Last month, atheists marked Blasphemy Day at gatherings around the world, and celebrated the freedom to denigrate and insult religion.

Some offered to trade pornography for Bibles. Others de-baptized people with hair dryers. And in Washington, D.C., an art exhibit opened that shows, among other paintings, one entitled Divine Wine, where Jesus, on the cross, has blood flowing from his wound into a wine bottle.

Another, Jesus Paints His Nails, shows an effeminate Jesus after the crucifixion, applying polish to the nails that attach his hands to the cross.

“I wouldn’t want this on my wall,” says Stuart Jordan, an atheist who advises the evidence-based group Center for Inquiry on policy issues. The Center for Inquiry hosted the art show.

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AUSTRALIA’S largest and most conservative Anglican diocese will tomorrow approve changes that would permit couples to marry in church, whether or not they are Christian.

The change to be passed at the Sydney synod tomorrow makes the diocese the 14th of the country’s 23 to approve the reform that would allow an unbaptised Australian to be married in church provided he or she meets the basic standards for civil marriage: a union between a man and woman voluntarily entered into for life.

The change was first mooted at the Anglican general synod in 2007. It has since been put to the different dioceses for agreement and will go back to the national synod next year. Of 16 dioceses that have so far considered it, 13 have agreed, including Melbourne and Adelaide, with Sydney to follow tomorrow, breaching the halfway mark.

The reform drops the “faith requirement” promulgated in 1981 that requires at least one half of the couple be baptised into the Christian faith (not necessarily Anglican).

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The most promising progressive people-power movements have been Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, the Sunni Awakening in Iraq and the Green Revolution in Iran. But the Cedar Revolution has been stymied by Syrian might and internal divisions. The Tehran uprising has been crushed by the iron fist of the Iranian regime, fueled by petro-dollars. And it is unclear whether the Iraqis will set aside their tribalism for a shared people power.

So as we try to figure out how many troops to send to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, let’s remember: Where there is people power wedded to progressive ideas, there is hope ”” and American power can help. Where there is people power harnessed to bad ideas, there is danger. Where there is no people power and only bad ideas, there will be no happy endings.

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Parishioners at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Edmonton will be on their feet during this Sunday’s service. Participating for the third year in the “Stand Up, Take Action to End Poverty” event, they are part of a grass-roots global movement to push world leaders to live up to their commitments to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which included eradicating extreme poverty.

Last year, the campaign recorded 116 million people participating, which broke a Guinness world record for the largest mobilization around a single cause, and organizers are hoping to have significantly more people involved this year in events held around the world from Oct. 16 to 18.

Inspired by a study of Micah 6:8, “Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God,” the youth at St. Paul’s got the congregation involved in this campaign, youth pastor Amy Croy said.

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Bishop Peter [Price]’s subject was The Church of England: the next 25 years in the context of the Anglican Communion, the world wide Church and other faiths.

He said: “As we look ahead into the next 25 years most of what will happen to us will be formed by things that are external to the church. The crises that will face humanity in 2034 for example are already in embryo with us now.”

He referred to the predicted demise of fossil fuels, a population explosion among the world’s poorest people, water shortage brought about by climate change, increased nationalism and the risk of germ and nuclear warfare that could kill millions of people.

Bishop Peter said: “How religions respond with openness, respect and a common concern for humanity and the planet, will in many ways be the key to whether they will have any part to play in a world that has all too often learned to do without them.

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Bishop James Newcome has a mild and engaging manner and his thoughtful response to each of my questions hints that he is unlikely to be a controversial prelate ”“ as long as you don’t raise the subject of nuclear power.

On the question of same-sex marriages, for example, he firmly backs the Church of England line that they should never be allowed in Anglican places of worship.

Even on the thorny sub-ject of wind farms, which is exercising the minds of many people in his diocese, Bishop Newcome is reluc-tant to use overly divisive language.

Instead, it is he who is ”˜very torn’ on the issue.

