Christians and Muslims share concern and compassion for those suffering in poverty and can find common ground to work toward eradicating both the causes and the problems it creates, the Vatican said.

In its traditional message to Muslims at the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue called attention to poverty as “a subject at the heart of the precepts that, under different beliefs, we all hold dear.”

As “brothers and sisters in humanity,” the letter said, people of both faiths can help the poor “establish their place in the fabric of society.”

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I spent the last few days here at the 60th annual convention of the Religion Newswriters Association, which is the national organization that represents the dwindling band of us who cover religion in the media. Attendance is off this year, in part because newsroom travel budgets are down, but also because the religion beat itself is suffering a serious reversal of fortune.

When I first started covering religion for the Globe nearly a decade ago, the beat was almost trendy; newspapers were beefing up their coverage considerably, religion sections were fat, and a few newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, had four or more religion writers.

No more. There have been reductions in the number of reporters who write about religion full time at all of the nation’s biggest newspapers, and the religion news beat has disappeared from multiple midsize and smaller papers. The surviving newspaper religion sections are getting smaller.

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But for a long time he stood alongside his colleagues, handing out bread and butter as people held out their trays.

O’Sullivan told me the kitchen averages 245 lunches served per day. This is up about 10 percent from last year. He also praised Leavy for “putting his considerable faith in action.” O’Sullivan called Leavy “a remarkable fellow.”

At 12:30 p.m. it was quitting time. Leavy took off his apron, picked up his cane and called Whitney Center to ask for a ride. Within a half-hour a car picked us up and brought us back to his place, where he planned to relax, take a nap and play Bach on his piano.

When I asked him if getting downtown, working and getting back was tiring, he replied with a grin, “At this age, anything makes you tired!”

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Most people are lucky to find one career in their lifetime that they can truly enjoy.

Yuman Bill Krieger has been fortunate enough to have two.

Krieger used to help design offshore oil rigs.

These days, every Wednesday and Sunday, the congregation at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church know him as Father Bill.

“I feel like this is a second life,” Krieger said about his current career.

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The president’s contention was questionable.

But Rep. Wilson’s rash rudeness was a disgrace for him, an embarrassment for South Carolina and a particularly appalling breach of protocol by a native of Charleston, a bastion of gentility. Fellow federal lawmakers swiftly responded with bipartisan condemnation….

And we express sincere disappointment at seeing Joe Wilson descending to such deplorably bitter depths in a sorry spectacle that’s a sign of our increasingly acrimonious times.

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Miller enthusiastically joins in the debate. He is eager to remind twenty-first-century readers that “Jung, Pauli and their contemporaries considered Jung’s research to be quite as important as Pauli’s work in physics”, and certainly seems to be more than open-minded on that point himself. Pauli was intrigued to find, on consulting a scholar of Jewish mysticism, that the word Kabbalah, written as numbers in Hebrew, adds up to 137. Miller agrees that this is “an extraordinary link between mysticism and physics”. Neither does he question Jung’s accounts of Pauli’s dreams: a more rational explanation of the images that successively appear in them might be that Pauli’s increasing preoccupation with Jung’s theories while waking caused him to rehearse versions of them in his sleep. Miller also seems surprisingly little interested in the relationship between Pauli and his parents. Pauli’s mother poisoned herself when his father left her for another woman, but Pauli’s psychological problems clearly date from before this traumatic event, which did not occur until he was twenty-seven.

Miller himself originally trained as a physicist before developing an interest in the history and philosophy of science. His ability to approach his subject from the perspective of both the sciences and the humanities is a great strength. My sympathies, however, lie with Pauli’s loving second wife Franca, who did at least as much as Jung to make him a more or less civilized member of society, and who spent the three decades she survived him trying to delay publication of his correspondence with Jung, in case it damaged his image as a serious scientist.

