A Supreme Court argument on Wednesday about the fate of a cross in a remote part of the Mojave National Preserve in southeastern California largely avoided the most interesting question in the case: whether the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion is violated by the display of a cross as a war memorial.

The cross in the desert was erected in the 1930s by the Veterans of Foreign Wars to honor fallen service members. Ten years ago, Frank Buono, a retired employee of the National Park Service, objected to the cross, saying it violated the establishment clause.

In the intervening decade, Congress and the courts have engaged in a legal tug of war. Congress passed measures forbidding removal of the cross, designating it as a national memorial and, finally, ordering the land under the cross to be transferred to private hands. Federal courts in California have insisted that the cross may not be displayed.

At Wednesday’s argument, only Justice Antonin Scalia appeared inclined to reach the establishment clause question.

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In my role as publisher of United Methodist News Service, I am often called on to defend or explain a decision to report on a sensitive issue. You can take your pick of issues – homosexuality, church trials, constitutional amendments. People often ask me why the church’s news agency would disclose information about disagreements or problems in the church.

The answer is simple: Reporting the unvarnished truth is our responsibility to the church and to you. It’s a core value. Out of our collective experience as a people of faith our forefathers and foremothers determined it is necessary for the good of the whole. This is a remarkable stand for integrity and truthfulness.

Being a truly open church requires being transparent about what goes on in our congregations, conferences and agencies. It means being accountable, from the local level right up to the Council of Bishops. The absence of accountability leaves room for a host of problems, ranging from complacenc[y] to the misuse of power.

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Watching this video again makes Kagan fairly vibrate with the thrill of rediscovery: here on camera is the young girl who, as an infant, first embodied for him what it meant to be wired to worry. He went on to find many more such children, and would watch a big chunk of them run into trouble with anxiety or other problems as they grew up.

The tenuousness of modern life can make anyone feel overwrought. And in societal moments like the one we are in ”” thousands losing jobs and homes, our futures threatened by everything from diminishing retirement funds to global warming ”” it often feels as if ours is the Age of Anxiety. But some people, no matter how robust their stock portfolios or how healthy their children, are always mentally preparing for doom. They are just born worriers, their brains forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe. For the past 20 years, Kagan and his colleagues have been following hundreds of such people, beginning in infancy, to see what happens to those who start out primed to fret. Now that these infants are young adults, the studies are yielding new information about the anxious brain.

These psychologists have put the assumptions about innate temperament on firmer footing, and they have also demonstrated that some of us, like Baby 19, are born anxious ”” or, more accurately, born predisposed to be anxious. Four significant long-term longitudinal studies are now under way: two at Harvard that Kagan initiated, two more at the University of Maryland under the direction of Nathan Fox, a former graduate student of Kagan’s. With slight variations, they all have reached similar conclusions: that babies differ according to inborn temperament; that 15 to 20 percent of them will react strongly to novel people or situations; and that strongly reactive babies are more likely to grow up to be anxious.

They have also shown that while temperament persists, the behavior associated with it doesn’t always….

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The new chief officer of the public schools here, Ron Huberman, a former police officer and transit executive with a passion for data analysis, has a plan to stop the killings of the city’s public school students. And it does not have to do with guns or security guards. It has to do with statistics and probability.

The plan comes too late for Derrion Albert, the 16-year-old who was beaten to death recently with wood planks after getting caught on his way home between two rival South Side gangs, neither of which he was a member, the police said.

The killing, captured on cellphone video and broadcast on YouTube, among other places, has once again caused widespread grief over a seemingly intractable problem here. Derrion, a football player on the honor roll, was the third youth to die violently this academic year ”” and the 67th since the beginning of the 2007-8 school year. And hundreds of others have survived shootings or severe beatings on their way to and from school.

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Having been tipped that the numbers were being shared with the Executive Council during its Oct. 5-8 meeting, I e-mailed church public affairs officer Neva Rae Fox late Wednesday, Oct. 7, and asked for a “copy of the new ASA and membership figures that were passed out to the Executive Council at this week’s meeting.”

She e-mailed me back that “ASA and membership figures have not been passed out to Exec Council.”

So I e-mailed back: “Perhaps passed out is the wrong word. It’s my understanding that the figures are finished and were shared with the Executive Council this week.”

This morning, she responded: “if so, not yet. nothing has been shared yet.”