“I am in favour of wind farms, even though they are very erratic and not hugely effective,” he says.

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If reconciliation and healing are to come to our beloved Nation in these circumstances, we are all required to take a right-about turn and engage in two initiatives. These are the ability to look within our selves and our communities and deal with the mistakes of the past; and the cultivation of a behaviour that respects and welcomes the presence of the other. These unwritten democratic values of self scrutiny and inclusive behaviour will require time, personal integrity and an abundance of generosity. But we don’t have to go far to find them. The respective spiritualities of our religions provide these values to those of us who want to live at peace with each other.

It is from here that we will together recognise how to address past grievance and future integration. And it will be only then that the journey towards getting to that place, where each will be received with dignity, none will violate another and all will be provided space for growth and fulfilment, will be discerned. From here our collective conscience will be required to invite and encourage the other repeatedly, till the call falls on good ground and bears fruit. This is the prophetic tradition of the Church without which there can be no reconciliation and healing in Christ.

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Christianity has been a passionate argument, periodically escalating to bloody conflict, since its inception. There were disputes amongst the disciples even before Jesus died. Then came Paul, who directed his fury at his fellow Christians in Jerusalem. Several of the theologians who came next were first heralded as brilliant, only later to be declared heretics. All in all, the first five centuries, up to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, saw an extraordinary flourishing of theological imagination and religious antagonism. Christians were persecuting each other within two years of the emperor Constantine’s conversion, a fact that is doubly arresting since that was easily within living memory of the period during which Christians suffered their severest persecution under Diocletian.

Work through the centuries since, as Diarmaid MacCulloch does in his new book, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, and it’s clear that few facets of human nature have been left unexplored in this struggle. Equally inventive are the authorities that have attempted to unify their bit of Christianity. That creativity continues to the present day too: the teaching authority, or magisterium, of the contemporary Roman Catholic church is an invention as recent as the 19th century.

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THE Sydney Archbishop, Peter Jensen, is facing a legal challenge over his church’s decision to break with the national church and permit apprentice ministers to give Holy Communion.

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Important Update: There is more from the Sydney Morning herald here–read it all as well.

The Episcopal Church has lost approximately a third of its members in 50 years. This should be a warning to other denominations. The gas that is choking The Episcopal Church is the same gas that is affecting all other church traditions, as well as the universities and other institutions of Western Civilization. The air we breathe does not contain the gas of coal mines, but our air does contain a mold or yeast.

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The Episcopal Church (USA) is no exception to the Law. I submit that all of the outward signs point to a draining from it of people and energy which at the moment is very much greater than what it is managing to attract to itself.

There is no glee to be had here, no Schadenfreude. I am an Episcopalian — a member of a Church that is in free fall, and whose current leadership is a disgrace, as they say, to the profession. Consider the fifty-year trend in its numbers, as vividly portrayed by Bishop FitzSimmons Allison in this brilliant analysis of what that leadership has done wrong — and continues to do wrong, as borne out by the latest figures. Consider the huge drain on its reserves caused by that leadership’s decisions to go to court wherever and whenever they think another parish (or diocese) must be sued for its property.

And last, but by no means least, consider the self-inflicted wounds caused by the Church’s deposition of more than 200 of its clergy in just the last eight years — every one of them unnecessary when simple letters dimissory would have sufficed. Add to this, now, the arrogant and lawless leadership of the Chief Kaitiff (for so I must call her when she acts in this way) — whose respect for the Church’s Canons is as non-existent as is her understanding of them.

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Episcopalians from York, Carlisle and Gettysburg journeyed Sunday evening to the tiny borough of York Springs.

It was a homecoming of sorts.

They prayed and meditated on Scripture in a one-room brick chapel on Main Street — the parent church for Episcopalians west of the Susquehanna. A rotting sign out front reads: “Christ Church Episcopal, Colonial English Parish founded 1746.”

