Morale has fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, where troops are seeing record violence in the 8-year-old war, while those in Iraq show much improved mental health amid much lower violence, the Army said Friday. It was the first time since 2004 that soldier suicides in Iraq did not increase. Self-inflicted deaths in Afghanistan were on track to go up this year.

Though findings of two new battlefield surveys are similar in several ways to the last ones taken in 2007, they come at a time of intense scrutiny on Afghanistan as President Barack Obama struggles to craft a new war strategy and planned troop buildup. There is also new focus on the mental health of the force since a shooting rampage at Fort Hood last week in which an Army psychiatrist is charged.

Both surveys showed that soldiers on their third or fourth tours of duty had lower morale and more mental health problems than those with fewer deployments. And an increasing number of troops are having problems with their marriages.

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“As a writer, you’re always reaching for a more potent way to call somebody a jerk,” Dan Harmon, the creator of “Community,” said about the word “douche.” “This is a word that has evolved in the last couple of years ”” a thing that sounds like a thing you can’t say.”

It is not simply that the language is becoming more raw on broadcast networks but that the language, violence and sex that formerly was restricted to the 10 p.m. hour has migrated to earlier time slots.

Recent research by Barbara K. Kaye of the University of Tennessee and Barry S. Sapolsky of Florida State University found that in 2005 television viewers were more likely to hear offensive language during the 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. hours than at 10 p.m. Technically, there has not been a “family hour” since 1976, when the United States Supreme Court struck down the imposition of such a policy by the Federal Communications Commission. But broadcast networks observed the practice long after that.

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When we wonder about life after death, there are so many questions of varying subtlety. None of us has all the answers. But there is a wisdom in recognising that love may be one of them. The very suggestion that love is the answer is so well worn that it may well seem worn out. But that may be because we have let slip our awareness of what we mean by love. We know about the emotion and we know how mercurial it often is. We recognise it too as something more than feeling: it is the bond that binds us in decisive commitment, the fruit of desire, something we have willed. And then love also names us as we are at our best.

I think of a couple in their later middle age whom I used to visit years ago. The wife had had a stroke, and her medication had caused side-effects that disfigured her. One day her husband said to me, “I wish you could have seen her when she was young. She was lovely”. And I in my foolishness said to him, “I suppose you can still see glimpses of that in her”. He told me, “That is all I see”. Love is more than a quality we possess. It is not an abstraction. It is ultimately what we are called to become.

Heaven is code for the presence of God where love is made perfect, and we are perfected in love. There we shall see one another as we really are, when all imperfection has been wiped away.

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It was my children who told me about Tolkien, and said I should read The Lord of the Rings. I had thought it was a book for boys, and was pleasantly surprised to find wonderful feisty heroines in it. But it’s also very melancholic, and you are led to long for something beyond it: the ending is quite unsatisfying, and you’re left with a great hunger for heaven.

The Franciscans use it a lot with young people in Italy. And I was in America, talking to some poor young men on a Greyhound bus; it meant something to all of them. It made one of them question his work, sent another to walk the Appalachian mountains, and prompted a meeting with a girl on the internet.

It’s a very powerful book. I don’t think the films are very good.

G. K. Chesterton is a wonderful writer. The Everlasting Man con­verted C. S. Lewis. Chesterton’s story of how he came to Christianity himself, Orthodoxy, is brilliant: witty, paradoxical, and it makes you see reality in a totally new way.

The stories that changed my life and faith are the ones which give me a shock of the otherness and reality of the world beyond the self.

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Paris has its grand mosque, on the Left Bank. So does Rome, the city of the pope. Yet despite a sizable Muslim population, this Danish city has nothing but the occasional tiny storefront Muslim place of worship.

The city, Denmark’s capital, is now inching toward construction of not one, but two grand mosques. In August, the city council approved the construction of a Shiite Muslim mosque, replete with two 104-foot-tall minarets, in an industrial quarter on the site of a former factory. Plans are also afoot for a Sunni mosque. But it has been a long and complicated process, tangled up in local politics and the publication four years ago of cartoons mocking Islam.

The difficulties reflect the tortuous path Denmark has taken in dealing with its immigrants, most of whom are Muslim. Copenhagen in particular has been racked by gang wars, with shootouts and killings in recent months between groups of Hells Angels and immigrant bands.

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While President Obama’s decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan is primarily a military one, it also has substantial budget implications that are adding pressure to limit the commitment, senior administration officials say.

