Q: You (and others) have said that the national church is walking apart, that it’s abandoned in part or whole its doctrines, canons and traditional practices and therefore has relinquished its authority over the Diocese of South Carolina, which remains true to the original canons. And you have said you are ready to re-engage with the national church if it repudiates its recent actions and returns to the Anglican fold. Do you think there is any chance the national church will do so? If yes, why have you called for a withdrawal from it?

A: Actually, the term “walking apart” was used by the Archbishop of Canterbury and many others around the world. What I have said is the authority of national entities in The Episcopal Church has a limited and defined role within a diocese. But ”¦ relinquished its authority? No, I never said that. What I have said is that the Constitution and Canons are what gives the General Convention its authority. When it passes resolutions contrary to those canons or without changing them, it has entered into a theatre of the absurd. Into an irrational way of legislating — that is what General Convention did when it gave bishops permission to allow same-sex marriages without changing the canons that define marriage as between a man and a woman. Along with being unscriptural and confusing to the laity, it is a dysfunctional way to run a church.

Whether The Episcopal Church will repudiate its recent actions is doubtful at best — but this is not about reading tea leaves. God has called me as a bishop of the church to proclaim the gospel in season and out of season, regardless of what others will or will not do. This includes protecting the faithful from false teachings.

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The meeting between Jesus and the rich young man is one of the most startling, challenging, and misunderstood in the Gospels. It startles us because of Jesus’s blunt declaration. According to St Mark, He tells the young man, “There is one thing you lack. Go and sell everything you own and then come, follow me.” St Matthew’s version is still stronger. Jesus tells him: “If you would be perfect, go and sell, come and follow.” If that is perfection, how can the rest of us rise to the challenge? We should desire perfection, but how many of us can go and sell, come and follow? The challenge is impracticable and impossible. So are we destined to be only second-class citizens in the Kingdom of God? Is perfection the preserve of those few who abandon everything to live lives of poverty, chastity and contemplation, in monasteries and convents? Or have we misunderstood something?

Perhaps we have….

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Dear Diocesan Family,

A panel of the Virginia Supreme Court will hear our petition for appeal on October 21 and, while it is unfortunate that these legal proceedings were necessary, I trust that this hearing will bring us one step closer to resolution.

I am proud that the Diocese of Virginia and the Episcopal Church have chosen the path consistently to defend loyal Episcopalians, and to safeguard and to protect the Church’s legacy and the Church from unwarranted governmental and legislative interference. It is with the same determination to stand by the people, traditions and legacy of our diocese that I look toward our appeal.
For nearly 225 years, the Episcopal Church has had the freedom to govern itself according to its beliefs. But that freedom is under direct attack here in our diocese in the form of a Virginia law that allows the government to interfere with the faith, polity and structure of our Church and other hierarchical churches in the Commonwealth.

I believe that this law is unconstitutional and that there is too much at stake to let it remain in effect. The legal struggle to secure our right to organize as we choose and safeguard our churches from those seeking to seize them has not been easy. This journey has been a long one, but now more than ever we must all gather around those who need us most at this difficult time.

Loyal Episcopalians have been exiled from their Episcopal homes for too long and I ask you to keep all of them in your prayers. This includes St. Stephen’s, Heathsville; St. Margaret’s, Woodbridge; Epiphany, Oak Hill; and The Falls Church, Falls Church. These parishioners have been denied the ability to worship as they wish at the very same churches where they were married, where they baptized their children and where they buried their loved ones. I view this next hearing with great hope for the day when I will join these faith-filled Episcopalians as they return to their church homes to celebrate and worship together.

Faithfully yours,

–(The Rt. Rev.) Shannon S. Johnston, Bishop of Virginia

And so the student decided instead of a casket burial or cremation, he asked if it would be OK to be shipped to Heinrich’s beautiful mountainside property in Maine (where he had done fieldwork) and be given a shallow burial where he could be recycled by nature’s most commonplace undertakers. He wanted to be “beetleized.”