The historic chapel is open once a year for the pilgrims — about 25 of them Sunday. After the liturgy, the Rev. Canon David Lovelace of York explained the parish’s significance.

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A visiting parishioner stood before the congregation of St. Luke’s Anglican Church, instructed patrons to bring both wrists together as if bound by shackles, and told them to cast the symbolic chains aside.

“You’re free,” he said, inside the unfamiliar confines of Seventh Day Adventist Church in Glendale.

The Rev. Rob Holman cast a knowing smile over the sermon Sunday, the first since surrendering the keys to the stone-facade church at 2563 Foothill Blvd. following a three-year legal battle for ownership of the building.

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In the olden days before social media, if a Trinity United Methodist Church member fell ill, they called the church office. Now, if someone goes to the hospital or needs pastor Sid Hall to pray for them, they usually go online.

“If they post it on Facebook, even if they have the flu or they’re not feeling well, those are things I can see,” Hall said. “I can show up at the hospital if they’re there, or on Sunday morning, I can say, ‘How’s your brother? I saw on Facebook that he’s going through some hard times.’ ”

Hall has used Facebook as a way to connect with his congregation since January, when his wife, Mary Pratt , suggested that it could be a good tool for his church. Other pastors, representatives from large denominations and laypeople across faiths have been using social media to reach out in similar ways.

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If you were a woman reading this magazine 40 years ago, the odds were good that your husband provided the money to buy it. That you voted the same way he did. That if you got breast cancer, he might be asked to sign the form authorizing a mastectomy. That your son was heading to college but not your daughter. That your boss, if you had a job, could explain that he was paying you less because, after all, you were probably working just for pocket money.

It’s funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they’ve changed completely. It’s expected that by the end of the year, for the first time in history the majority of workers in the U.S. will be women ”” largely because the downturn has hit men so hard. This is an extraordinary change in a single generation, and it is gathering speed: the growth prospects, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are in typically female jobs like nursing, retail and customer service. More and more women are the primary breadwinner in their household (almost 40%) or are providing essential income for the family’s bottom line. Their buying power has never been greater ”” and their choices have seldom been harder.

It is in this context that the Rockefeller Foundation, in collaboration with TIME, conducted a landmark survey of gender issues to assess how individual Americans are reacting. Is the battle of the sexes really over, and if so, did anyone win? How do men now view female power? How much resentment or confusion or gratitude is there for the forces that have rearranged family life, rewired the economy and reinvented gender roles? And what, if anything, does everyone agree needs to happen to make all this work? The study found that men and women were in broad agreement about what matters most to them; gone is the notion that women’s rise comes at men’s expense. As the Old Economy dissolves and pressures on working parents grow, they share their fears about what this means for their children and their frustration with institutions that refuse to admit how much has changed. In the new age, the battles we fight together are the ones that define us.

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Check it out, noting especially the items related to the upcoming special Diocesan Convention.

St. Luke’s is one of 30 parishes in the Anglican Network in Canada which averages a Sunday attendance of around 3,500 to date. It was established in 2005 to commit to the foundational principles and historic standards of the Anglican tradition. Two years later, however, the network announced it would provide episcopal oversight for Canadian Anglicans and parishes that no longer had a home in the Anglican Church.

Attending this inaugural service was the church’s bishop, the Right Reverend Donald Harvey. He said he was pleased the congregation now has a home and praised them for maintaining a robust membership.

“It’s one of the jewels in our crown,” said Bishop Harvey. “Now the challenge is to go out into the community and bring souls to Christ.”

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At an Induction Service the other night, the acting rector made a comment that struck me “For us Anglicans, the reading of the Bible aloud in church is a very special moment”.

It got me thinking of a lecture given by Oliver O’Donovan in April this year, “The Reading Church: Scriptural Authority in Practice” which was a reflection on the clause in the Jerusalem Declaration that said

We believe that the holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the word of God written and to contain all thinking necessary for salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense with respect for the church’s historical and consensual reading.

