This is straight out of the litigation playbook described above, is it not? It represents steps 4 and 6 outlined earlier. But now we get to the crux of the matter. It is not sufficient to show that the persons who currently claim to be the “Trustees of The Corporation of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth” hired you as their attorneys; in order to satisfy Rule 12, you must also show that those persons are who they claim to be, and indeed have the required authority to authorize you, as an attorney, to file suit in an entity’s name. Stated another way: you cannot respond to a Rule 12 motion by saying “Joe Doakes at XYZ Corp. authorized me to bring suit for it, and he’s the Vice President for Legal Affairs.” You have to show that there actually is a Joe Doakes, and he has to prove that the corporation (through its Board of Directors, or President) gave him the authority to hire attorneys to institute litigation in the corporation’s name.

Thus in order to have the requisite authority, the persons claiming to be the “Trustees of The Corporation of The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth” would have to show that they were duly appointed to that office in accordance with The Corporation’s Articles and bylaws. And here they encounter an obstacle. For the Diocesan Canons (Canon 17) provide for one of the Board’s Five Trustees (the Bishop is an ex officio Trustee and Chairman) to be elected at each Annual Convention to a staggered five-year term. When a Trustee does not serve out his term, and a vacancy occurs, the bylaws specify that the remaining Trustees have authority to appoint an interim Trustee to serve until the next Annual Convention, as I noted in this previous post.

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Listen to it all from the ‘Something Understood’ Radio 4 programme.

Two new reports on the size and strength of American congregations present contrasting pictures of church life today.

The October issue of Outreach magazine is all about growth. It lists the 100 largest U.S. churches, based on attendance statistics gathered by LifeWay Research, Nashville.

Leading the list, as in 2008, is Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, Houston; 43,500 attend weekend worship.

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Bankers have failed to repent for their roles in the global financial collapse, said the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, leader of the Anglican Church.

“There hasn’t been a feeling of closure about what happened last year — there hasn’t been what I as a Christian would call repentance,” Williams said in a British Broadcasting Corp. interview yesterday. “We haven’t heard people saying, ”˜Actually, no, we got it wrong, and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty.’ ”

Williams is the most senior cleric in the church, which has 80 million members in 164 countries. He has called for stricter financial regulations and caps on bonuses for bankers.

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And the moral of the story is–Dads are not in charge. But you knew that–right? Watch it all–KSH.

With Lehman gone, the little oligarchy of banks still dominates Wall Street, but the clique is a little bit smaller. This may be the worst possible outcome for the future of our financial markets. Worse even than bailing all every one of the banks out, or letting them all fail. If the whole system had gone down, we’d at least have the chance to rebuild a better one.

But with fewer giants, there is even less competition on Wall Street than before the crisis. The banks in the now smaller club are even more likely to do what monopolists always do: fight transparency and protect their own profits at the expense of small businesses and consumers. And with fewer, but much bigger giants, it will be even harder for regulators to avoid bailing any one of them out if it fails. No matter how badly their managers behave. Before the crisis, four or five of them were probably too big to fail. Now, they all are.

I never thought I would say that I miss Lehman. But as I look out on the new Wall Street landscape, same as the old one, except worse, I’m tempted to put a few flowers on Lehman’s financial grave.

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A retired Army lieutenant colonel-turned-priest has been elected the new primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, one of the largest provinces in the Anglican Communion.

The Rev. Nicholas Orogbodo Okoh, 57, will lead Nigeria’s 20 million Anglicans following next year’s retirement of Archbishop Peter Akinola, who has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Episcopal Church’s acceptance of homosexuality.

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Earlier this month, James von Brunn, the 89-year-old bigot charged with killing an African American security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, appeared for a hearing in a Washington courtroom.

Von Brunn, who faces charges including first-degree murder, hate crimes and gun violations, “appeared frail and sat quietly in a wheelchair,” according to news reports. The hearing presented evidence that he was on a “suicide mission,” driven to “send a message to the Jewish community” that the Holocaust is a hoax.

Not surprisingly, the judge ordered a mental competency exam.

In the hours after the Holocaust museum shooting, there were multiple, brazen assertions that American Jews were in profound danger and that the shooting was only the latest evidence of the lurking threats that ought to rouse Jews from their mistaken slumber.

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A failed state also has a huge impact on everyday religious experience and practice. Of necessity, religious organizations have to take over most of the responsibilities and activities that a Westerner might expect to fall to government. Churches and mosques supply social services and, in many instances, take over legal and justice functions as well, providing arbitration of disputes and performing community policing. It is scarcely surprising that Islamic courts thrive in Somalia, Sudan and parts of Pakistan where secular justice is only a vague rumor.

Among both Christians and Muslims, many dream, however fancifully, of full-fledged religious states that could suppress the anarchy and misery. Religious fundamentalism will not diminish until those societies develop strong states that can guarantee the supply of food, water, electricity and sanitation.

Only when we in the global North witness what happens when the state is taken out of the picture do we realize how much of what we regard as natural and in evitable in our religious traditions depends on the continued strength of political order and security.

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Doctors, by a large majority, support adding a government run health insurance program that would compete with private insurance. That’s according to a new survey. What’s been called the public option continues to be one of the most contentious issues in the health care debate, but the survey shows that doctors are already used to dealing with government run insurance.

NPR’s Joseph Shapiro reports.

JOSEPH SHAPIRO: In the survey, nearly three-quarters of doctors said they favor a public option. Co-author Dr. Salomeh Keyhani is a researcher at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Dr. SALOMEH KEYHANI (Researcher, Mount Sinai School of Medicine): The results of the study demonstrated that the majority of physicians support a public option in the United States of America.