This wasn’t a crazy notion. Ecology-minded scientists often discuss how they want to be buried.

William D. Hamilton, perhaps one of the greatest biologists in the 20th century, famously wrote an open letter saying that when he died he wanted to be laid out on the forest floor in the Amazon jungle….

Read or listen to it all.

[ELEANOR] BEARDSLEY: The affair died down again until this week, when on a late-night political talk show Marine Le Pen, daughter of far-right Nationalist Party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, dug out a copy of Mitterrand’s 2005 autobiographical novel and read excerpts set in the brothels of Bangkok….

Ms. LE PEN: …Mr. Frederic Mitterrand, culture minister, describes his pleasure in sexual tourism, all the while knowing the perversity of the system. It’s in black and white right here, and this man’s a minister.

BEARDSLEY: Soon, everyone was reading the same excerpts online, although no one had bothered to notice them in his book for the last five years.

Le Pen called for Mitterrand to resign, and in a bizarre political matchup, members of Mitterrand’s Socialist Party joined the far right in attacking him, and no one missed the ironic connection between l’affaire Mitterrand and l’affaire Polanski.

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If two women””one in Yellowknife, one in Regina””hear the call to be priests in the Anglican Church of Canada, the steps they will take to become ordained are quite different. Although both will wear collars and be “the Rev.” in the end, their assessment and education will depend on their diocese’s unique program, which could range from an informal mentoring relationship to specific course requirements.

A national conference””to be held January 5 to 7, 2010, in Montreal, Que.””will examine this diversity. Representatives from theological colleges and dioceses, students, and pastors will explore differences and discuss what should be core and common in preparing people for presbyteral (priestly) ministry in the Anglican Church of Canada.

People may be surprised to learn that there are minimal national standards for such preparation, said Dr. Eileen Scully, General Synod’s coordinator for ministry and worship, and conference staff support. All that exists is a 1986 document called “Prerequisites for Ordination” from the House of Bishops and the Advisory Committee on Postulants for Ordination (ACPO), which assesses candidates in discernment weekends, then offers non-binding recommendations to their bishops.

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Slight of build and dressed in the stylish manner of the European-influenced Arab middle class, Nonie Darwish could be any wealthy Levantine in Paris or west London.

But behind the veneer of Egyptian elegance is a one-woman anti-jihad machine, a Christian convert from Islam, founder of a group called Former Muslims United and author of two books highly critical of Sharia law, Arab policy towards Israel and Islamists’ ambitions for global conquest.

Darwish is often compared to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch feminist, but whereas Ali is an atheist who stands up for Europe’s “Enlightenment values” against Islam, Darwish is a Christian who believes “that Judeo-Christian culture produces healthier, happier and more just societies, whereas Islamic culture produces tyrannical regimes and oppression”.

Read the whole article.

The Catholic population of Africa has shot up from 1.9 million in 1900 to almost 165 million today, and more than 40 per cent of all adult baptisms in the world take place in Africa.

During the synod’s opening liturgy, which featured more Latin and Gregorian chant than African languages and hymns, the Pope blamed the “so-called First World” for continuing to “export its spiritual toxic waste” to the continent.

“In this sense, colonialism, which is over at a political level, has never really entirely come to an end,” he said in a lengthy homily delivered entirely in Italian.

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Update: The Catholic Herald has a lot more here.

In California, your church likely would lose its property. In South Carolina, however, your church is safe. That’s because the California Supreme Court in January and the South Carolina Supreme Court in September chose opposing methods for their respective lower courts to use in judging church property disputes. (Declared the South Carolina court: “It is an axiomatic principle of law that a person or entity must hold title to property in order to declare that it is held in trust for the benefit of another.”)