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A few hours before dawn, when most New Yorkers are fast asleep, a middle-aged man rolls out of bed in Brooklyn, dons a billowy red outfit and matching turban, climbs into his Lincoln Town Car, drives 15 minutes, pulls out a big drum and ”” there on the sidewalk of a residential neighborhood ”” starts to play.

The man, Mohammad Boota, is a Ramadan drummer. Every morning during the holy month, which ends on Sept. 21, drummers stroll the streets of Muslim communities around the world, waking worshipers so they can eat a meal before the day’s fasting begins.

But New York City, renowned for welcoming all manner of cultural traditions, has limits to its hospitality. And so Mr. Boota, a Pakistani immigrant, has spent the past several years learning uncomfortable lessons about noise-complaint hot lines, American profanity and the particular crankiness of non-Muslims rousted from sleep at 3:30 a.m.

“Everywhere they complain,” he said. “People go, like, ”˜What the hell? What you doing, man?’ They never know it’s Ramadan.”

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The key words are “abortion neutral.”

What those two words mean is that neither abortion opponents nor abortion rights advocates would use the overhaul effort to advance their agendas. Most important, they would not try to change the legal status quo regarding federal financing of abortions.

That truce did not mean that those activists ”” or Americans generally ”” were themselves abortion neutral. Far from it.

When it comes to health care, abortion rights supporters strongly believe that abortion should be treated no differently than any other medical procedure to which Americans have a legal right. Abortion opponents say that a procedure they view as lethal to a distinct member of the human species, no matter how early in its development, hardly qualifies as health care.

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The scale of that help is huge. Loans from central banks and debt guarantees alone amount to $2.7 trillion. As with any private industry in receipt of almost unlimited cheap public funds, finance now has every incentive to be as big as possible””beyond the point of usefulness. Change the assumptions behind this weird system, and everything else, including pay and the heads-I-win, tails-you-lose culture, will move too.

Removing the explicit side of the state’s commitment is relatively simple. Some guarantees are still plainly needed now, but a firm deadline of, say, five years for the final expiry of the governments’ various crisis-induced pledges should be set globally. With the world economy in better shape, this looks more realistic than it did six months ago. But even then the implicit assumption will linger that banks will always be bailed out. This is the core problem. There are two possible responses to it: regulate banks to try to make them safer, and attempt to limit the implicit guarantee. Both approaches are now needed.

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[BOB] FAW: On nearly 600 remote acres in south central Wisconsin, even private time, as when Brother Stephen Treat walks the Stations of the Cross, even that time is spent, he says, lifting his mind exclusively to God.

BROTHER STEPHEN TREAT (Cistercian Abbey): The main part of our business is going into that church seven times a day and praising God and praying for the safety and well-being of the world.

FAW: Even when Father Bernard relaxes with his Spanish hotbloods Alejandro and Tinaco, or with the ordinary Bert, there is meditation.

FATHER BERNARD: Theirs is about being and about awareness, and there is a quietness to them, obviously, for the most part, so they are a very contemplative presence in our life.

FAW: The rituals, the routines here are familiar, but what sets this abbey apart is that while it keeps one foot in the 11th century, the other is firmly planted in the 21st. On the grounds nearby, with a background of Gregorian chants, is a high-powered Internet operation run by two laywomen which permits the abbey to flourish.

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While visiting Afghanistan in July, I met a U.S. diplomat in Helmand Province who told me this story: He had served in Anbar, in Iraq, and one day a Marine officer came to him, after carrying a wounded buddy off the battlefield on his back, and said to him, “The policy had better match the sacrifice.”

In Iraq, for way too long, our policy did not match the sacrifice of our soldiers. It was badly planned and under-resourced. Before we proceed with this new strategy in Afghanistan we have to give our generals a chance to make their case, we also have to insist that Congress debate it anew, hear other experts, and, if Congress decides to go ahead, to formally authorize it. Like Iraq, it would involve a long struggle, and we can’t ask our soldiers to start something we have no stomach to finish.

