No method of resolving disputes within the church can function without the support of an underlying sensus fidelium, a common mind among the faithful. Even a teaching office on Roman Catholic lines can only settle disputes successfully if there is a shared perception that the office deserves respect. This can never be wholly a matter of recognizing the formal authority of the bishop or the Pope, as in the slogan “Rome has spoken ”“ case closed.” It has to include a perception that the actual decisions made by the teaching office reliably cohere with central Christian beliefs and practices. Only so can a sense be maintained that obedience to the teaching office is an authentic form of discipleship. But for that to be the case, the teachers and the faithful must share a common formation in faith and life. They can only meet, so to speak, if they live in the same Christian universe.

The root of our problems with authority in the ELCA, I would suggest, is the confusion, weakening, and consequent fragmentation of the sensus fidelium, the common mind of the faithful. This confusion and weakness are by no means all on one side. We’ve all been affected by the biblical illiteracy, thin catechesis, clueless educational programs, and unfocused preaching that are widespread (I’m not saying universal) in our denomination. Seeking scriptural resolution to a passionate controversy on top of such weakness, confusion, and fragmentation is like trying to ride up the glass mountain in the fairy tale: no matter how strong your theological horse or how well you ride it, you’re never going to get traction.

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The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh has chosen Bishop Kenneth Price, Jr., as its provisional — temporary — bishop, and declared its departing, part-time shepherd, Bishop Robert H. Johnson, to be “assisting bishop emeritus.”

The diocese is still recovering from a split in October 2008, when a majority of the clergy and laity at its last regular convention voted to leave the Episcopal Church over theological issues.

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“This will bring further recognition of our diocese as a part of the Episcopal Church, as a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, and in communion with the See of Canterbury. When I shared with the Archbishop of Canterbury last month the plans for a resolution of this nature, he responded favorably,” the bishop said.

The bishop also spoke of why he believes the diocese needs to remain within the Episcopal Church.

“We need to stay where we are because our Lord needs the faithfulness of the ministry this diocese has to offer, and does offer, through the commitment of those who make this their spiritual home, and in turn are striving to build up the kingdom of God in this place and the life of Christ’s Church,” he said. “We stay also because our historic identity with the Anglican Communion demands it of us. Without ordered processes there is no catholicity, no claim to the ancient Christian unity, which we claim is at the very heart of whom we are as members of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.”

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The “God slot” can count the Prince of Wales among its fans but, despite having supporters in the highest of places, the clamour has grown in recent months for it to change its policy of exclusivity ”“ or be dropped altogether.

And with a decision expected within the next few weeks, the behind-the-scenes battle between secularists and believers has intensified.

Senior Church of England bishops have privately lobbied the trust over the importance of maintaining the status quo. Meanwhile, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that secularists have warned the corporation it would be in breach of equality laws if it refuses to make the slot more inclusive. Lawyers have been asked by senior management at the BBC to investigate the claim so that they can advise the trust on whether they would be at risk of facing the fight going to court. This legal challenge is a new twist in a battle between secularists and believers – and neither side is prepared to lose.

Thought for the Day may be a mere three-minute slot, but it has become a totemic issue in the social struggle over the role of religion in public life.

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This is a great set of presentations to go through and enjoy.

Weak from a respiratory infection and solitary confinement, Luis Barrios was waiting in line to see the doctor at a federal prison in Lower Manhattan one day last spring when a reminder of his outside life appeared. It was a group of graduate students in criminal justice, taking a tour of the Metropolitan Correctional Facility.

Priest, professor and provocateur, the Rev. Dr. Luis Barrios had landed inside the jail with a two-month sentence for trespassing onto a military base in Georgia in a protest against a training facility there for soldiers from Central and South America. From the barricades to the bastille, Professor Barrios was traveling territory familiar from what he estimates are about 65 arrests for various forms of civil disobedience.

The graduate students hailed from Professor Barrios’s academic home, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Professor Barrios recognized one who had been part of his study-abroad program in the Dominican Republic. Later in his sentence, he met a correctional officer who had taken one of his courses.

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I know from speaking with Bishop Ackerman that he sent the Presiding Bishop a handwritten letter merely asking to have his credentials transferred to the Diocese of Bolivia. He said that he had no intention of renouncing his orders and that, while he intends to assist Bishop Lyons in work in Bolivia, he also wished to remain available to assist bishops in the United States, as requested.

