Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams held a private meeting September 2 with seven Episcopal Church bishops at Lambeth Palace, his London residence.

The bishops attending the meeting were Mark Lawrence of South Carolina, Gary Lillibridge of West Texas, Edward Little of Northern Indiana, Bill Love of Albany, Michael Smith of North Dakota, James Stanton of Dallas, and Bruce MacPherson of Western Louisiana.

A spokesperson in the Lambeth Palace press office confirmed that Williams had hosted the seven Episcopal bishops, but said that the meeting was private.

When asked for his reflections on the meeting, MacPherson told ENS that the bishops will have “something forthcoming soon.”

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They always saw themselves as a neighborhood parish, committed to the idea that with their brand of spirituality they could make a difference to those around them.

But when Bishop Geralyn Wolf chose the Church of the Epiphany as the site of her first parish visit after being installed as Rhode Island’s Episcopal bishop 13 years ago, there was already a growing sense that the parish was in trouble.

With roots going back to its start as a mission church in 1868, members believed their West End parish could show the world that a church needn’t be affluent to immerse itself in the old Anglo-Catholic traditions. Its members might be working class, but their services could still resonate with the sounds of chanting and incense-filled “high church” liturgies with all the trappings.
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By the 1990s, it was becoming clear that something was not working….

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A law backed by the Ku Klux Klan nearly a century ago to keep Catholics out of public schools is still on the books in Oregon, one of the last states in the nation to prohibit teachers from wearing religious clothing in classrooms.

Both Pennsylvania and Nebraska have similar laws, which try to balance the constitutional conflict between protecting students from the establishment of religion in schools and the rights of teachers to express their beliefs through their dress.

Oregon’s law, originally aimed at priest collars and nun habits, survived a legal challenge in the 1980s by a Sikh convert who wanted to wear her turban in the classroom and was recently upheld by the state’s Legislature.

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The ACNA has consecrated and elected two bishops for its dioceses, which represent the full span of its theological spectrum, while also highlighting the fragility of the new province-in-waiting’s theological boundaries.

On Aug 22, the Rt Rev William Ilgenfritz was consecrated Bishop of the Missionary Diocese of All Saints by Archbishop Robert Duncan. The new diocese consists of 13 congregations across the United States, and is part of the wider ACNA.

In 2002 FiFNA elected Fr Ilgenfritz and the Rev David Moyer to be consecrated as bishops in order to fulfill an episcopal ministry in the US similar to that exercised by the ”˜flying bishops’ of the Church of England. Their names were then “lain on the table” pending their consecration at the hands of sympathetic Anglican bishops.

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An Anglican church cannot simultaneously commit itself through the Anglican Covenant to shared discernment and reject that discernment; to interdependence and then act independently; to accountability and remain determined to be unaccountable. If the battle over homosexuality in The Episcopal Church is truly over, then so is the battle over the Anglican Covenant in The Episcopal Church, at least provisionally. As Christians, we live in hope that The Episcopal Church will at some future General Convention reverse the course to which it has committed itself, but we acknowledge the decisions that already have been taken. These decisions and actions run counter to the shared discernment of the Communion and the recommendations of the Instruments of Communion implementing this discernment. They are, therefore, also incompatible with the express substance, meaning, and committed direction of the first three Sections of the proposed Anglican Covenant. As a consequence, only a formal overturning by The Episcopal Church of these decisions and actions could place the church in a position capable of truly assuming the Covenant’s already articulated commitments. Until such time, The Episcopal Church has rejected the Covenant commitments openly and concretely, and her members and other Anglican churches within the Communion must take this into account. This conclusion is reached not on the basis of animus or prejudice, but on a straightforward and careful reading of the Covenant’s language and its meaning within the history of the Anglican Communion’s well-articulated life.

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This is just a gem, especially the section on the spider. Make sure to find the time to listen to it all from NPR (over 14 minutes in all).

Go here and click on the “Learn More” diagonal bar on the top left corner of the each of the four nominees’ photos to hear them each answer the same five questions.

Take a look–what interests me is the red line at the bottom.

Twenty-six students were arrested after a melee broke out Wednesday afternoon at North Charleston High, a struggling school facing intense scrutiny and pressure to improve this year.

ity police officers and Charleston County sheriff’s deputies rushed to the school’s temporary home — a former middle school on Leeds Avenue — and found students from rival neighborhoods fighting in the cafeteria about 1:30 p.m., said Spencer Pryor, public information officer for North Charleston police.

They broke up multiple fights, and one student was taken to a hospital after complaining about stomach pains.

Officers charged 13 juveniles and 13 adult-age students with disturbing school, but North Charleston police would not release the names of the adults who were arrested.