In short, President Obama has to be as committed to any surge in Afghanistan as President Bush was in Iraq, because Mr. Obama will have to endure a lot of bad news before things ”” might ”” get better.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told an American Legion convention about Afghanistan: “Let’s take a good hard look at this fight we’re in, what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. I’d rather see us as a nation argue about the war, struggling to get it right, than ignore it. Because each time I go to Dover to see the return of someone’s father, brother, mother, or sister, I want to know that collectively we’ve done all we can to make sure that sacrifice isn’t in vain.”

It was not a lesson Lawrence Summers mastered with great ease. But after nearly a decade working beside sphinxlike Alan Greenspan, and having watched his own tenure as president of Harvard cut short by a phrase that slipped too nimbly from brain to mouth, Summers, director of the President’s National Economic Council, has become a restrained public man. Gone are the days when he would glibly compare flailing financial markets to jet crashes, as he did to TIME in 1999. He is mindful of how ill-considered asides by policymakers can cause financial-market angina. So you can probably imagine the ripple that ran through the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington in July when Summers looked up from his prepared speech, flashed a grin and loosed the sort of utterance that once upon a time marked imminent indiscretion. “There was,” he told the room, “a fight about whether I was allowed to say this now that I work in the White House.”

What Summers proceeded to offer was, in fact, an unusually candid insight. And though couched in jargon, it was an insider’s confession of why our present economic moment is fraught with both danger and opportunity. There appears to be, Summers told the suddenly very attentive crowd, a strange bit of physics working itself out in our economy. The problem is related to a hiccup in an economic rule called Okun’s law. First mooted by economist Arthur Okun in 1962, the law (it’s really more of a rule of thumb) says that when the economy grows, it produces jobs at a predictable rate, and when it shrinks, it sheds them at a similarly regular pace. It’s a labor version of how the accelerator on your car works: add gas, go faster; less gas, go slower.

What made Summers’ frank comment important is that it suggests this just-add-gas relationship may now be malfunctioning. The American economy has been shedding jobs much, much faster than Okun’s law predicts. According to that rough rule, we should be at about 8.5% unemployment today, not slipping toward 10%. Something new and possibly strange seems to be happening in this recession. Something unpredicted by the experts. “I don’t think,” Summers told the Peterson Institute crowd ”” deviating again from his text ”” “that anyone fully understands this phenomenon.” And that raises some worrying questions. Will creating jobs be that much slower too? Will double-digit unemployment persist even after we emerge from this recession? Has the idea of full employment rather suddenly become antiquated? Is there something fundamentally broken in the heart of our economy? And if so, how can we fix it?

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Still, worry remains, making future hiring unlikely. Rockwell’s customers have resumed replacing older gear, but have not begun full-scale expansions, which would generate much more business.

Factory managers doubt whether American consumers ”” still reeling from lost jobs and savings ”” can snap back vigorously enough to restore manufacturing.

“I’ve got 22 years of experience and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Mike Laszkiewicz, 48, vice president and general manager of Rockwell’s power control business. “This is a tough one. I’m a little uncertain which way this is going to go.”

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China announced a probe into the alleged dumping of American auto and chicken products, two days after U.S. President Barack Obama imposed tariffs on imports of tires from the Asian nation.

Chinese industries have complained that they’re being hurt by “unfair trade practices,” the nation’s Ministry of Commerce said on its Web site yesterday. The Beijing-based ministry is also looking into subsidies for the products, it said. It didn’t specify the imports’ value.

The European Central Bank said last week that rising protectionism may hamper world trade and undermine the global economy’s recovery from recession. The U.S. placed tariffs starting at 35 percent on $1.8 billion of tire imports from China, backing a United Steelworkers union complaint against the second-largest U.S. trading partner.

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What time is it?” the preacher asks.

“Preaching time!” comes the collective response.

“What time is it?” he repeats.

“Preaching time!!” they answer, louder.

“What time is it?”

“Preaching time!!!”

