America’s pastime (baseball) enters its sprint toward the World Series, and the sport that is America’s pastime in more than just name (football) has fans transfixed from coast to coast.

Anyone who watches pro and college football or follows the drama of the baseball playoffs can’t help but notice something else that often competes for our attention amid the passes, pitches and home runs: religion.

Players point skyward to the Almighty after reaching the end zone or home plate, star athletes voice thanks and praise to their savior after a big win, and sports heroes use their media spotlight to promote the Christian message. (See University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow and his eye-black, touting Scripture.)These are the outward signs of a faith surge that has made big-time sports one of the most outwardly religious sectors of American culture.

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…in Augusta the leadership of Maine casually ignored their own policy when they enacted same-sex marriage. They pretended that the state had no historic interest to protect marriage as an essential institution which preserves the important roles that men and women each play in marriage and the raising of children.

Bishop Robinson of New Hampshire is much like those legislators. He pretends that the Episcopal Church’s teaching on marriage is no longer important. As a partnered homosexual living in a same-sex union, he is outside the church’s official position on sexual relationships.

He is a schismatic ringleader of a recent majority of the Episcopal Church’s leadership, which openly defies the church’s own teaching on sexual relationships. You would think that the way Bishop Robinson and some Maine Episcopal clergy act that the official teaching of the church is to equate same-sex unions to marriage in the eyes of God and the church.

Not.

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The Lutherans aren’t sitting around for three years like the Episcopalians did. For them, the writing clearly is on the wall.

“One of the messages we heard loud and clear from the Episcopalians is that by waiting several years, they lost some of their best and brightest lay people,” Mr. [Ryan] Schwarz told me. “We intend to have our plans in place a lot faster.”

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You can tell a lot about a person’s spiritual outlook based on the administrative structure of the congregation or denomination, church expert Bill Swatos says.

Members of traditions with strong hierarchies, such as the Catholic or Episcopal churches, are likely to view spirituality as a group experience, said Swatos, an Episcopal priest and director of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

Those in evangelical and congregational churches, such as Baptists and many non-denominational traditions, express faith as a personal experience, he said.

You can also tell a lot by how a given tradition selects spiritual leaders for its congregations.

Swatos and five First Coast ministers discuss how that process evolves in their traditions and what it says about their take on religious life, according to Swatos.

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David Hyde Pierce, the comedic actor best known for his role on the sitcom “Frasier,” presented one of his lesser known talents Sunday afternoon to a capacity congregation at the Bethesda Episcopal Church.

Pierce performed two works on the restored 1921 Skinner organ, which he and his three siblings donated the funds to rebuild. The organ has been renamed the Pierce Memorial Gallery Organ in honor of their parents, George and Laura Pierce.

“I hadn’t played organ in awhile,” Pierce said before the ceremony while standing next to the instrument, which is located upstairs in the gallery of the church. “But I live in New York City, so I practiced in some churches there to bone up.”

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The parish was founded in 1881 by the Rev. N.F. Robinson in the neighboring Fernwood section of Upper Darby and relocated to its Lansdowne site for the first worship service in 1900.

Lack of parishioners and mounting expenses evidenced by the buckets in the side aisle to collect water from the leaking roof, estimated to cost $500,000, are the causes for its closure.

“We usually don’t have this many people,” Joseph Hypolite, senior warden of the church vestry, said of the estimated 100 persons in attendance versus the usual 30 to 40 people worshipping at Sunday services.

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Richard Dawkins, best known as the author of “The Selfish Gene” (1976) and “The God Delusion” (2006), is at the Atheist Alliance International Convention in Burbank to discuss his new book, “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution” (Free Press: 470 pp., $30), but he can’t get from one banquet hall to the next without someone asking to take a picture with him.

Modest and professorial, Dawkins is mobbed, celebrity-style, no matter which audience he tells there is no God. As for Mother Nature, he adds, she doesn’t care either — natural selection is not a good-natured process, but one that favors mutant efforts to get ahead. The evidence for evolution, he concludes, is irrefutable; all living things evolved from a common ancestor, so grow up and stop whining. There is no master plan. We (our genes, that is) are on our own.

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The marquee outside St. Luke’s Anglican Church in La Crescenta was a bit sardonic in its scripture from the Book of Hebrews: “You joyfully accepted confiscation of your property.”

That was the message delivered Sunday by the Rev. Rob Holman, in his last sermon at the Foothill Boulevard church that has been entangled in a legal dispute with the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

“Next Sunday, as many of you know, we will be worshiping in a different building,” Holman said. “All because we have chosen to stand for the gospel and the authority of God’s word over our lives.”