The Presiding Bishop says that “…there is no provision for transferring a bishop to another province.” But that is not true.

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Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori notified Keith Ackerman by mail and email October 16 that she has accepted the former Bishop of Quincy’s voluntary renunciation of ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church.

In a statement released by the Presiding Bishop’s office October 16, JeffertsSchori cited Title III, Section 7 of the Canons: “I have accepted the renunciation of the Ordained Ministry of this Church, made in writing to me in July 2009 by the Rt. Rev. Keith L. Ackerman, Bishop of Quincy, Resigned who is, therefore, removed from the Ordained Ministry of this Church and released from the obligations of all Ministerial offices, and is deprived of the right to exercise the gifts and spiritual authority as a Minister of God’s Word and Sacraments conferred on him in Ordinations.”

According to the statement, Jefferts Schori had thanked Ackerman in an October 7 letter “for your follow up note regarding your plans to function as a bishop in the Diocese of Bolivia in the Province of the Southern Cone. As you know, there is no provision for transferring a bishop to another Province. I am therefore releasing you from the obligations of ordained ministry in this Church.”

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Yet there was a woman, also raised religious, who blazed the trail for Darwin””an often forgotten and dismissed fossil hunter who, too, was surely tortured by her own bizarre discoveries. Born in 1799, Mary Anning, the dirt-poor woman said to have inspired the tongue-twister “She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore,” would spend her entire life uncovering and piecing together the fossils of one never-before-seen monsters””monsters that had been hidden away for nearly 200 million years in the cliffs up and down England’s southern coastline.

After her father died in 1810, a young Anning, in order to put food on her table, was forced to run the shore’s gantlet of high tides and landslides, dressed in tattered skirts, as she hunted for curiosities she could sell to seafaring tourists, mostly from London. By birthright, Anning never should have grown up to be an influential fossil hunter and geologist. She was marginalized not only by her family’s poverty but by her sex, her regional dialect and her nearly complete lack of schooling. But she enjoyed one natural advantage: the very good fortune of having been born in exactly the right place at the right time, alongside some of the most geologically unstable coastline in the world; it was””and still is””a place permeated with fossils.

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In a case echoing the scandals of the 1980s, federal authorities exposed what they claim is the biggest insider-trading ring in a generation — a conspiracy in which a hedge-fund kingpin and executives at blue-chip firms including IBM and Intel allegedly connived to profit on Google and other big-name stocks.

At the center was Raj Rajaratnam, founder of Galleon Group, a New York-based fund firm that manages $3.7 billion. A native of Sri Lanka, he spent years carving a reputation as a meticulous investor in technology stocks, building a fortune estimated at $1.5 billion.

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With three small children and her marriage in trouble, Pat Bond attended a spirituality retreat for Roman Catholic women in Illinois 26 years ago in hopes of finding support and comfort.

What Ms. Bond found was a priest ”” a dynamic, handsome Franciscan friar in a brown robe ”” who was serving as the spiritual director for the retreat and agreed to begin counseling her on her marriage. One day, she said, as she was leaving the priest’s parlor, he pulled her aside for a passionate kiss.

Ms. Bond separated from her husband, and for the next five years she and the priest, the Rev. Henry Willenborg, carried on an intimate relationship, according to interviews and court documents. In public, they were both leaders in their Catholic community in Quincy, Ill. In private they functioned like a married couple, sharing a bed, meals, movie nights and vacations with the children.

Eventually they had a son, setting off a series of legal battles as Ms. Bond repeatedly petitioned the church for child support. The Franciscans acquiesced, with the stipulation that she sign a confidentiality agreement. It is now an agreement she is willing to break as both she and her child, Nathan Halbach, 22, are battling cancer.

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A proposal for the Pittsburgh diocese’s convention, which takes place today and Saturday, had called for formation of a task force to study the possibility of a reunion between the two dioceses. They had once been one.

But that resolution will be replaced, according to a statement from the Pittsburgh diocese. The new resolution will call for “discussions with a number of neighboring dioceses to explore collaborative partnerships to enhance the ministries of our dioceses and to improve the efficiency of diocesan operations,” the statement said.

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…they never tell you how to save your money. No one tells you. We’ve been trained to spend money since we were born with all these commercials with toys and G.I. Joes and Transformers. But there’s so many things in the supermarket, there’s so many things on television that automatically when you turn it on are saying “Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy!” And no one’s ever saying, “Save! Save! Save! Save! Save! Save! Save! Save!”