“Gospel means ‘good news,’ and there’s no better news than the Book of John,” the Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III begins, steering the congregation at Charity Missionary Baptist Church to Chapter 9, Verses 18-25, which recount the story of the blind man made to see.

Read it all from the Faith and Values section of the local paper.

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali said that the rejection of Christian values is having a damaging effect on the country.

Speaking at his farewell service, he expressed particular concern at the breakdown of the family and at growing calls for the legalisation of assisted suicide.

Although he is stepping down as bishop, he vowed to continue to speak out on important issues and to fight for a return to Christian principles.

“I believe that the Christian faith is necessary for the life of our country,” he said.

“We need to get away from the constant making of moral decisions by opinion poll.

“We are facing a crisis about affirming the dignity of human purpose.

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Lord Carey paid this tribute during the service ( not verbatim):

“I want to express my thanks to Bishop Michael for his magnificent ministry as a Diocesan Bishop. But I want to focus on his national and international roles. Ask the average informed person in England which bishops they can name, and they will probably name two who come from outside these islands ”“ Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Rochester.

They have both touched a nerve with the British public. They ask questions from a much more critical perspective ”“ they are outspoken, brave and controversial. Michael speaks out of conviction and is not afraid to speak his mind. This has led him to receive his share of opprobrium and even death threats. He has also been outspoken in the House of Bishops. His clear mind undergirded by scholarship has also been a great resource to the General Synod. In the debates on Liturgy I asked Michael to guide us through the complex theological issues. Who can forget the magisterial debate he had with Professor Anthony Thiselton on the translation of the preposition ”˜ek. He was the first to identify problems and with him there was no pulling of punches.

His views on the damage done by The Episcopal Church in consecrating Gene Robinson as a bishop were applauded by many, including me. Though ignored by urban elites, he earned the right to be a critical friend of Islam. His contribution after 9/11 was invaluable when he put forward a number of ideas to open up dialogue with Muslim scholars. In 1988 ( for which Michael was study secretary) the Anglican Communion began to take dialogue with Islam seriously ”“ and in his new post following Lambeth as General Secretary of Church Mission Society he was best placed to do that. In his new post he reminded us that dialogue was not an end in itself ”“ and called for reciprocity and the freedom to change beliefs that are denied to so many Christians.

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“By plotting a graph of the expansion of the monasteries throughout the Middle Ages we might easily have concluded that nine-tenths of the British people were celibates today.” John V Taylor’s wisdom, in his prophetic, ecological gem Enough is Enough, is worth remembering concerning any future predictions, not least the growth of Islam in the west. None of us knows what is round the corner.

Another shrewd attitude towards the past and the future is that taken by Zhou Enlai, the Chinese prime minister who died in 1975. When asked how he assessed the French Revolution, replied, “It’s a little too early to judge.”

Are Anglican conservatives in the Anglican communion turning their attention away from issues of sexuality to the threat of Islam? From reading articles and comments and taking part in various private discussions, this seems to me too simplistic an analysis. Perceptions on both these subjects may interweave and are likely to feature in future comment and campaign.

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“God of grace and God of glory,” prayed the Rev. Cynthia Hale during a national conference call Aug. 19 on health care reform, “É We believe that it is your will that every man, woman, boy and girl receive quality health care in America.”

On that point, no religious leader would contest Hale, pastor at Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Ga., who offered the prayer at the kickoff of an effort by the faith community to mobilize religious support for the ideals of health care reform favored by President Obama.

From the pulpits and through public statements, religious leaders have been weighing in on various elements of what they say is a crucial moral issue. Catholic bishops in New Jersey, in letters to the state’s members of Congress, have lobbied against possible inclusion of abortion coverage in any federal health care plan, a possibility Obama dismissed in his prime-time speech Wednesday. The Episcopal Church USA passed a resolution favoring a single-payer system, while some Catholic bishops in the Midwest have publicly opposed any massive government effort.