The latest internal government estimates place the cost of adding 40,000 American troops and sharply expanding the Afghan security forces, as favored by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, at $40 billion to $54 billion a year, the officials said.

Even if fewer troops are sent, or their mission is modified, the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier a year, appears almost constant.

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With so much in common, will many orthodox Anglicans be taking the Pope up on his recent offer? Is this the end of the English Reformation? Probably not. The primacy of Scripture and the Catholic Faith and Order of the early Church serve as the very foundation of the English Reformation and historic Anglicanism. Persons, churches, etc, availing themselves of the Pope’s provision, while maintaining some aspects of Anglican spirituality and liturgy must sacrifice this foundation and become Roman Catholic in Faith. For many Anglicans, we could no more avail ourselves of this offer than could the Eastern Orthodox Church. So for now, Ecumenical Dialogue must continue. We should be grateful to Benedict XIV for reaching out to us and bending as far as he could to accommodate us for the sake of unity. He leads by example. I long for the day when the Church Catholic is reunited. Until then, let us all commit to pray for unity and continue to grow in our understanding and respect for one another.

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Perhaps because of lack of consultation with both Catholic and Anglican authorities in England, the CDF seems to have failed to grasp what Anglo-Catholicism is really all about. Its fundamental aim was to reassert the Catholic credentials of the Church of England as the “ancient Catholic Church of these lands” identical in essence to the medieval English Church. It is from this foundation that derive all those characteristics of its style that the CDF is keen to preserve ”“ the interiors of its churches almost indistinguishable from Catholic churches, the use of “Father” as the title for its clergy, and devotion to a Catholic type of spirituality including honouring the Virgin Mary. But unless one counts use of the Roman missal in some of their churches, there is no distinctive Anglo-Catholic liturgy.

Anglo-Catholicism is going through a profound crisis precisely because it is losing faith in its central principle. Anglicanorum Coetibus is offering to let incoming Anglo-Catholics hang on to the incidental symbols of that principle, while relinquishing what lies behind it. Does that make sense? Would they not be better off just becoming Roman Catholics in the normal way, and joining an existing Catholic community they can enrich and be enriched by?

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To change the metaphor, the wall that has existed between Rome and Canterbury still stands, maintained, it must be said, largely by Rome. Gates have allowed those led by their consciences to pass across to the other side, but the slow, painstaking work of chipping away at the edifice ”” which many Anglicans thought was the object of dialogue with Roman Catholicism ”” has not yet born fruit. Certainly, this latest move amounts only to the erection of a larger gate, so that groups rather than individuals might cross over. Any who choose to do so will find themselves in another enclosure erected partly, we are told, to preserve the Anglican nature of the ordinariates, but mostly, we suspect, to protect the Roman Catholic dioceses from non-celibate priests and unfamiliar liturgy.

On the Anglican side, the view appears to be gaining ground that, for those people who have been petitioning Rome repeatedly and insistently, the time for persuading them to stay passed some time ago. The issue for them has ceased to be how to fit into the Anglican set-up, but whether the Pope’s offer meets their desires. Just how many of these petitioners there are remains to be seen, of course. When those in “irregular marriage situations”, and those who were formerly Roman Catholics, and those who have difficulty accepting the Roman Catholic Catechism in its entirety, and those who object to the removal of lay people from government are excluded from the figures, there might well be fewer than expected. But once they have decided, the true work of unity, the chipping away at those walls, can resume.

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There is an air of absurdity to what is mistakenly called “health-care reform.” Everyone knows that the United States faces massive governmental budget deficits as far as calculators can project, driven heavily by an aging population and uncontrolled health costs. Recovering slowly from a devastating recession, it’s widely agreed that, though deficits should not be cut abruptly (lest the economy resume its slump), a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending, and curb massive future deficits. The president and his top economic advisers all say this.

So, what do they do? Just the opposite. Their sweeping overhaul of the health-care system””which Congress is halfway toward enacting””would almost certainly make matters worse. It would create new, open-ended medical entitlements that would probably expand deficits and do little to suppress surging health costs. The disconnect between what Obama says and what he’s doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it. The president and his allies have no trouble. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both.

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“It’s our belief that it’s not just a political and economic issue, it’s a fundamental moral issue,” said David Liners, state coordinator for WISDOM, an interfaith coalition of about 140 Wisconsin congregations working to advance health care reform.