–Donald Faison on MarketPlace Money last night

What would you choose given her options? Watch it all.

How then do we live as humans in a way that honours rather than endangers the life of our planet? Or, to put it slightly differently, ‘How do we live in a way that shows an understanding that we genuinely live in a shared world, not one that simply belongs to us?’ This would be a good question even if we were not faced with the threats associated with global warming, with the reduction of biodiversity, with desertification and deforestation, with fuel and food shortages. We should be asking the question whether or not it happens to be urgent, just because it is a question about how we live humanly, how we live in such a way as to show that we understand and respect that we are only one species within creation. The nature of our crisis is such that we can easily fall back on a position that says it isn’t worth trying to change our patterns of behaviour, notably our patterns of consumption, because it’s already too late to arrest the pace of global warming. But the question of exactly how late it is isn’t the only one, and concentrating only on this can blind us to a more basic point. If we are locked into a way of life that does not honour who and what we are because it does not honour life itself and our calling to nourish it, we are not even going to know where to start in addressing the environmental challenge.

Alastair McIntosh in his splendid book, Hell and High Water. Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition, speaks of what he calls our current ‘ecocidal’ patterns of consumption as addictive and self-destructive. Living like this is living at a less than properly human level: McIntosh suggests we may need therapy, what he describes as a ‘cultural psychotherapy’ (chapter 9) to liberate us. That liberation may or may not be enough to avert disaster. We simply don’t know, though it would be a very foolish person who took that to mean that it might be all right after all. What we do know ”“ or should know ”“ is that we are living inhumanly.

Start from here and the significance of small changes is obvious. If I ask what’s the point of my undertaking a modest amount of recycling my rubbish or scaling down my air travel, the answer is not that this will unquestionably save the world within six months, but in the first place that it’s a step towards liberation from a cycle of behaviour that is keeping me, indeed most of us, in a dangerous state ”“ dangerous, that is, to our human dignity and self-respect.

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Fierce fighting has broken out as the Pakistan army battles Taliban militants in their remote strongholds in the South Waziristan province.

Local officials said 30,000 troops, backed by artillery, had moved into the region where Pakistan Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud is based.

Officials said the Taliban were resisting as troops mobilised from the north, east, and west.

A curfew was imposed in the region before the offensive began.

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In the autumn time feels short, but that there is enough of it, which is paradoxical. Time being a tricky thing to think about is best done alongside Nature, where it seems to make more sense than it does by clock or by calendar. And the memory place that autumn is uses time itself as a container for the things that we keep returning to and trying to understand.

The reflective melancholy of autumn helps me to cope with change and loss, and to find both beauty and necessity in things passing. Ageing has a splendour to it.

Our culture cannot accept that. I think of those lines of Donne: “Nor spring or summer beauty hath such grace/ As I have seen in one autumnal face.”

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The Very Reverend John B. Burwell
Rector, Church of the Holy Cross
Sullivan’s Island, Daniel Island

The Reverend Canon Dr. Neal O. Michell
Canon to the Ordinary,
Episcopal Diocese of Dallas

The Reverend David F. O. Thompson
Rector, St. Bartholomew’s Church
North Augusta, South Carolina

The Reverend W. Andrew Waldo
Rector, Trinity Episcopal Church
Excelsior, Minnesota

The Reverend Jerre Stockton Williams, Jr.
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church
Kerrville, Texas

Check them out.

People on very low incomes in the developing world may soon be able to access health insurance thanks to the Anglican Health Network (AHN).

Based in Geneva, AHN announced 6 October that it will establish a new pilot project to test the concept of providing a ‘micro health insurance plan’ in an African setting. The AHN was established at the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in May, 2009. Its key ambition is to support Anglican health providers to improve health care in the developing world.

“In an era when faith communities have been rediscovered as key health services providers, we are pleased to be leading this innovative approach to low income health care” said the Rev Paul Holley, President and Co-founder of AHN.

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Every few months, more than 100 security volunteers at the Rock Church in Point Loma run through drills to prepare for a gunman attack, a kidnapping at the nursery or disorderly outsiders.

That church isn’t alone in fearing violence and vandalism.