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President Barack Obama and his family attended Sunday services at St. John’s Church, an Episcopal church on Lafayette Square just across the street from the White House.

Obama, first lady Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia listened to a sermon about how Christianity has consequences.

Mike Angell, a seminarian of the church, told the parishioners that the consequences vary, whether it’s making a hard decision at work or deciding to give more time to God.

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Nowhere, over the field of Christian doctrine, is the gulf between the biblical viewpoint and the outlook of modern secularism so yawning as in the matter of eschatology.

–J.A.T. Robinson, In The End, God (London: Collins, 2nd Edition, 1968), p. 15.

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Harcourt Brace, 1956), p.228, quoted by yours truly in yesterday’s Adult Sunday school

The more specific you can be about the work, the more readers can benefit. Thanks.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.

So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

–1 Corinthians 13: 11-13

However much he tried, Mr. [Paul] Knitter found that certain longstanding Christian formulations of faith “just didn’t make sense”: God as a person separate from creation and intervening in it as an external agent; individualized life after death for all and eternal punishment for some; Jesus as God’s “only Son” and the only savior of humankind; prayers that ask God to favor some people over others.

Mr. Knitter’s response, based on his long interaction with Buddhist teachers, was to “pass over” to Buddhism’s approach to each of these problems and then “pass back” to Christian tradition to see if he could retrieve or re-imagine aspects of it with this “Buddhist flashlight.”

He was not asserting, as some people have, that religions like Christianity and Buddhism are merely superficially different expressions of one underlying faith.

On the contrary, he insists they differ profoundly. Yet “Buddhism has helped me take another and deeper look at what I believe as a Christian,” he writes. “Many of the words that I had repeated or read throughout my life started to glow with new meaning.”

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If by any chance you didn’t catch it, this is an excellent discussion.

A referendum in a small island off the European mainland about an incomprehensible document sounds dull. Yet Ireland’s vote on October 2nd in favour of the Lisbon treaty marks a milestone for the European Union. The treaty””which, despite a flurry about the Czechs, now looks certain to be ratified””is likely to be the last big piece of EU institution-building for years to come. It also poses serious questions about the world’s biggest economy. Is Europe evolving inexorably into a federation of states? Could it become an economic trendsetter? Will Europe wake up and take a bigger role in the world? Or are the affairs of man to be decided largely in Washington and Beijing, with the new “G2” occasionally copying in the Brussels bureaucracy on its decisions?

Very few of the answers to these questions can be found in the moderately useless Lisbon treaty. It is a deliberately obscure reworking of the draft EU constitutional treaty rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. This newspaper opposed the constitution because it failed utterly to achieve the goals set by the Laeken European summit in 2001: simplification of the rules, a clearer distribution of power between the centre and national governments, greater transparency, bringing the EU closer to voters. That the Lisbon treaty is being driven through despite having been rejected by three out of a total of six referendums, and with ten governments reneging on promises to hold votes of their own, is deeply shabby.

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FAMILY MEMBER: She’s been fighting cancer for five years, twice. She has emphysema of the lungs real bad. It’s gotten worse, they said, since she’s been in here, and right now she is fighting a bad stroke. They are not sure, but they are saying something like it could affect her left side and maybe her brain.

BETTY ROLLIN, correspondent: Did she leave any instructions about what to do?

FAMILY MEMBER: No, she did not.

ROLLIN: And that’s a major problem, says Dr. Jeff Gordon, an internist at Grant Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio. Dr. Gordon has had dying patients who have not made their wishes known and haven’t realized that some extreme measures are almost always futile.

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Plans to consecrate women bishops in the Church of England have been delayed by at least four years in an attempt to avoid mass defections by opponents of women’s ordination.

Church legislators have backtracked on a decision made by the General Synod, the Church’s governing body, last year to consecrate women bishops with minimal concessions to opponents.

The Church will now be asked again to approve the plans for “super bishops”, which were rejected in July last year and which will create a new class of bishop, operating in traditionalist zones “untainted” by the spectre of women bishops.

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The unity of the Church of England is under threat once more after a key committee agreed to automatically remove certain powers from female bishops and give them to their male colleagues.

According to the amended law, this move would allow the male bishop to perform certain functions, such as communion and confirmation, in order to accommodate parishioners and clergy hostile to female bishops.

It follows heavy lobbying from those opposed to the concept of women bishops who have demanded special care in the event of their ordination, an event unlikely to occur before 2014.

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