Yuck–this one was blaring out at me on the front page of the morning local paper. Read it all.

The increasing number of One-man-churches, run by persons motivated by financial gains and materialism in the country is a great source of worry to the mainstream Christian Churches in Ghana, the Anglican Bishop of Kumasi, Rt. Rev. Daniel Yinkah Sarfo has observed.

According to the Anglican Bishop, one of the major challenges currently facing Christianity in the country is the daily increase in the number of the so-called men of God, who rather engage in exploiting people, under the guise of preaching the gospel.

Rev. Yinkah Sarfo, who expressed these concerns during the official inauguration of the Satellite Extension Programme of the Academy of Mission and Theology of the North Carolina College of Theology at the Christian Hope Ministry, located at Ohwim, in Kumasi, said the situation had cast a serious slur on the image of the religion in the country.

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:: On upheaval in the Church

The Anglican Communion has grown a great deal in many parts of the world, such as Nigeria, Uganda, Singapore but obviously we’ve had negative developments.

I’ve always been a believer in principled comprehensiveness. The Anglican Communion and the Church of England are comprehensive ”“ they embrace people of different ideas like evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics and the principled bit is important.

There was a basic belief in doctrine and worship but the difficulty has been that that consensus has been overturned.

We now have people in the US for example, but not only there, who believe things about God, about salvation, about marriage and about human sexuality that seem to be another religion.

In a way it would be better to recognise it as something quite different because then we could relate to it in a more positive and constructive way.

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With the memory of the appointment of the third Bahamian priest to be inducted as Archbishop of the local Anglican community still fresh in Bahamian minds, Anglicans within the Archdiocese of The Bahamas and the Turks & Caicos Islands have yet another reason to celebrate as Archdeacon Cornell Jerome Moss, rector at the Church of the Ascension in Lucaya, Grand Bahama has been selected as the Bishop-designate of the Diocese of Guyana.

Moss, who became rector at Church of the Ascension in 1993 and then archdeacon of the Northern Bahamas in 1998 was surprised at his selection as the new bishop of the Diocese of Guyana.

He says that it took him a few days to fully digest the news, but that he quickly got over his minor confusion and retrained his mind on what his new appointment would entail and what he would need to do in preparation for it.

“The news of the decision by the House of Bishops came as a definite surprise,” said Moss at the announcement on Tuesday, Sept. 1.

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The scholars and publishers behind the world’s leading English language evangelical Bible announced Tuesday that they would publish a updated translation in 2011.

“And we’ll make sure we get it right this time,” says Keith Danby, president and chief executive officer of Biblica, once known as the International Bible Society.

Biblica, the Committee on Bible Translation and evangelical publisher Zondervan jointly announced the newest New International Version Bible — and acknowledged they were still singed by the fire and brimstone cast down on earlier update efforts.

The NIV, now in pews and homes in 46 countries, was originally published in 1978; it was updated in 1984. A plan to revise it in 1997 died when word got out that it would use “inclusive language” — code for largely eliminating masculine pronouns.

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A British-based academic has uncovered a fragment of the world’s oldest Bible hiding underneath the binding of an 18th-century book.

Nikolas Sarris spotted a previously unseen section of the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates from about AD350, as he was trawling through photographs of manuscripts in the library of St Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt.

The Codex, handwritten in Greek on animal skin, is the earliest known version of the Bible. Leaves from the priceless tome are divided between four institutions, including St Catherine’s Monastery and the British Library, which has held the largest section of the ancient Bible since the Soviet Union sold its collection to Britain in 1933.

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To the long list of reasons American companies aren’t hiring ”” business losses, tight credit, consumer retrenchment ”” add the fact that many of their older workers are unable, or afraid, to retire.

In other parts of the developed world, people are retiring as planned, because of relatively flush state and corporate pensions that await them. But here in the United States, financial security in old age rests increasingly on private savings, which have taken a beating in the last year. Prospective retirees are clinging to their jobs despite some cherished life plans.

As a result, companies are not only reluctant to create new jobs, but have fewer job openings to fill from attrition. For the 14 million Americans looking for work ”” a number expected to rise in Friday’s jobs report for August ”” this lack of turnover has made a tough job market even tougher.

Consider Barbara Petrucci, a dialysis nurse who had expected to stop working soon, or at least scale back to part time. Now that her family savings have been depleted by market declines, she expects to stay on the job for a long, long time.

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President Obama plans to address a joint session of Congress next week in an effort to rally support for health care legislation as White House officials look for ways to simplify and scale back the major Democratic bills, lower the cost and drop contentious but nonessential elements.