That didn’t match what I’d been led to believe by a very reliable source. So I asked Anderson and the Presiding Bishop about the numbers during the press conference. Here’s what they said…

Read it all especially the responses to Mr. Lockwood’s question.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair said Wednesday (Oct. 7) that Muslims and Christians working to understand each other’s cultural and religious beliefs could help build a global movement for peace.

“In religion, we are told to love your God, love your neighbors as yourself,” Blair said at a Georgetown University panel on the future of Muslim-Christian relations, adding that too often people view their neighbors as only those with similar beliefs.

Blair said both Christians and Muslims had been outsiders at one point in their histories, and that each had wrestled with how their own beliefs defied convention at one time.

“If we can get on, the 21st century world can get on,” he said. “It’s true we are different, but so were our founders.”

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Check it out and there is much more here.

American soldiers serving in Afghanistan are depressed and deeply disillusioned, according to the chaplains of two US battalions that have spent nine months on the front line in the war against the Taleban.

Many feel that they are risking their lives ”” and that colleagues have died ”” for a futile mission and an Afghan population that does nothing to help them, the chaplains told The Times in their makeshift chapel on this fortress-like base in a dusty, brown valley southwest of Kabul.

“The many soldiers who come to see us have a sense of futility and anger about being here. They are really in a state of depression and despair and just want to get back to their families,” said Captain Jeff Masengale, of the 10th Mountain Division’s 2-87 Infantry Battalion.

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“There were a couple of years after the Tiananmen crackdown when human rights were a more significant element of American policy, but they didn’t last long,” [James] Mann said.

A key reason is that Chinese leaders began to fully embrace capitalist-style reforms in 1992, allowing foreign investment and trade between the U.S. and China to skyrocket.

China used the money it gained from a giant trade surplus to buy U.S. debt, and ”” in recent years ”” become America’s banker.

“The result of that has been enormous economic leverage over the United States,” Mann said.

Mary Beth Markey, with the human-rights group International Campaign for Tibet, said pressing the campaign’s agenda became harder as China joined the world economy.

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The Executive Council said that the comments it received on Section Four were “so interwoven” with comments on the covenant as a whole that “separating the two is difficult.”

“The majority of deputations and individual deputies that responded are not convinced that the covenant in its current form will bring about deeper communion,” the council said. “Several stated that the overall idea of a covenant is ‘un-Anglican.’ One went as far as to say that the ‘document incorporates anxiety.'”

On the other hand, the council noted, another deputy called the covenant “a presentation of the Christian community as a dynamic spiritual body in which God-given freedom is inextricably bound up with God-given accountability.”

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Unless Uganda begins to address the poverty, ethnic divisions and social unrest in its midst, the country’s future will be blighted, Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda has warned.

Police report that 24 people died in two days of rioting in and around Kampala that began on Sept 10 after the government forbade King Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II, the leader of Uganda’s largest ethnic group, the Baganda, from touring the Kayunga region near Kampala.

Kayunga is a part of the Baganda kingdom, however, only a minority of its residents are Baganda. The government forbade the king from visiting the region after it said he declined to meet with separatist groups.

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Measured in euros (a more stable ruler than the ever-weakening dollar), U.S. real per capita GDP is down 25% since 2000, while Germany’s is up 4% and tops ours.

The solution is a strong U.S. jobs and wealth program. It has to include stable money, a flatter, more competitive tax structure, spending restraint, and common-sense bank regulation so small business lending can restart. Treasury has to rapidly lengthen the maturity of the national debt and take steps to protect the Fed from market losses on its long-term debt holdings.

Instead, Washington’s current economic program pushes capital away by weakening the dollar, threatening higher tax rates, borrowing short (the Fed’s near trillion-dollar overnight debt, Treasury’s mounds of bill and note issuance) to lend long (mortgages, student loans, entitlements), doubling down on government subsidies, and rechanneling bank loans to governments and big businesses instead of the small business job-growth engine.

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The building up of people and parishes is at the heart of ministry. Whatever ”˜church’ might look like in an assortment of possible expressions, with a better supported clergy and more teaching and learning opportunities, parishioners will be nurtured better in worship and faith.