Despite near consensus in the call for reform, there remains widespread debate over who and what procedures should be covered – with undocumented workers and abortion as the main flash points – and at what cost; the role of government and whether the law or conscience should dictate a health care professional’s participation.

Alliances have emerged that reflect traditionally political divisions as much as faith, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

“It’s not a question of whether we need health care reform, but how we do it. And I don’t think government is the way,” said Mathew Staver, chairman of the faith-based coalition Freedom Federation, which opposes abortion and advocates a free-market approach to reform.”We believe individual liberties trump government-imposed obligations,” he said.

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Sunday’s sermon at St. Anne’s Anglican Church in Oceanside will be about “standing on the authority of God’s word” in light of a recent court ruling that could force the congregation to find a new home.

Father Joe Rees, rector of the church at 701 West St. near the former Ditmar Elementary School, said he and his parishioners are still praying about a ruling handed down by San Diego Superior Court Judge Steven Denton on Tuesday.

The tentative ruling found that the Episcopal Diocese of San Diego is the true owner of the Oceanside church building and grounds, as well as property inhabited by another Anglican congregation in Ocean Beach. Both congregations left the Episcopal Diocese in 2006 and changed denominations.

It is the latest legal victory for the Episcopal Church, which has seen many individual congregations and four dioceses nationwide break away in disagreement over several decisions made by church leadership, including the ordination of the faith’s first openly gay bishop in 2003.

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The Revision Committee met for its third scheduled meeting yesterday (13 November) since 8 October (see earlier statement). It concluded a substantial exploration of ways in which the draft legislation could be amended to enable certain functions to be vested by statute in bishops who would provide oversight for those unable to receive the episcopal and/or priestly ministry of women.

After much discussion, the members of the Committee were unable to identify a basis for specifying particular functions for vesting which commanded sufficient support both from those in favour of the ordination of women as bishops and those unable to support that development. As a result all of the proposals for vesting particular functions by statute were defeated.

The effect of the Committee’s decision is therefore that such arrangements as are made for those unable to receive the episcopal ministry of women will need to be by way of delegation from the diocesan bishop rather than vesting.

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During the discussion, panelists recounted how the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Miami would outcast black Episcopalians.

“I remember when we couldn’t walk by Trinity church,” said Gay Outler, referring to the then all-white Episcopal cathedral.

Outler, chair of the anti-racism commission said the oral history project will preserve what happened in the past and serve as a catalyst for continued dialogue on how to improve race relations in the church and society.

Many churches are in different stages of archiving and documenting their oral history.

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No less an authority on terrorism trials than Judge Michael Mukasey has spoken out strongly against trying the 9/11 plotters in federal court. Judge Mukasey, who was Mr. Holder’s predecessor as attorney general, presided over the 1995 trial of Sheik Omar. He has written that terrorism trials become targets for terrorists and are thus big drains on judicial resources. Courts and jails need extra protection, as do jurors, lawyers and judges. On the other hand, Judge Mukasey wrote, the government has already spent millions on a safe venue for military commission trials with full rights for defendants. But it is at Guantanamo, which the Obama administration shuns.

Judge Mukasey also has pointed out that expedience led prosecutors to charge Saleh Hahlah al-Marri, who confessed to plotting a second wave of al-Qaida attacks on the U.S., with a lesser crime. He could become free to rejoin the war against us in six years.

Sen. James Webb, D-Va., who leads a Senate review of the nation’s criminal justice system, supported Sen. [Lindsey] Graham’s Nov. 5 motion to block civilian trials for the Guantanamo detainees. It failed in the Senate by a 54-45 vote…

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Ruby Kittrell was getting ready for work Monday night when a staccato burst crackled through the air — Pop! Pop! Pop! — like a string of a firecrackers going off.

Kittrell’s front door swung open as she ran toward the noise. A young man stumbled in, crying that he had been shot. Then she heard her daughter Aleshia screaming from outside, calling her baby’s name.

Kittrell raced outside and found her 20-month-old granddaughter, Shaniyah Burden, lying in the dirt. She turned the girl over. A bullet had torn through the toddler’s head. She lay motionless.

Around them, eight others lay wounded and bleeding from a drive-by shooting outside Kittrell’s low-slung bungalow at the corner of Gerideau and McDaniel streets. Three of the victims, including Shaniyah, didn’t make it. They died before the night was over.

Horrifying–read it all. Today’s local paper has a front page follow up story: Authorities ‘saturate’ Walterboro streets after rash of deadly shootings–read it as well.

