The Anglican Bishop of Stafford has taken a bold swipe at ”˜little-England’ mentality and the far-right British National Party. In parish magazines, published across the diocese of Lichfield, the Rt Rev Gordon Mursell asked ”˜what does it mean to be British?’ He wrote: “Britain will never be great again if all we have to offer is xenophobia and dreams of a lost empire.”

He went on to say: “But it can indeed be great again if it signs up to the values of Jesus’ kingdom – a place where people are judged by where they’re going, not where they come from; a place where what matters is not borders but compassion and courage and commitment and dedication.”

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Seventy-four priests who are affiliated with Communion Partners have pledged to fulfill non-episcopal requests made by bishops who met with the Archbishop of Canterbury on Sept. 1.

The priests, who lead parishes with a collective baptized membership of 60,000, list five commitments regarding their response to the Anglican Communion Covenant. The priests say they will:

Ӣ Continue to study the covenant and to pray and work for its adoption.

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‘That’s it folks ”“ until the next Bishop.’

Those were the parting words from the retiring Bishop of Portsmouth as he said goodbye to a 300-strong congregation of worshippers.

The Rt Rev Dr Kenneth Stevenson’s final service at Portsmouth Anglican Cathedral was tinged with sadness, yet full of jubilant song and celebration.

The 59-year-old has called time after 14 years in the job following a four-year battle with leukaemia, which has seen him undergo two bone marrow transplants.

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In an interview after the service, Jefferts Schori said Episcopalians “celebrate a diversity of opinion within the church” and their leaders traditionally have expressed opinions – among them that the death penalty is immoral.

“We believe that health care is a basic human right,” she added. “He (Jesus) heals people.”

The bishop was in the city with and at the invitation of the Right Rev. Nathan Baxter, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Central Pennsylvania, who will return to Trinity on Oct. 25 for a service at the church, which is to be designated the “pro-cathedral” of the northern half of the diocese.

Schori’s visit Sunday drew more than 400 Episcopalian parishioners and clergy from churches throughout much of the diocese, including this city, Lock Haven, Jersey Shore, Mansfield, Wellsboro, Altoona, State College, Coudersport, Bloomsburg, Selinsgrove, Sunbury, Lewisburg, Exchange, Renovo, Muncy, Montoursville and Upper Fairfield Township.

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One in every 33 women who attend worship services regularly has been the target of sexual advances by a religious leader, a survey released Wednesday says.

The study, by Baylor University researchers, found that the problem is so pervasive that it almost certainly involves a wide range of denominations, religious traditions and leaders.

“It certainly is prevalent, and clearly the problem is more than simply a few charismatic leaders preying on vulnerable followers,” said Diana Garland, dean of Baylor’s School of Social Work, who co-authored the study.

It found that more than two-thirds of the offenders were married to someone else at the time of the advance.

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John P. Hoffmann, a professor of sociology at Brigham Young University, examined the harm caused by gambling. Gambling has generally been placed in the category of victimless crimes, but he argued this terminology is not correct.

Problems such as gambling have substantial negative effects on marital relations and family functioning. Many people gamble with no apparent problems, Hoffmann admitted, but studies point to about 9% of gamblers having some risks, with another 1.5% classified as problem gamblers, and 0.9% as pathological gamblers.

The percentages might seem low, but they translate into substantial numbers — millions of people, in fact — when you consider the total population of the United States, he commented.

When it comes to family life Hoffmann observed that pathological gambling is associated with mental health problems and divorce. When gambling reaches problem levels, children are also often acutely affected. Not only does it influence the time parents spend at home, but children also suffer from a sense of diminished personal attachment to their parents and a loss of trust in them.

In my mind, one of the colossal failures of the church in the last generation. Read it all

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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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