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ON a recent humid Sunday, 26 members of the Harmonium Choral Society shuffled into Grace Episcopal Church here and dropped their belongings among the pews. As they stood in a scattered group, they locked gazes, stretched their arms skyward and hissed at one another.

That was a warm-up for a three-hour session that would culminate in the recording of three minutes of original music, created on the spot, to be woven into the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey’s production of “Hamlet,” which is running in Madison through Oct. 11. Music previously recorded by the group would be used at other points in the play.

Bonnie J. Monte, the Shakespeare Theater’s artistic director, approached Harmonium’s director, Anne Matlack, about a collaboration after she heard the singers at a First Night event in Morristown last year.

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Jesus was fiercely determined that we might see the truth about our condition, not so we would despair, but so we would flee to him for refuge and cleansing. This is what the gospel is all about. The truth will set you free.

It simply breaks my spirit when I hear people who should know better insist that this teaching of original sin and the universally diseased human heart is an insult to human dignity, when in fact it is curiously liberating because it throws us entirely on the dependence of God’s grace. And God’s grace gives new life!

There’s an old legend that pre-dates the story of the princes and the frog. It has a simple but sound theological allegory: The ballad tells of how a handsome night found coiling around a tree in a dismal forest, a loathsome serpent-like-dragon breathing out poison; and how, undeterred by its hideousness and foulness, the knight cast his arms around it and kissed it on the mouth. The thing resisted him fiercely, but the knight persisted, and finally the beast changed into a fair lady, and he won his bride. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Being loved when you don’t deserve it is the most transforming thing in the world.

Who are the most humble people in the world? Are they not those who have looked within and recognized their own foulness, yet who have felt the love of God when they didn’t deserve it? Is it any wonder that the atoning sacrifice of Jesus’ blood is most cherished by those who have searched their hearts and found them in desperate need of cleansing?

Who are the most humble before other sinners? Who are the most patient and kind before other peoples’ flaws and weaknesses? Who are the most compassionate and ready to forgive other people? Are they not the ones who see the truth about their own condition and have come to know the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ?

Brothers and sisters in Christ, as long as our hearts have a beat, and as long as vermin breathe, we will struggle. But beloved simply keep to the old gospel. There are no new theories for us, no newly found places of refuge. Keep to the old gospel of Jesus and his love. It is the one thing needful, exactly suited to our necessities. May God draw reluctant hearts, and now give doubting souls courage to believe for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

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On the eighth anniversary of the terrorist strikes, the Coast Guard incident served as an unwelcome reminder of two facts of life in the capital: Homeland security authorities continue to bear an occasional, unnerving likeness to Keystone Kops, and the cable-news-driven, minute-by-minute news cycle has a unique ability to sow mass confusion and misinformation.

—Dana Milbank in today’s Washington Post

In an interview, Outreach founder and chief executive Scott Evans said a recent study by Southern Baptist-affiliated Lifeway Research sparked the campaign. The study found that “82 percent of people who don’t go to church would be somewhat likely to go if invited but that only 2 percent of people who do go to church had invited someone,” he said. Outreach, Evans said, is “equipping people to be inviters.”

Eric Abel, the vice president of marketing for Outreach, said the organization works with about 17,000 churches; most of the interest in the back-to-church campaign is coming from evangelical or nondenominational churches.

According to Evans, there have been more than 1,000 requests for the tool kits. Outreach’s Web site allows people to record how many people they’ve invited to church; the count is up to nearly 700,000.

In Great Britain, Back to Church Sunday, which is Sept. 27 this year, was started in 2004 by the Anglican Diocese of Manchester. Anglican churches in New Zealand and Canada picked up the idea, and British Baptist, Methodist and United Reform churches are taking part.

Although the Back to Church Sunday campaign in the United States is generating buzz on Facebook, many mainline Protestant churches were staging fall welcomes long before there was electricity, much less computers. Concord Presbyterian Church in Statesville, N.C., is holding its 234th homecoming celebration on Sept. 20 — the congregation was founded in 1775 — with guest speakers and musicians.