We know that parish is a geographic and administrative term as much as it is a term for a local unit of the Church. Our parish system has been marvellously effective in evangelising neighbourhoods and sustaining the faithful with pastoral care. Nevertheless we know that modern society sees many people relating to each other through networks of shared interest, not just through or not even in neighbourhoods. The Church of England has pioneered work in Fresh Expressions of Church to seek to evangelise the networks of relationship in our society and pastorally care for Christians within them. There are undoubtedly many opportunities for us to progress work in this area in Australia. Early initiatives have included a dog walking group in the northern suburbs, the revitalisation of midweek worship as a focus for community in itself, and ministry around cycling groups in Bendigo.

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The Synod opened last night in St Paul’s Cathedral with an address by Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr Philip Freier, who said that the fragility of human existence reminded us of the folly of seeking security in the physical rather than the spiritual. “The devastation of the bushfires in February, the continued effects of the drought and natural disasters in our region all point to our rather less secure grasp on the world than most Australians had come to expect.”

Moreover, the Global Financial Crisis, and predictions of future disasters arising from climate change, reinforced this view. For Christians, he added, the answer lies “in the promise of our redemption in Christ”¦ [this is where] we find the deepest purpose of God who calls us into being and maintains our hope even in the midst of a world with forces that have the power to crush us.”

He also outlined the achievements of the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne over the past 12 months, including its Bushfire Appeal and recovery program which was established following the tragic bushfires of 7 February; and the ”˜fresh connections’ parishes had been making with their local communities through such events as Open Church Week in July, and Back to Church Sunday in September.

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The mission that grounds Jefferts Schori is transforming the world so that it looks like the reign of God. She is vocal about the Episcopal Church’s priorities, including the United Nations Millennium Development Goals that address issues including poverty and hunger, climate change and care for the earth and sustainable development. “There’s more in the Bible about hunger and poverty than sexuality,” she said. “Jesus healed people more than he did anything else.”

Jefferts Schori also challenges the church she pastors to “recognize, bless, and celebrate multicultural reality.” In the Omaha diocese, Episcopal, Jewish and Muslim congregations are purchasing a single piece of property to build a shared building that will include worship space for each faith and a common area that can be used by the community during the week. The example of interfaith relations recognizes the commonality of the three denominations Abrahamic roots and their differences, Jefferts Schori said.

Attendance at the Episcopal Church is declining just as it is at other traditional denominations. The average Episcopal congregation has 75 worshippers on a Sunday and 19,000 more members of the aging church die than are born each year. The presiding bishop said the solution is to reach out to growing populations, including Hispanics, who have not been part of what is mistakenly perceived as a white, upper class church that kneels and stands and supports gays and lesbians. “The task of evangelism is to present worship in a language that can be understood and shape worship to speak to a new generation. It’s not necessarily change. It’s addition,” Jefferts Schori said.

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A core membership of 200 former Christ Church members have raised $370,000 to pay for the initial startup, with the hope of raising more to buy the church outright.

This new parish has its roots in a deep division among conservatives and liberals within the Episcopal Church as a whole, strife that came to a head in 2003 with the consecration of the openly gay Right Rev. Gene Robinson as bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire.

The founders of this new church don’t consider this a split from the Hamilton parish, but the founding of a new church under the Anglican Communion, said David Greening, 58, of Beverly, a retired marketing and communications manager from Osram Sylvania. He’s the church’s senior warden.

“It’s more of a pioneering effort on our part,” Greening said. “This is not a schism.”

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THE Anglican and Catholic Churches in Kayunga district conducted a joint service on Sunday in St. Stephen’s church of Uganda Namagabi. They prayed for the talks between the central Government and Buganda kingdom to produce good results.

The service was led by the Catholic priest of Namagabi parish, Emmanuel Walakira, with the help of the Anglican priest of St. Stephen’s church Daniel Balabyekubo.

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The letter refers to Canon III.9.8 but does not cite it by title: “Renunciation of the Ordained Ministry.” That language has proven a stumbling point, in recent years, as other priests have received occasional offers for release without deposition.

The canon applies to any priest who wants to resign from the Episcopal Church’s holy orders, “acting voluntarily and for causes, assigned or known, which do not affect the priest’s moral character.” The canon’s wording sometimes has left priests uncertain of whether they are being asked to renounce only their ministry within the Episcopal Church or their future ministry as priests.

Read it all. While I appreciate that the desire to be generous is motivating those taking this decision, the problem is the canon which is being used. This is not what the canon is for. The more time I have had to ponder this, the more troubled I have become. There were other ways to undertake this which do not involve misuse of the canons–KSH.