The U.S. Supreme Court is partly to blame for the confusion. Traditionally, property matters are a state, not federal, legal matter. Many states historically allowed an exception to laws governing property. They deferred instead to rules set by certain “hierarchical” denominations in property issues of their member churches. As the 20th century deepened, scattered courts became more willing to listen to appeals of congregations deprived of their property and to apply “neutral principles” of state law in resolving disputes. In Jones v. Wolf in 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court said courts were free to use “either approach: deference to the hierarchy” or neutral principles of law.

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We are deeply disappointed that former members of the vestry at Christ Episcopal Church have chosen to use the Ridgewood Blog and other public forums to address what is clearly an internal matter involving the congregation ”“ especially when a more appropriate forum had already been provided and communicated to all members of the congregation.

The Office of the Bishop has been in conversation with the clergy and lay leadership of Christ Church, and together we have developed a process ”“ already underway ”“ to address any and all issues and concerns raised by the congregation’s members. That process was outlined in a letter from the wardens and rector to the congregation dated October 1.

At a Rector’s Forum held on Sunday, October 4, the rector and wardens discussed this process and responded to questions from parishioners. During the forum, which is held every Sunday, matters of concern to parish members are regularly discussed. In fact, a large number of parishioners who had received the letter from the rector and wardens participated fully in that open conversation.

We are confident that through patient listening, candid conversation, and the good faith efforts of the clergy, lay leadership and parishioners ”“ working together ”“ the mission and ministry of Christ Church will continue to serve the needs of the congregation, the community of Ridgewood and the wider world.

–Nina Nicholson, Director of Communications, the Episcopal Diocese of Newark

As you have heard, ten of the twelve elected members of the Christ Church Vestry have resigned since the February Annual Meeting, nine of us in the past week. We feel it is important that we express the reasons for this most extraordinary development to you directly. All of these matters have been previously brought to the attention of the Rector and/or Wardens, most recently in an Executive Session held two weeks before we resigned.

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It is said that the key to the door in the Iron Curtain was cut in Leipzig. It was to become the key that opened Berlin’s infamous Wall and ultimately brought about its collapse, not to mention that of the Soviet empire. But 20 years ago to the day, in the second city of what was communist East Germany, no one had any notion of what was to come. Instead, the shabby, heavily polluted town of nearly half a million people was gripped by an all-pervasive fear.

Newspapers controlled by the Communist Party had done their best to whip up panic, full of dire warnings about the state’s readiness to crush “the counter revolution” by force. The order had been given by none other than Erich Mielke, the regime’s despised and feared Stasi chief. There were rumours about hundreds of Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns being broken out of store rooms at secret police headquarters in preparation for a bloody showdown with the growing numbers of demonstrators who were taking to Leipzig’s streets to protest against the Communist regime.

“We were terrified that the state would enforce a Chinese solution,” recalled Christian Führer, a pastor who was one of the demonstration leaders. “You have to remember that our protests against the regime were happening only weeks after the massacre at Tiananmen Square.”

Führer is one of the big heroes of East Germany’s peaceful revolution. He looks more like a lorry driver than a pastor and is rarely seen without his sleveless jean jacket. At age 66, he could easily be mistaken for someone 10 years younger. In 1989, the East German regime were using 28 Stasi officers to watch him night and day; his spiky grey hair earned him the secret police codename “hedgehog”.

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It makes doing your taxes look kind of easy. Dealing with your insurance forms when you’re sick is… it’s really hard.

—Karen Pollitz, a health policy researcher at Georgetown, as quoted on last night’s Marketplace

Yet this might just be where the president’s luck runs out. For precisely the power of his own party in Congress could prove to be a source of weakness rather than strength. On my most recent visit to Washington, I could not help being struck by the shift that has occurred from the imperial presidency of the Bush era to something like parliamentary government under Mr Obama. This president proposes; Congress disposes. It was Congress that wrote the stimulus bill and made sure it was stuffed full of political pork. It is Congress that will ensure the healthcare bill falls well short of being self-financing. Mr Obama recently snapped at an unnamed “Blue Dog” (conservative-leaning) House Democrat: “You’re going to destroy my presidency.” He could be right.