SHAPIRO: That included the 63 percent who say they’d like to see patients get a choice of public or private insurance and another 10 percent who favor a public option only. They’d like to see a single-payer system. When the public in general is surveyed, support for a public option has run between 50 and 70 percent.

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Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted, a new IBD/TIPP Poll has found.

The poll contradicts the claims of not only the White House, but also doctors’ own lobby ”” the powerful American Medical Association ”” both of which suggest the medical profession is behind the proposed overhaul.

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After Paris warned that new sanctions against Teheran remained an option despite the likelihood of negotiations with Iran, French President Nicolas Sarkozy maintained that the Islamic republic was still working on a nuclear weapons program.

“It is a certainty to all of our secret services. Iran is working today on a nuclear [weapons] program,” Sarkozy told lawmakers from his UMP party on Tuesday, according to Press TV.

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So maybe it’s not swine flu, but the nation seems to have come down with a serious case of impulse control disorder.

Symptoms include (but are not limited to) Kanye West snatching Taylor Swift’s moment at MTV’s Video Music Awards; Serena Williams threatening, with expletives, to cram her ball down a lineswoman’s throat at the U.S. Open; and Rep. Joe Wilson’s inability to contain the urge to denigrate President Obama while the president was in the middle of addressing the nation on a topic of critical importance.

Wilson’s House colleagues formally chastised the South Carolina Republican on Tuesday.

In the wake of these high-profile outbursts across disciplines — politics, entertainment and sports — many Americans have found themselves asking what is going on. To some, it’s not a coincidence but rather the manifestation of a deepening social dysfunction.

“It’s extremely regrettable, but not shocking,” said Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist. “And there is a viral element to it. It’s like Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point.’ You get to a critical mass of something and it spreads like wildfire.”

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In a hearing today in the141st District Court, Judge John Chupp granted the Diocese partial relief under Rule 12 of the Texas code Rules of Civil Procedure. He ruled that attorneys Jonathan Nelson and Kathleen Wells do not represent the diocese or the corporation which have realigned under the Province of the Southern Cone. He denied a second aspect of Rule 12 relief which would have removed the plaintiffs’ diocese and corporation from the lawsuit filed April 14, 2009.

The judge also ruled that neither the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church nor the Constitution and Canons of this diocese prohibit withdrawal from TEC and realignment under another province. Further, he found that the Diocese had done so at its November 2008 annual convention, saying that “they [the members] took the diocese with them.” The action of the November convention was not, he said, ultra vires and void, as the suit’s plaintiffs have argued. He declared, too, that the Diocese had taken its property with it in realignment. He said he did not consider any court ruling concerning a realigning parish to be applicable in the present case, and he said that he considered it “self-serving on [the part of TEC] to say that [Bishop Iker] abandoned his job.

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Everett P. Pope, a member of the Class of 1941 and a decorated World War II hero, was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery Tuesday, September 15, 2009….

Pope’s Medal of Honor Award for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty” was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but presented after Roosevelt’s death by President Harry S. Truman at a White House ceremony in June 1945. The award citation recounted the harrowing circumstances that faced Pope and his men:

Subjected to pointblank cannon fire which caused heavy casualties and badly disorganized his company while assaulting a steep coral hill, Capt. Pope rallied his men and gallantly led them to the summit in the face of machinegun, mortar, and sniper fire. Forced by widespread hostile attack to deploy the remnants of his company thinly in order to hold the ground won, and with his machineguns out of order and insufficient water and ammunition, he remained on the exposed hill with 12 men and 1 wounded officer determined to hold through the night. Attacked continuously with grenades, machineguns, and rifles from 3 sides, he and his valiant men fiercely beat back or destroyed the enemy, resorting to hand-to-hand combat as the supply of ammunition dwindled, and still maintaining his lines with his 8 remaining riflemen when daylight brought more deadly fire and he was ordered to withdraw. His valiant leadership against devastating odds while protecting the units below from heavy Japanese attack reflects the highest credit upon Capt. Pope and the U.S. Naval Service.

Read it all and if you have time watched the video (link provided in article). They are all dying so fast now, one hopes they get the thanks they so richly deserve–KSH

Sen. Max Baucus spent the past few months trying to negotiate a compromise health care overhaul package that would have bipartisan support. But when Baucus, the Senate Finance Committee chairman, finally released the details of his massive bill on Wednesday, there was no sign of Republican backing.

Many Democrats are worried that Baucus offered far too many concessions to Republicans ”” most notably dropping the idea of a government-run health care plan to compete with private insurers ”” without securing any firm support from across the aisle.

The top selling point of the Baucus bill was supposed to be its bipartisan appeal. Without some Republican support, Baucus’ version could end up adding to the cacophony of competing proposals passed by several committees in the House and Senate.

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Two members of the Communion Partners rectors advisory committee say the group is striving to be an irenic voice as the Episcopal Church discusses the Anglican Communion’s proposed covenant.

“We aim to be constructive in relationships between orthodox clergy and their bishops whose theology may not be the same,” said the Rev. Leigh Spruill, rector of St. George’s Church, Nashville.

Communion Partners has begun filling the void left by congregations and dioceses affiliated with the Anglican Communion Network, but it is cautious about becoming another political force within the Episcopal Church.

“We’re trying to find a better way than the political structures that have arisen in response to volatile issues,” said the Rt. Rev. Anthony Burton, former bishop of Saskatchewan and rector of Church of the Incarnation, Dallas.

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