For the country [ofAmerica] as a whole…homebuyers have paid no more than the old-fashioned standard of 25% of their incomes for housing in any year since 1985. Renters have in recent years paid a somewhat higher percentage of their smaller incomes but not more than 30% in any year over the past several decades.

Neither by comparison with the recent past nor by comparison with other countries today is most housing in the United States unaffordable. The median-priced home in the United States as a whole is 3.6 times the median income of Americans. For Great Britain, the median-priced home is 5.5 times the median income and, in Australia and New Zealand, the ratio of home prices to income is 6.3.

Acknowledging this reality would cause a widely accepted vision, and the national crusades and policies built upon it, to collapse like a house of cards. Instead, facts that would undermine this vision and this political crusade have been largely ignored.

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The FHA’s finances are in a much worse state than previously thought, we discovered this week. Congress mandated that it must always maintain cash reserves of 2 per cent of the mortgages it insures, but these have fallen to 0.53 per cent. Meanwhile, the percentage of loans seriously in arrears has risen to 17.9 per cent.

Reversing its previous position, the agency said that, if the economic recovery goes into reverse, it might well have to increase the line of credit it has with the US Treasury, perhaps by $1.6bn in 2011. It says that this would only be a problem in a serious double-dip recession, but we know from the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debacle that the government’s housing market experts are prone to crunching the numbers optimistically.

Why have things deteriorated so fast? The reason is that the FHA has been ramping up its activities in the past two years. As the private sub-prime mortgage market collapsed, the agency stepped in to provide financing options for the “good” sub-prime borrowers who at least could prove their income. From insuring less than 2 per cent of the market in 2006, the FHA now puts its effective government guarantee behind one in four new US mortgages.

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What a surprise — that someone who shouts “Allahu Akbar” (the “God is great” jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre playing down Nidal Hasan’s religious beliefs.

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It was disheartening to hear the recent statistics showing payrolls fell by 190,000 workers last month and the U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 10.2 percent. These numbers have been creeping up for some time now, and families nationwide are hurting from lost jobs, lost benefits, and lost sense of self. There had to be something different – something better – that could be done.

Though we knew we weren’t the first to tackle this challenge, we decided to use the skills we had – researching. One program in particular stuck out – work sharing. Simply put, work sharing is mutually beneficial to both employers and employees – a win/win situation. Employers reduce workers’ weekly hours and pay, and the workers collect unemployment from the state in lieu of being laid off.

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Update: Mark Zandi’s piece on this important subject is here and includes the following:

Still, the recovery remains fragile. No doubt, there will be moments in the coming months when the economy appears liable to falter again. In order to ensure that today’s tentative recovery becomes a lasting expansion, the government must now make it a priority to deal with employment ”” particularly among small businesses.

That the Vatican would offer here again ”” as in other texts of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, since 1992, and also the Catechism of the Catholic Church (at n. 817) ”” an ecclesiology of wound, this time at the outset of a text that introduces a gracious provision for itinerant, Catholic-minded Anglicans, should go a long way to alleviate fears of undue and untoward Roman triumphalism. If the one Church of Jesus Christ is wounded by dint of inter-Christian divisions, then the Christians in question must already be caught up in the life of the Body of that Church. The division is rather more intra than inter.

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For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life? For the Son of man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man for what he has done.

–Matthew 16:25-27

Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood clinic director whose about-face on abortion prompted her to resign her job, says she’s gotten flack for her decision from an unexpected quarter: her own church.

Her Oct. 6 decision to leave Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas – after viewing an ultrasound-guided abortion of a 13-week-old fetus two weeks earlier – made headlines, especially when she ended up volunteering at the Coalition for Life center a few doors away. Her former employer filed a restraining order to silence Mrs. Johnson, but a judge threw out the case on Tuesday.

Now she is facing a different kind of music at her parish, St. Francis Episcopal in nearby College Station, the home of Texas A&M University.

Whereas clergy and parishioners welcomed her as a Planned Parenthood employee, now they are buttonholing her after Sunday services.

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Why the poor reception? For a tax that’s attracted high-profile backers like Brown and Sarkozy, its track record is thin. When Tobin first proposed the idea in 1972, it was seen as a way to stop currency speculators after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, but it was never imposed. Sweden enacted a tax on certain financial transactions in the 1980s but ditched it in 1991 after trading volumes sank.

