology would not operate during the coming year due to budget cuts and a need to redefine its mission.

Read it all.

Check it out.

Update: You can find the AP story on this here. It begins as follows:

The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation’s plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.

The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.

Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession’s impact: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.

The last time the government’s revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.

If you think it’s difficult to be pro-life in a pro-choice world, or to be a disciple of Jesus in a sea of skeptics, try advocating for young marriage. Almost no one empathizes, even among the faithful. The nearly universal hostile reaction to my April 23, 2009, op-ed on early marriage in The Washington Post suggests that to esteem marriage in the public sphere today is to speak a foreign language: you invoke annoyance, confusion, or both.

But after years of studying the sexual behavior and family decision-making of young Americans, I’ve come to the conclusion that Christians have made much ado about sex but are becoming slow and lax about marriage””that more significant, enduring witness to Christ’s sacrificial love for his bride. Americans are taking flight from marriage. We are marrying later, if at all, and having fewer children.

Demographers call it the second demographic transition. In societies like ours that exhibit lengthy economic prosperity, men and women alike begin to lose motivation to marry and have children, and thus avoid one or both. Pragmatically, however, the institution of marriage remains a foundational good for individuals and communities. It is by far the optimal context for child-rearing. Married people accumulate more wealth than people who are single or cohabiting. Marriage consolidates expenses””like food, child care, electricity, and gas””and over the life course drastically reduces the odds of becoming indigent or dependent on the state.

Read it carefully and read it all, it is the cover story from the latest Christianity Today.

These incidents are the latest in the ongoing series of attacks that Christians in Pakistan have had to endure in recent years.

The Revd Patrick Augustine, now a priest of The Episcopal Church in Wisconsin, United States, but himself born in Gojra, where his father and grandfather ministered, writes that in such attacks, ”˜The Muslim attackers have often justified the persecution of Christians in Pakistan on the basis of the draconian Blasphemy Law section 295”“B and 295-C passed in 1982. These two laws make anyone deemed to have insulted the holy prophet of Islam or dishonoured the Holy Qur’an liable for capital punishment and life imprisonment and fines. In its selective application it has provided a pretext for private vendettas, but its victims almost always have been Christians.’

Bishop Mano Rumalshah of Peshawar Diocese in Pakistan commented, ”˜It is horrible to have to say this – but at least these latest incidents have led to somebody ”“ both in Pakistan and outside the country – hearing our cry. Such episodes occur again and again, and their nature is always very similar: false accusations being made against Christians, and Muslim militants being stirred up by the voices of extremist preachers.’

Read it all.

The recent atrocities against Christians in Pakistan will sear the imaginations of countless people of all faiths throughout the world. As the minister of law in the Punjab has already said, such actions are not the work of true Muslims: they are an abuse of real faith and an injury to its reputation as well as an outrage against common humanity, and deserve forthright condemnation.

Read it all.

“The heartbeat of our Episcopal Church will forever be ‘mission, mission, mission.'”

This statement of “priorities” appeared in the published budget presented to the 76th General Convention in Anaheim, California, by the Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance. There can be no doubt that mission is a central priority of the Episcopal Church. Sixty-two percent of our budget is expended on program and mission.

Sadly, the budget for the 2010-2012 triennium shows scant concern for what, in the absence of better language, I would label “branding,” “marketing” and “advertising” the Episcopal Church. Actually, I do have better language — evangelism.

In the upcoming triennium, the Episcopal Church plans on spending more than $3 million to preserve our past through our Archives Offices and another $3 million to communicate with our own members through budgeted communications expenses and such vehicles as Episcopal Life.

Nowhere is there evidence of an equivalent financial commitment to sharing the Episcopal Church’s compelling story of mission and ministry and our unique presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ in a strategic, systematic and significant way to the millions of people in this country who are unchurched and who, according to reliable research, increasingly identify themselves as “not Christian.” In fact, in passing the budget for the upcoming triennium, the 76th General Convention skewered an exciting and carefully developed plan for strategic evangelism and growth among Hispanics and Latinos, the single largest-growing segment of our nation, allocating only $300,000 for the project instead of the $3 million originally requested by those ready to do the work.