According to the polls, voters disapprove of Congress by 61 per cent to 31 per cent. What’s more, the two parties would be neck and neck if the midterm elections were held today. The reason is clear. While the stimulus package had a sound macroeconomic rationale, the growing structural imbalance between federal revenue and spending scares the hell out of voters. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll showed that 59 per cent of Americans think government spending is excessive. Mr Obama receives his lowest approval ratings for his handling of the federal budget deficit.

—Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School

Excessive praise can be unwelcome and embarrassing. Just ask President Obama, who awoke Friday to discover that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before he had completed even a year in office. Obama managed to be both abashed and appreciative in his response, but no amount of self-effacing spin can obscure the oddity of this award.

For the president’s critics on the right, the Nobel feeds a narrative in which Obama is more interested in flattering foreigners than in defending U.S. interests. To those in his restive progressive base, it appears that the peacemaker’s mantle has been draped on the shoulders of a president who is presiding over two distant wars and who may soon send as many as 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

For our part, we’re fans of the president. We endorsed him for the job, and we greatly prefer him to his predecessor. But it’s difficult to see why he deserves the peace prize so soon after taking office. The Nobel committee didn’t just embarrass Obama, it diminished the credibility of the prize itself….

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

The people of St. Luke’s Anglican Church have called their La Crescenta parish home for 85 years. Generations of families have grown up within its historic stone walls.

On Sunday, the Rev. Rob Holman will deliver his final sermon there, an epitaph to a bruising legal fight the congregation waged and lost to practice its conservative brand of Christian theology and hold on to the church.

On Monday, St. Luke’s leaders will hand over its keys to the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

The diocese sued to retain St. Luke’s property after the congregation voted overwhelmingly in 2006 to leave it and the national Episcopal Church over theological differences, including the consecration of a gay bishop in New Hampshire.

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An English diocesan bishop has publicly revealed an occasion when he railed against God and angrily asked him: “What do you think you’re doing?”

The candid disclosure comes from the Bishop of Bradford, the Rt Rev David James, in the October issue of the Bradford diocesan monthly.

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Justice does not come without cost. In the most obvious sense, it is the cost of life and safety. For very many here today, that will be the first thing in their minds and hearts ”“ along with the cost in anxiety and compassion that is carried by the families of servicemen and women. But there is another sort of cost involved in holding back the easy instinctive response and checking that you are genuinely doing something for the sake of long-term building or healing: a cost in putting up with boredom and frustration in the course of operations; in setting aside prejudice and resentment to get to know a strange culture and feel with and for its people. These are all part of the cost, the sacrifice, involved in seeking a better and more secure life for people who have suffered outrageously.

When we as Christians consider the sacrifice that purchased peace and mercy for the whole world, we think not only of the death of Jesus on the cross but also of the cost of love and openness to the stranger that marked his entire life. We can recognise the same thing at work in a lesser degree in any life that is dedicated to taking the world a little further out of barbarity and violence: it is not only the moments of high tragedy that matter, but the patient acceptance of daily frustrations and confusions, and the need for painstaking attention in every detail to the work that is there to be done. All of that too we commemorate and celebrate today.

Many people of my generation and younger grew up doubting whether we should ever see another straightforward international conflict, fought by a standing army with conventional weapons. We had begun to forget the realities of cost. And when such conflict appeared on the horizon, there were those among both policy makers and commentators who were able to talk about it without really measuring the price, the cost of justice. Perhaps we have learned something ”“ if only that there is ‘a time to keep silence’, a time to let go of the satisfyingly overblown language that is so tempting for human beings when war is in the air. But today it is also ‘a time to speak’, although only briefly, to speak our thanks for those who have taught us through their sacrifice the sheer worth of justice and peace and who have shouldered some of the responsibility for fleshing out the values most of us only talk about.