Today, there are bigger obstacles to its implementation. First, there are the tax’s tricky practicalities: Which financial transactions and institutions do you target? And who pays, administers and regulates it? But possibly more importantly, every major financial center would need to be on board for the levy to be effective. Investment banks wouldn’t likely leave Britain for cheaper foreign currency”“trading in Macedonia, but they might well if that opportunity was in Manhattan. Advanced economies imposing the tax unilaterally “would see their financial markets decimated,” Howard Wheeldon, senior strategist at BGC Partners in London, wrote in a note to clients on Monday.

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Check it out.

Last week, Shinseki spoke to a group of young veterans attending college. A former Army chief of staff who was wounded during his service in Vietnam, Shinseki asked the veterans if any of them suffered from post-traumatic stress.

He got only silence ”” so Shinseki asked about symptoms.

“How many of you have a little trouble sleeping at night?” he asked the students, many of whom had been in combat.

The general then asked them if they were overly vigilant for threats in their own homes, or if any of them had been having anger management problems.

“And then hands go up,” Shinseki said. “And they looked at each other, and they suddenly realize they’re not the only ones in it.”

Listen to it all.

Faith-at-work movements have been popular at least since the 1857 businessmen’s revival in New York City, in which noon-hour prayer meetings were so full of the city’s professionals that many businesses closed during the gatherings. But churches have typically kept business people at a distance, needing their money but questioning their spiritual depth. With the business as mission movement, that has changed. In 2004, the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism, founded by Billy Graham, featured a track on business as mission. At a recent missionary conference in Hong Kong, Doug Seebeck says mission leaders apologized to the business people present. They had been guilty of asking for their money while keeping them in the foyer of the church, outside of the sanctuary.

Mr. Seebeck is executive director of Partners Worldwide, a Michigan organization that provides mentoring relationships for business owners in the developing world by connecting them with business people in the U.S. Mr. Seebeck was a missionary in Bangladesh and Africa for nearly 20 years, but he saw the limitations of all the good work church people did. Now Mr. Seebeck says, “Business is the greatest hope for the world’s poor.” He sees business profits as consistent with God’s purpose for humans. Profits, unlike activities that are donor dependent, are sustainable. Making a profit, he argues, is a better stewardship of God’s resources than pleading for funds, spending them, and going back for more.

While advanced economies question capitalism, Christians who work in developing countries see how essential business is to provide jobs and health care, build communities and even minister to souls. For these business owners, a desk job overseas has become a full-time ministry.

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You might know that the tantalizing combination of peanut butter and jelly you’re eating between two slices of bread was named after a certain Earl of Sandwich, but how many other words that we use every day are named after real people?

How about galvanize? Silhouette? Leotard?

These words ”” called eponyms ”” and many more fill a new book called Anonyponymous: The Forgotten People Behind Everyday Words, written by John Bemelmans Marciano.

Some of the people who donated their names to history did it by accident.

“There was a woman named Mary Frisbie who made pies in Connecticut,” Marciano tells Renee Montagne. “Students would throw around her pie plates after they had finished her pies, and kind of like you would say, ‘Incoming!’ they would say, ‘Frisbie!’ just to give people the heads-up that there was something spinning and flying coming at their head.”

I caught this on the morning podcast. Please listen to it all–it is a delight (7 minutes, 20 seconds).

These restrictions (Article 5 and 6 of the Norms) were acknowledged by the leader of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), Archbishop John Hepworth, on Tuesday. He had, in October 2007, with TAC’s other 37 bishops, petitioned the CDF for “a communal and ecclesial way of being Anglican Catholics in communion with the Holy See”.

At the time of the petition, he had wanted to make his personal situ­ation clear to Rome, he said; so he had sent a letter of resignation to Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Ben­edict), then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), to take effect when unity was achieved, “if that is what Rome re­quires”.

The reason why he had done so was that he had been married twice, although his first marriage was not recognised by Rome.

“Ratzinger wrote back to me in his own hand.” The Archbishop had responded: “The ball’s in your court. I will bring them [TAC] to your door. I will fade out, and you must do what you want.” Other bishops in the TAC had also offered their resignations to Rome.

He expected most of the 400,000-strong international Communion, which, he said, had a Sunday attend­ance of 210,000, to vote to enter into unity with Rome. TAC in Britain had voted to do so on 29 October. “We will meet in Rome in Low Week after Easter, and we will present the yes vote to the CDF.”

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