Read it all.

It’s been about three months now since we heard of Alberto Cutie, the former Roman Catholic priest who was caught kissing his girlfriend on a Miami beach. No sooner was he removed from his post than he left the Catholic Church altogether for the local Episcopal diocese, which welcomed him with much fanfare and sent him to pastor a local church.
Alberto-Cutie-2.jpg

As I looked at photos of Cutie, I realized there was something very familiar about the background: I used to attend that church.

That was when I was a reporter for the Hollywood Sun-Tattler, a daily of about 35,000 circulation when I moved there in 1983 as a general assignment reporter. Hollywood is a few suburbs to the north of Biscayne Park, where sits the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, Father Cutie’s digs.

Read it all.

Officials with the breakaway Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin say they will appeal a Fresno County Superior Court ruling that affirmed the U.S. Episcopal Church’s authority and its choice for a bishop — a man the decision said controls the local church’s affairs and properties.

The ruling did not directly address ownership of disputed properties claimed by the Episcopal Church but occupied by breakaway congregations. But the ruling likely will make it hard for the rebel diocese to hold on to the properties as the legal battle between the two sides continues.

Read it all.

Liberals in the Church of England declared war on conservatives including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams tonight.

Condemning as “flawed” Dr Williams’s recent declaration that the way forward lay in a “twin-track” Anglican Communion, liberals revealed plans to bring in same-sex blessings and gay ordination in England, as has happened in the Episcopal Church in the US.

Their strategy will be to attempt to win the General Synod, the Church’s governing body currently dominated by evangelicals, over to the liberal cause. The opportunity will come next year when the quinquennial elections for a new synod are due.

Liberals from organisations such as Inclusive Church, set up and led by Giles Fraser, the new canon chancellor of St Paul’s, and the long-established Modern Churchpeople’s Union, will attempt to win key seats throughout the Church’s 44 dioceses in what look likely to be the hardest fought elections since the synod came into being in 1970 and which could turn into a battle for the soul of the established Church.

Read it all.

[The] Rev. Jeffrey H. Walker, a tall man with dark-rimmed round glasses, walked in singing. He led the congregation through prayers that reminded me those similar to Catholic masses like the Nicene Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. But The Book of Common Prayer was a new addition to my understanding of prayer in church.

Rev. Walker is a good storyteller, but he is also genuinely funny. He began his sermon with the words of an old friend. “I don’t go to church, but if I did, I’d go to yours,” he started. “If I counted all the times someone said that to me, I’d be the rector of the largest congregation in the Episcopal Church.”

This began a story about people who walk away from religion. Some have cited the inclusion of gay clergy more recently; others have declared the appointment of V. Gene Robinson in 2003, the first openly gay bishop, as the “end of civilization.” (They are the same people, no doubt, who dislike the recent nomination of gay priests for promotion.)

Considering all of the challenges and changes facing the church in recent months – both when the General Convention affirmed gay clergy and same-sex unions and the Anglican Communion’s reacted to those affirmations – it was compelling to hear Rev. Walker talk about the reasons people stray from organized religion.

Read it all.

The liberal fightback against Anglican conservatives and the Archbishop of Canterbury has begun. Open warfare is now declared.

Pro-gays in the Church of England are planning a survey of all LGBT clergy, in and out of the closet, in London, Southwark and throughout the Church. In the capital, they reckon, it is as many as 20 per cent. They are also intending to survey precisely how many gay blessings have been and are being done. Again, estimates put the number in the hundreds.

After that, bearing in mind the General Synod elections next year, they will make a push for the Church of England to approve gay blessings and gay ordinations to the priesthood and episcopate, as The Episcopal Church has done.

Read it all.

i was on your site just a while ago reading your roots of the roots piece, how do you know your father if your not taught by him, his word. I agree with basic, but once you know basic you really want to increase that. Interesting piece got me thinking a lot….

i am actually surpised you don’t write more, your style of writing seems to promote good and deep thought, I would enjoy reading more of your pieces, I am sure many more would agree