The decision to suspend the camp’s operations is just the first of many expected changes in the diocese, which serves Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. In a recent issue of the Diocesan Post, Rev. Gary Nicolosi made it clear a major transformation is needed.

Under the headline – “Can We Handle The Truth?” – Nicolosi said average Sunday attendance across the entire Island fell last year to 3,856 from 4,955 in 2007. The average Anglican congregation had just 82 worshippers – down 15 from the previous year – and most parishes reported budget deficits.

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According to church organizers, 120,000 people heard the pope’s homily on September 27, which Benedict delivered in an open field near the Brno airport. Like his other addresses on the challenges of modernity and secularization, Benedict spoke on behalf of the broad Christian tradition, indicating that the dire situation demands a unified Christian apologetic. He referenced Isaiah 61:1-3a, when the prophet explains his Spirit-anointed mission to proclaim liberty to captives and console the afflicted and poor. Jesus, of course, fulfilled this promise (Luke 4:16-21). Indeed, Jesus accomplished this mission counter-intuitively, through his death and resurrection. Those who believe in him are freed from slavery to selfishness and evil, sin and death.

This message never changes, but Benedict admitted that the cultural circumstances in Europe have altered dramatically. Faith has been limited to the private, supernatural realm. Scientific, economic, and social progress claim to fill the void. Yet Benedict reminded the audience that history holds little promise that a society built on anything but God can long sustain human freedom and promote the values of goodness, justice, and fraternity.

“Technical developments and the improvement of social structures are important and certainly necessary, but they are not enough to guarantee the moral welfare of society,” Benedict said. “Man needs to be liberated from material oppressions, but more profoundly, he must be saved from the evils that afflict the spirit. And who can save him if not God, who is Love and has revealed his face as almighty and merciful Father in Jesus Christ? Our firm hope is therefore Christ: in him, God has loved us to the utmost and has given us life in abundance (cf. Jn 10:10), the life that every person, even if unknowingly, longs to possess.”

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The Anglican Diocese of B.C. is in “crisis” and planning “drastic action,” to make up for dwindling revenues, declining attendance and increased deficit within its parishes totalling about $1 million.

The economy and declining attendance is likely to blame.

The diocese includes 64 churches on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, 26 in the Capital Region.

While there are more than 9,000 members on the islands, on average less than half that number attend weekly worship, down from about 5,000 regular attendees last year.

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Eight years ago, the U.S.-led assault against al-Qaeda fighters and the Taliban regime that gave them haven in Afghanistan won almost universal backing from Americans reeling from the 9/11 attacks.

Now, as President Obama wrestles with whether to deploy tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to the war there, he faces treacherous crosscurrents that have put him at odds with some of his strongest supporters ”” and created a potential public faceoff with the military commander he installed.

Obama met for three hours with his top national security advisers at the White House Situation Room on Wednesday and heads back there Friday for sessions on Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan.

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The U.S. dollar continued its six-month slide Tuesday amid a growing international chorus that wants the dollar replaced — or at least supplemented — as the world’s reserve currency, a move that would end the greenback’s six decades of global dominance.

The dollar has come under attack from abroad as the economic crisis has played out, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s decision to flood a seized-up financial system with liquidity last fall. The central bank’s moves likely staved off deflation, but the massive influx of new dollars has devalued existing ones. Foreign nations are worried that the massive U.S. national debt and rising deficits are not being addressed. And though inflation is not yet a concern in the United States, a prolonged slide in the dollar’s value could lead to higher prices for consumers.

Further, large emerging economies — such as China, Russia, Brazil and India — are tired of kow-towing to the American buck, and sense an opportunity to knock a weakened dollar off its imperial perch.

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I am a 56-year-old baby boomer, and looking around today it’s very clear that my generation had it easy: We grew up in the shadow of just one bomb ”” the nuclear bomb. That is, in our day, it seemed as if there was just one big threat that could trigger a nonlinear, 180-degree change in the trajectory of our lives: the Soviets hitting us with a nuke. My girls are not so lucky.

Today’s youth are growing up in the shadow of three bombs ”” any one of which could go off at any time and set in motion a truly nonlinear, radical change in the trajectory of their lives.

The first, of course, is still the nuclear threat, which, for my generation, basically came from just one seemingly rational enemy, the Soviet Union, with which we shared a doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Today, the nuclear threat can be delivered by all kinds of states or terrorists, including suicidal jihadists for whom mutual assured destruction is a delight, not a deterrent.