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Worth rereading and saving, eight years on.

ABC: I remember people sometimes say about the Church, especially the Church of England. I remember one of my students saying, It’s still a place where you put the stuff that won’t go anywhere else. And I find that quite a moving definition of the Church because it suggests our society still has a great deal of belief, hope, need, confusion, which a lot of our social life simply does not give any vehicles for dealing with. It’s got to go somewhere. And I don’t think that’s dead yet.

IH: What strikes me is that we have quite a conspicuous secular drive at the moment. We also have a fundamental drive. So people are driven to be believing in absolutely everything, or nothing at all and being fiercely proud of it. My entire relationship with the Church of England was based is that it didn’t question too closely what I believed in. I was told by someone I was in a long tradition of CofE agnosticism, which is basically the old Flanders and Swann joke: Religion? Don’t know. I’ll put you down as CofE. And I wonder if the Church is not making it clear enough that it is still there in the middle, that you don’t have to be an American evangelical, you do not have to be a Muslim fundamentalist, you do not have to be Richard Dawkins. At the Edinburgh festival this year there were at least four comedians selling out on the basis that Genesis isn’t literal. Extraordinary perception by these young men. They’ve caught up with 19th century theology. That does suggest the Church is slightly failing to say, do you know anything about us any more? It isn’t that.

ABC: That is one of the anxieties that many people in the Church feel, that a period of cultural legacy of knowing a bit about it has vanished and that therefore what people know is what high-profile headlines say and what the conflicts communicate. This is where the Church of England in particular does have quite a complicated balancing act. The Church as someone said decades ago, has to be something, has to be itself. The question is how to be itself with integrity in a way that doesn’t barricade the doors. I think understanding that the language of our theology the language of our hymns the symbolism of our worship is invitation before it’s anything else, it’s not a set of conditions before you come through the door… In the world of the imagination, of the arts, time was when the Christian faith was bound in with a lot of that. You couldn’t really say that now, easily. And yet that’s where a lot of people find the depth they want, the dimensionality they want.’

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Jesus tells his Disciples that in fact he will suffer severely, be rejected by the authorities, and put to death. It makes no sense. If He is the Christ, how can He be destined for such an end? Peter takes Him aside and makes that very point to Him. For his trouble Peter is called Satan. The one who has just acknowledged Jesus as the Christ is himself rebuked as though he were the Devil. And then Jesus speaks to the people as well as his Disciples and warns them: those who want to save their lives will lose them; it is those who lose their lives through following Him that will save them. A defeated Messiah, support dismissed as diabolical, and death promised instead of life: what had seemed to be triumph is unveiled as disaster. Here is failure writ large.

What sense can be made of it, this extraordinary invitation to failure, following the Christ who loses and losing our own lives in doing so?

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ATHEISM really may be fighting against nature: humans have been hardwired by evolution to believe in God, scientists have suggested.

The idea has emerged from studies of the way children’s brains develop and of the workings of the brain during religious experiences. They suggest that during evolution groups of humans with religious tendencies began to benefit from their beliefs, perhaps because they tended to work together better and so stood a greater chance of survival.

The findings challenge campaigners against organised religion, such as Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. He has long argued that religious beliefs result from poor education and childhood “indoctrination”.

Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University, believes the picture is more complex. “Our research shows children have a natural, intuitive way of reasoning that leads them to all kinds of supernatural beliefs about how the world works,” he said.

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One year after the demise of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. paralyzed the financial system, “mega-banks,” as Fine’s group calls them, are as interconnected and inscrutable as ever. The Obama administration’s plan for a regulatory overhaul wouldn’t force them to shrink or simplify their structure.

“We could have another Lehman Monday,” Niall Ferguson, author of the 2008 book “The Ascent of Money” and a professor of history at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in an interview. “The system is essentially unchanged, except that post-Lehman, the survivors have ”˜too big to fail’ tattooed on their chests.”

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I caught this this morning on the way to the dentist–very funny.

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