Administration officials said Wednesday that Mr. Obama would be more specific than he has been to date about what he wants included in the plan. Doing so amounts to an acknowledgment that the president’s prior tactic of laying out broad principles and leaving Congress to fill in the details was no longer working and that Mr. Obama needed to become more personally involved in shaping the outcome.

But the officials said Mr. Obama was unlikely to unveil a detailed legislative plan of his own. And they insisted that Mr. Obama had not given up on the provision that has attracted the most fire from the right, a proposal for a government-run competitor to private insurers, although many Democrats say the proposal may eventually be jettisoned.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Mr. Obama would be “more prescriptive than he has been to date.” And he added, “We have a tremendous amount of consensus in Congress to build off of.”

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The Episcopal Church (USA) currently is a party to some sixty lawsuits across the United States. Its litigation budget from 2006-2012 could approach $7 million, or more than $1 million per year — and that is just the official, published figures. There is another considerable amount going out to prop up its Potemkin dioceses in San Joaquin, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh and Quincy.

Those are the four dioceses which have thus far voted to leave the Church, and each departure has spawned a lawsuit. ECUSA from the beginning has adopted a high-stakes, winner-take-all strategy which depends for its success on its ability to prove in court the proposition that a diocese is not free to withdraw from the voluntary unincorporated association which ECUSA has been since its formation at common law in 1789….

The inverted logic of this argument should be apparent to any mind that loves reason. The Presiding Bishop and Chancellor first contend that ECUSA’s Constitution and Canons prohibit any Diocese from amending its Constitution so as to withdraw from the Church. They can point to no language in the national Constitution and Canons which says as much; they argue that the prohibition against leaving is implicit. Then they contend that because it is forbidden implicitly to withdraw, a vote to do so pursuant to the express power to amend spelled out in the diocesan Constitution (which, in the form approved by General Convention when the diocese in question was admitted, was an unlimited power to amend the document in any manner whatsoever) violates that implicit prohibition. So an implicit and unwritten understanding overrides the express language of amendment: the latter does not mean what it says, because despite its unrestricted language, it is to be understood that certain amendments are out of bounds. And it is further understood (although nowhere expressly written) that you are out of office the moment you choose to follow the express language in a manner that is implicitly prohibited.

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Seven diocesan bishops of the Episcopal Church are presently at Lambeth Palace for a brief–but, I’m sure, intense–consultation with the Archbishop of Canterbury. All seven are members of the Communion Partners, and all seven are signatories to the Anaheim Statement.

I have no inside knowledge of the subjects under discussion, but it doesn’t require any eavesdropping equipment to figure out that they’re talking about how Dr Williams’ “two tier/two track” plan might actually get implemented. More specifically, it is a safe bet that each of the seven is interested in what steps a diocese might have to take to remain on Tier/Track One even as TEC per se is assigned (consigned?) to Tier/Track Two.

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I will take comments but only by email (to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com) since a post like this, which I have no choice in posting, invites unwarranted speculation.

To meet their fiscal challenges, the report found that 67 percent of cities have cut jobs or enacted a hiring freeze while 62 percent have delayed or canceled capital projects. Only 14 percent have cut public safety so far, the report found.

To boost revenue, 27 percent of cities reported raising fees on services like water use and garbage collection; 25 percent hiked property taxes; and five percent raised their sales tax.

Even as city revenues have dropped, their wage, pension and health care costs have steadily climbed and will continue to do so even without an economic recovery, the report found.

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The full details of what [Dr. Anna] Pou did, and why, may never be known. But the arguments she is making about disaster preparedness ”” that medical workers should be virtually immune from prosecution for good-faith work during devastating events and that lifesaving interventions, including evacuation, shouldn’t necessarily go to the sickest first ”” deserve closer attention. This is particularly important as health officials are now weighing, with little public discussion and insufficient scientific evidence, protocols for making the kind of agonizing decisions that will, no doubt, arise again.

At a recent national conference for hospital disaster planners, Pou asked a question: “How long should health care workers have to be with patients who may not survive?” The story of Memorial Medical Center raises other questions: Which patients should get a share of limited resources, and who decides? What does it mean to do the greatest good for the greatest number, and does that end justify all means? Where is the line between appropriate comfort care and mercy killing? How, if at all, should doctors and nurses be held accountable for their actions in the most desperate of circumstances, especially when their government fails them?

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“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature — trees, flowers, grass — grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. We need silence to be able to touch souls.”

— Mother Teresa

Secularists might be surprised to learn that the Church is the largest single supplier of health care and education on the planet, the principal glue of civil society in Africa, the strongest bulwark of opposition to the caste system in India, and a leading player in global campaigns for sustainable living. It provides almost the only charitable presence in Chechnya, and other blackspots often forgotten by the rest of the world.