But there are now two other bombs our children have hanging over them: the debt bomb and the climate bomb.

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The sharp fall in the US dollar is giving ammunition to the critics of the Obama administration and fuelling broader concerns about the erosion of America’s reserve currency status.

Republican politicians have highlighted the dollar’s slide as evidence of waning US power. On Wednesday, Sarah Palin, the Republican former vice-presidential candidate, added her voice to those who have expressed concern over the consequences of rising US indebtedness and dependence on foreign oil.

“We can see the effect of this in the price of gold, which hit a record high today in response to fears about the weakened dollar,” she wrote on her Facebook site.

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The possibility of using a patient’s genetic information to create personalized therapies to battle cancer is one step closer to reality after Canadian scientists decoded, for the first time, the entire genome of a patient’s metastatic breast cancer.

It’s a landmark achievement that is helping to rewrite old notions about the way cancer develops and provides new insights into which drugs could benefit patients the most.

“I’m excited by the possibilities,” said Samuel Aparicio, the head of the department of breast and molecular oncology at the B.C. Cancer Agency and one of the lead scientists involved with the discovery. “In fact, I never thought I would see in my professional lifetime that it would become possible to routinely sequence genomes in the way that we’re now doing.”

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We lost. In human terms we lost. Bishop and Standing Committee, together with Board of Trustees, thought we understood the document that was signed on our behalf in 2005 that ended the first phase of the Calvary lawsuit. But yesterday, the judge found against us on the basis of that document.

The team that has provided extraordinary legal counsel to us, and to others in similar cases across the country, has issued the following statement: “We believe the opinion and order is contrary to applicable law, disregards the agreed assumption of valid withdrawal by the Diocese from TEC, violates the assurances given us that the issue of the ‘true diocese’ was not part of this proceeding and denies us due process of law.” Accordingly we reserve all of our rights to appeal.

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[Gerald] Kieschnick wrote to the ELCA bishops about an assembly action which directed the ELCA to change policy to make it possible for Lutherans in publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships to serve as ELCA associates in ministry, clergy, deaconesses and diaconal ministers.
“Bishop Hanson and Conference of Bishops, I share this letter with you to confirm what I have already stated, namely, that this is a very serious matter, one that we cannot ignore,” a portion of Kieschnick’s letter said. “To the greatest extent possible, it would be a blessing to our ongoing cooperative relationships if the actions taken at the ELCA Assembly were not implemented, nor given influence, in the context of inter-Lutheran ministries involving the LCMS and the ELCA, so that these relationships would be neither damaged nor destroyed.”
“Out of deep concern for the people who receive ministry from such organizations and for the continuation of those ministries, I share with you this letter and pray that it will be received in the spirit of fraternal, collegial dialogue with which it is sent,” the LCMS president wrote.

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The Church Council of the Silesian Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession, Czech Republic, wrote to the bishop of the ELCA Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod to report it will propose ending its companion synod relationship with the synod because of the assembly decision. Next month, the church’s assembly will consider the proposal, said the Rev. Rafael Malpica Padilla, executive director, ELCA Global Mission.

“We are still in conversation with that church to see if this means severing the relationship with the ELCA or the companion synod,” Malpica Padilla told the ELCA Conference of Bishops, which met here Oct. 1-6. The ELCA’s 65 synods maintain more than 120 companion synod relationships, through which the synod and its international partner pledge to support each other, share resources and engage in mission.

One international congregation, the Lutheran Church of Guam, intends to end its ELCA relationship because of the assembly decision, Malpica Padilla said.

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Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and four other bishops issued on October 5, a “Statement of Principles for Catholic-Jewish Dialogue.”

The cardinal and bishops also said in a letter that the June 18 document titled, “A Note on Ambiguities Contained in ”˜Reflections on Covenant and Mission’” would be amended by removing two sentences that might lead to misunderstanding about the purpose of interreligious dialogue.

The Note addressed issues related to evangelization and the Jewish covenant that were discussed in an article written in 2002 by a group of Catholic scholars who were consultants to the USCCB and the National Council of Synagogues. Intended “as a clarification of Church teaching primarily for Catholics,” the Note “led to misunderstanding and feelings of hurt among members of the Jewish community,” the bishops said in their statement.

Read it all and read the original statement linked in a pdf at the bottom of the linked page.