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(Please note: the inaccurate original article to which this offers corrections may be found here).

While I appreciate Adam Parker’s attempt to understand the larger issues surrounding the upcoming Special Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, his recent article titled “Diocese to vote on split” in the Oct. 4 Post and Courier was unfortunately marred by errors of fact.

These errors are all the more troubling because they relate to the effect of the proposed resolutions, should the convention vote in favor of them.

The errors are doubly troubling because a simple phone call to the bishop or the diocesan staff could have quickly corrected any misunderstanding.

The issues are so complicated that I can understand why such errors might be made. Nevertheless, I believe that it is important to correct misimpressions that the article may have produced.

Read it carefully and read it all.

It needs to be understood, however, that Paragraph Two is procedural only. It does not alter the legal or ecclesiastical principles surrounding the questions of whether a parish can disaffiliate from the diocese or whether a disaffiliating congregation may retain parish property.

To everyone in parishes where members have separated from the Episcopal Church, we say that despite our different views, we sincerely invite you to be reconciled with us and return to active participation in the diocese, so that no disputes over property are necessary. We pledge to you that we do not seek to punish but rather only to be reconciled with you. In our work together over the past year, we have learned that we have widely different opinions on many of the issues facing the Episcopal Church today; we have also learned that if we refuse to allow those differences to harden into divisions, many fruitful things can be accomplished.

Some media reports have incorrectly suggested that we will now begin simply to transfer buildings and land to parishes that do not want to be active in the Episcopal Church. Our fiduciary duties as trustees and stewards, as well as the terms of the Stipulation, do not permit that to be the case.

But it remains our desire, within the constraints of the Stipulation and the canons and legal principles which govern our stewardship of these matters, to find a means to use these sacred spaces to the greatest glory of God.

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In many Roman Catholic churches across the country, lay people no longer receive wine at Communion, and some Catholic clergy have advised congregants not to shake hands or hug at the moment of the liturgy known as “the passing of the peace,” when parishioners typically greet someone in, and offer embodied signs of, the peace of Christ. In my own Episcopal parish, I was greeted by a neighbor last Sunday with an elbow bump. At a United Church of Christ congregation in the suburbs of Chicago, Communion servers now slice up bread into bite-sized bits before distributing Communion; they no longer offer congregants a loaf from which to tear a hunk of bread. In the interest of keeping fingers away from communion wine, communicants at All Saints’ Chapel in Sewanee, Tenn., are now instructed not to dip their Eucharistic bread into the cup but rather to sip the cup directly, since hands are often more infectious than mouths.

At Cornell University, the Episcopal chaplain, Clark West, has reminded worshippers that they will receive the fullness of the Eucharist if they receive only “one kind”””that is, the wafer and not the wine. “We have alcoholics among us for whom this has been the practice for years without any noticeably adverse effects,” quips Mr. West. To emphasize this, he has, on occasion, used a longer liturgical formula, which names the host as itself both “the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Less reverently, Mr. West has taken to calling the bottle of Purell hand sanitizer, which now sits prominently on the credence table, the post-modern lavabo. (A lavabo is the bowl a priest uses to wash his or her hands in the Eucharist.)

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The Church of England could restrict the powers of some women bishops under a plan designed to end a rift between traditionalists who want to keep the all-male senior clergy, and liberals demanding equality.

The proposal has reignited the long-running debate over the “stained glass ceiling” that stops women from taking the most senior roles in the church.

Along with homosexual bishops and same-sex marriages, the ordination of women is among the most divisive issues facing the Anglican Communion, which has 77 million members worldwide.