–Rupert Shortt, “There are now almost as many Roman Catholics as citizens of China ”“ why?” in the Times Literary Supplement, April 8, 2009

The prospect that U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal may ask for as many as 45,000 additional American troops in Afghanistan is fueling growing tension within President Barack Obama’s administration over the U.S. commitment to the war there.

On Monday, McChrystal sent his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan to the Pentagon, the U.S. Central Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and NATO. Although the assessment didn’t include any request for more troops, senior military officials said they expect McChrystal later in September to seek between 21,000 and 45,000 more. There currently are 62,000 American troops in Afghanistan.

However, administration officials said that amid rising violence and casualties, polls show a majority of Americans now think the war in Afghanistan isn’t worth fighting. With tough battles ahead on health care, the budget and other issues, Vice President Joe Biden and other officials are increasingly anxious about how the American public would respond to sending additional troops.

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More than 200 adults receive Baptism every year in Bangkok archdiocese, and for some of them the decision is made in the face of stiff opposition from people they love most.

However, after a while, their family members grow to accept their decision, say several new converts to Catholicism in this predominantly Buddhist country.

“Wait until I die before you convert,” was the request of the mother of Ravipun Jaruthawee. Nevertheless, the 25-year-old post-graduate student got baptized secretly this year on Holy Saturday, April 11, at Assumption Cathedral in Bangkok.

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In international politics, religion has been the elephant in the room for most of the modern age. And in recent years, it has only grown larger and louder. Policymakers and political theorists have adopted the mostly unpromising strategies of ignoring it in the hope that rationality and modernity will eventually push it out; using laws, coercion, or public opinion to remove it from the political sphere; or pretending that it is only a matter of culture and treating it accordingly.

The authors of God Is Back are an exception. They admit that religion is here to stay and seek to find out what it is really all about. John Micklethwait, editor in chief of The Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, its Washington bureau chief, work for a publication that has been notably dubious about religion’s long-term viability in the face of modernization and economic globalization. The Economist boldly published God’s obituary in its millennium issue, declaring that “the Almighty recently passed into history.” Micklethwait and Wooldridge, for their part, were not so sure about God’s demise. To investigate God’s place in the world today, the two men traveled thousands of miles to talk to religious leaders and ordinary believers across the world and spent hundreds of hours visiting mosques and temples, attending religious services, sitting in on Bible-study groups, and picking the brains of theologians.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge entered dangerous territory. They faced the literal dangers of encountering real live religious radicals and investigating religion’s impact in all kinds of tough neighborhoods — from inner-city Philadelphia to the northern Nigerian city of Kano. And they faced literary dangers by walking into a field thick with theological crossfire between believers and nonbelievers, epitomized on one extreme by Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About Christianity and on the other by Christopher Hitchens’ atheist manifesto, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The confessionally diverse duo of Micklethwait and Wooldridge — the first is a Catholic and the second an atheist — steers clear of polemics and focuses instead on reading God’s vital signs rather than identifying his virtues or vices. What they find is that many of the forces that were supposed to consign the Almighty to the ash heap of history — or to a quiet corner of the living room — have only made him stronger.

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In their bid to export what South Carolina Bishop Mark Lawrence labeled “the gospel of indiscriminate inclusivity,” revisionist forces in the Episcopal Church have allies they can call upon in the Anglican Communion, and not just the usual suspects in Canada, Scotland or New Zealand. When seeking validation for their actions, Episcopal leaders have called upon the churches of Mexico, Brazil, and frequently, Southern Africa. At about 2 million members, the province of Southern Africa is significantly larger than either Anglican population in Mexico (25,000) or Brazil (83,000) and is more equivalent to other mid-sized African provinces such as Rwanda (1.27 million) and Kenya (2.5 million).

None of these provinces has provoked the Anglican Communion as their American and Canadian counterparts have, with the election of openly partnered homosexual bishops. But in the Episcopal Church’s evangelistic fervor to spread heterodox teaching to the rest of the Anglican Communion, they are more than ready to play a supporting role.

Just like in the Episcopal Church, not everyone in these provinces is revisionist. Some bishops in Mexico and Southern Africa have either criticized TEC’s actions at General Convention, or expressed solidarity with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), the alternative province-in-formation recently launched by U.S. and Canadian traditionalists. Indeed, Brazil has experienced its own split, with the conservative northern diocese of Recife breaking away from that province and joining the neighboring Province of the Southern Cone.

But the majority of the provinces, and certainly their leadership, are onboard with the revisionist agenda. The Episcopal Church views them not merely as allies in holding off conservative detractors like the churches of Nigeria or Rwanda, but also as a beachhead for liberalizing other Global South provinces such as Tanzania and even Uganda.

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