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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Check it out.

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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