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Historically, religious communities in the United States addressed the needs of local communities in way that were clearly outside the scope of government. For example, as David G. Dalin writes in “The Jewish War on Poverty,” between the 1820s and the Civil War, Jews laid the foundation for many charitable institutions outside the synagogue including a network of orphanages, fraternal lodges, hospitals, retirement homes, settlement houses, free-loan associations, and vocational training schools. These were also normative activities for both Protestant and Catholic religious communities on even a larger scale in communities all over America before Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The reported decline in religious life is an omen that virtue-driven local charity will decline, the passion to pursue the good will wane, and Americans will look to government to guide, protect, and provide. As we turn our lives over to government control, our capacity for independent thought and action are compromised. The real “opiate of the masses,” it would seem, is not religion but the lack of it.

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Today’s topic: When should we start caring about federal deficits? When should we start doing something about them? Dean Baker and Maya MacGuineas continue their debate on the relationship between unemployment rates and economic recovery, and how much Washington can do about both.

Point: Maya MacGuineas, New American Foundation Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget

The federal budget deficit was bad before the recession; now it is downright alarming. In the fiscal year that just ended, the deficit was about $1.4 trillion — almost a trillion more than the prior year. And reasonable projections are that we will borrow close to $10 trillion more over the next decade.

Does that mean we should start to reduce the deficit this year? No, not at all. The economic recovery is still too fragile to aggressively start pulling money out of the economy, a policy blunder that could derail our anemic growth.

But at the same time, there are signs that markets and creditors could turn against us at any moment.

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A Read-only word document, see what you make of it.

Check it out if you have yet to do so.

The dollar fell to a 14-month low against other currencies Thursday, intensifying a trend that the Obama administration has publicly suggested it opposes — but which it appears prepared to tolerate quietly.

Many of America’s trading partners, however, are pushing the other way. In Asia, traders said central banks in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong again intervened to slow the dollar’s fall against their currencies.

Asian officials fear that the dollar’s fall could crimp their export-driven economies. “The [Thai] baht has appreciated a little too rapidly compared with our fundamentals,” said Suchada Kirakul, assistant governor of the Bank of Thailand.

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A London Church was effectively ”˜silenced’ by a Court after a decision by Magistrates to uphold a noise abatement notice, not to play excessive sound, after just one Muslim neighbour complained about noise levels of worship in a church which was next door to the house he purchased.

Singing songs of praise on a Sunday is normal Church activity. Using amplification is a normal part of Church life and it was argued at the Court hearing that the normal use of a Church building entails worship and cannot constitute noise nuisance.

Immanuel House of Worship Church has been meeting at 89 Vallentin Road in Walthamstow since it bought the premises in 2006. The Church was built in 1894 and was formerly used by the United Reformed Church, when the Church owned all the land on which the current properties are now built.

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Basing full membership of the Anglican Communion on compliance with the text of a covenant may send unintended messages about exclusion, Dr Peter Selby, the former Bishop of Worcester, said this week.

Speaking at the Inclusive Church conference, Dr Selby offered a detailed critique of Communion, Covenant, and our Anglican Future, the statement issued by Dr Rowan Williams after the recent General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States. (News, 31 July,)

Dr Selby said that both of the main arguments made in the Archbishop’s paper had a two-edged character. The requirement that, in order to be recognisable, Anglicans needed patterns and convictions such as those proposed in the Anglican Covenant, raised the fundamental biblical question “recognisable to whom?” Being recognisable to “the least of the brothers and sisters” (Matthew 25) mattered at least as much as being recognisable to other provinces, Dr Selby contended.

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The global Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly 1 in 4 people in the world practice Islam, according to a report Wednesday billed as the most comprehensive of its kind.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report provides a precise number for a population whose size has long has been subject to guesswork, with estimates ranging anywhere from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.

The project, three years in the making, also presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For instance, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon, China has more Muslims than Syria, Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined, and Ethiopia has nearly as many Muslims as Afghanistan.

“This whole idea that Muslims are Arabs and Arabs are Muslims is really just obliterated by this report,” said Amaney Jamal, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University who reviewed an advance copy.

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