Once deemed sacred sanctuaries off-limits to criminals, religious institutions are becoming vulnerable targets to shootings, thefts and protests because of their low-tech security and open environment.

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Welcome to Balloon Boy, the Faux Reality Rescue show, with the mystifyingly happy ending.

In fact, now that it’s all over ”” and the little boy is safe and mostly sound ”” I’m not sure what I saw or what the ending actually was.

Did life imitate art or did art imitate life or is it possible anymore to tell the difference?

What a bizarre story. Read it all.

“The judge put a fairly tight deadline on getting things moving … and to present some evidence of what the orderly transition would be. We intend to fully cooperate with that,” said Rich Creehan, a spokesman for the Episcopal diocese.

Anglican leaders have asked their clergy to fast and pray this week over whether to appeal.

“We were dismayed and surprised by the decision,” said the Rev. Mary Hays, canon to the ordinary of the Anglican diocese. “But there’s a lot to consider in an appeal. Financial resources and energy resources are required, so we have to consider whether we want to be side-tracked from our mission, which has nothing to do with litigation.”

The Episcopal trustees reported that in July the total endowment was worth about $17 million, although some of the funds were held for parishes that now belong to the Anglican diocese. The funds have been frozen due to the litigation.

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The nation’s Catholic bishops have threatened to pull their support for health care reform unless their concerns about abortion and access for immigrants are addressed by lawmakers.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which supports universal access to health care as a “basic human right,” had been supportive of efforts to reform the health care system, but is concerned about taxpayer-funded abortions.

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One thing is certain: alongside the wish of its majority that women should be admitted to the episcopate, the Synod has also insisted on provision for those who, in conscience, could not go along with this development. It is difficult to estimate the size of this minority, but more than a third of the Synod might vote against any final legisla­tion, should this provision not meet the needs of those for whom it was intended ”” and herein lies the difficulty.

It is all too easy to categorise these groups as Anglo-Catholic or conservative Evangelical; but a variety of people from all traditions remain unconvinced that this is the mind of Christ for his Church, as revealed in scripture and tradi­tion.

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THE news that the revision committee has chosen not to explore the option of the single clause with a statutory code of practice any further, and has gone for “certain functions to be invested in bishops by statute” will strike despair into the hearts of many. What the committee is proposing takes a step back from the position Synod thought it had reached in July 2008.

My concerns are on several levels. First, these proposals appear to institutionalise mistrust in legislation: the opponents of women’s ordination do not trust the bishops to make proper provision. Is that really what we have come to?

Second, it destroys the ecclesiology of the Church of England, making it legitimate to “choose your own bishop”. Are there to be any limits as to the grounds on which you might petition to do this?

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Inclusive Church is deeply disturbed by the recent announcement of the Revision Committee. It has moved away from the expressed will of General Synod in July 2008 – that there should be legislation to consecrate women as bishops on the same terms as men with an additional code of practice containing arrangements for those who do not accept the authority of bishops who are women.

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SUPPORTERS of women bishops have expressed shock at a decision by the revision committee for the draft legislation not to go further down the route of a statutory code of practice. Traditionalists say that the change of direction proposed does not go far enough.

The General Synod voted in July 2008 for “special arrangements”, embodied in a statutory code of practice, to be drawn up by the legis­lative drafting group.

The Bishops supported the motion by 28 to 12; the Clergy by 124 to 44; and the Laity by 111 to 68 (News, 11 July 2008). The full Synod had its first consideration of the draft legislation last February, and voted to commit it to a revision com­mittee of the Synod.

The committee, chaired by the Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Revd Nigel McCulloch, said in a statement last week that it had received nearly 300 submissions, including 100 from Synod members.

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The inherent contradiction in the term “jobless recovery” continues to cast a shadow on overdue good economic news. The Dow Jones Industrial average closed above 10,000 Wednesday for the first time in more than a year. But the national unemployment rate of 9.8 percent in September was the highest in more than a quarter century.

As The Associated Press reported Thursday, though the economic recovery apparently has begun, it “is widely expected to be weak, particularly when it comes to employment.”

And as The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, about 30,000 jobs “have been directly created or saved by contractors who received money” from the $787 billion federal stimulus package that President Barack Obama signed into law eight months ago. That’s far fewer than the 1 million jobs promised by the White House — and not nearly enough to make a dent in those ominous unemployment figures.

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Read it carefully and read it all..