O’Donovan rightly noted that very few people have commented on these words. And, introducing his book of theological reflections on the homosexual crisis in our Church, (A Conversation Waiting to Begin: the Churches and the Gay Controversy’ SCM Press, 2009) he does just that in his usual, profound, if somewhat difficult to follow, way.

But it was the concept of the place of the reading of Scripture in church that got me.

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The launch of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (UK and Ireland) on 6 July was an answer to my prayers. I had feared that orthodox Anglicans, who share a common commitment to the essentials of our faith and a concern about departures from it within the Church of England and wider Anglican Communion, would spend more energy disagreeing over their different strategies for the defence and proclamation of the gospel than in supporting one another and working together for Christ in our church and nation. GAFCON gave me a glimpse of another possibility: a wide spectrum of believers including Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals of all shades, joining together in one united movement for the cause of Christ in the Anglican Communion in the light of great opportunities for mission and serious departures from the apostolic gospel. The existence of a national FCA provides us, I believe, with a God given opportunity. It is urgently needed for the following reasons:

1. To support the beleaguered orthodox overseas
FCA is committed to supporting Anglicans around the world who are suffering because of their commitment to the orthodox faith in dioceses and provinces that have departed from it. TEC is currently spending very large sums of money on deposing clergy and dispossessing churches. Both those who have formed the ACNA and others who have remained in TEC need to know that they are not alone and can rely on our prayers and partnership, as do the orthodox in a number of other countries who face great difficulties. Their situations are urgent now and can not wait for the outcome of the proposed Anglican Covenant process, which is anyway likely only to address questions of order rather than the issue of defending orthodox belief.

2. To resist a drift from orthodoxy in the Church of England
Although the situation in TEC is especially bad, there is certainly no room for complacency closer to home, especially in Scotland and Wales.

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My concerns in regard to FCAUK are as follows:

(1) FCAUK is likely to encourage precipitate action on a variety of different issues that need to be responded to separately if they are to be handled with integrity

(2) FCAUK will encourage cynicism amongst evangelicals about the existing structures within the Church of England at just a time when these structures need encouragement and support

(3) The formation of FCAUK will encourage an unhelpful standoff with more liberal groupings and work to increase rather than resolve polarisation on the issue of homosexuality

(4) Because of all of these things, FCAUK will work to hinder the mission of both the Church of England and the evangelical churches and groupings within it.

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Ten years have passed since the night of January 22, 1999, when Hindu extremists burned alive the Australian Christian missionary Graham Stewart Staines and his sons Philip and Timothy (ages 9 and 7…) while they were sleeping in their station wagon in the village of Manoharpur, district of Keonjhar (Orissa). The widow Gladys Staines talks to AsiaNews about the drama of Hindutva violence and the recent anti-Christian persecution in Orissa.

The woman has been back in Orissa since June of 2006, together with her daughter Esther. About the recent anti-Christian violence in Kandhamal, she says “I feel very sad and I am pained at their suffering.” On January 22, there will be a commemorative Mass in Monoharpur, at the site of the murder. On the morning of the 23rd, a prayer service will be held at the Baripada Mission, which will conclude with the inauguration of a new physiotherapy hall.

Staines remembers her husband and sons calmly, with tenderness. “During these ten years, there have been times of sadness, I feel sad that I do not have my husband to support me, to guard me, but these are just momentary emotions of sadness which also fill me with great hope, the hope of heaven and of being reunited with my husband and children in paradise and seeing the Father face to face. This guarantee fills me with consolation.

“I cannot express that how I felt when I got the news of my husband and sons being burnt alive. I told my daughter Esther that though we had been”¨left alone, we would forgive and my daughter replied, ‘Yes, we will’.”

—From Widow of Graham Staines: “Do not give up hope, pray for India” quoted by yours truly in this morning’s sermon