In Sevenoaks – visited by the BBC News website earlier this year to discuss the women bishops debate, the parish of St John the Baptist is firmly on the Catholic wing of the Church and opposed to women’s ordination.

But Jim Cheeseman, a parishioner of St John’s and a member of the C of E’s General Synod, finds much to criticise in the Vatican’s plan.

For example, the rules issued by the Vatican say that lay Anglicans joining the ordinariates must receive the sacraments of initiation.

If that means submitting to a fresh ceremony of confirmation, he says, “to me that would be totally unacceptable”.

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But no priest or group of laity has the right to take church property with them when they change denominations, for a Diocese holds such property in trust for the mission and ministry of the Church of England to all the people of its parishes and this duty of care would continue.

I don’t myself see how a parish could legally “take” the parish church and other assets without specific statutory authority.In the case of the parish church, it would presumably mean a Scheme under the Pastoral Measure or specific legislation enacted for the purpose, and this could only be done with the goodwill of the Diocese.In the case of assets such as the church hall or other parish property, appropriation to another denomination would almost certainly be a breach of trust and would not be possible without the co-operation of the Diocesan Board of Finance as Custodian Trustees and probably also the involvement of the Charity Commission.Parsonage houses are, of course, governed by the Parsonages Measure and an Incumbent cannot alienate the parsonage without obtaining the authority required by law, again the Diocesan Board of Finance or the Church Commissioners.Of course, in the months and years ahead much of this might well be crawled over by lawyers on all sides, but the general principles seem to be clear….

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In the department of bad ideas that won’t go away, Exhibit A is a global tax on financial transactions. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown mooted the tax last weekend before the G-20 finance ministers in St. Andrews, Scotland, where he was promptly rebuffed by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. “That’s not something we’re prepared to support,” Mr. Geithner said.

But it’s easy to see why high-tax countries such as France and Germany relish the idea. Tax competition is a bête noire for the Western European countries whose governments eat up close to half of their economies. The U.K. is back in that club after the post-financial-panic recession lopped 6% off its GDP. Scrambling for revenue””and unwilling to hamstring London markets alone””Mr. Brown is suddenly promoting global tax coordination.

Read it all. I didnt like this editorial because the argument isn’t nearly strong enough. The two key points are not made

It is amazing to me that (2) is hardly ever discussed–KSH.

The autumn leaves, red and yellow and brown, are tumbling from the trees, resigned to their fate. Weekends are full of football and the scritching of rakes. Lazy squirrels are still munching on moldering jack o’ lanterns left over from Halloween. In other words, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Disney released a new version of the Dickens Scrooge story last week, timing it so that “A Christmas Carol” will be lucky to be in distribution past Thanksgiving Day.

Starbucks has already retired its white cups for the duration, replacing them with cranberry-colored, snowflake-flecked seasonal substitutes. Wal-Mart is just one of the retailers already Kringling away like crazy, running television ads with Andy Williams crooning “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” Who knew that the weeks between Halloween and Thanksgiving were the hap-happiest season of all?

The day after Thanksgiving used to be the official launch of the commercial Christmas season. Now Sears is running “Black Friday” specials all through November.

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For the first time in four decades in the luxury-home business, executives at John Wieland builders are thinking the unthinkable: Maybe houses in the South don’t really need a fireplace.

They’re also wondering whether new homes require 4,700 square feet of living space. Or private theaters with 100-inch screens. Or super-size-me foyers.

As they draw up blueprints for the house of the post-recession future, builders are struggling to distinguish among what home buyers need, what they want and what they can live without — Jacuzzi by Jacuzzi, butler’s pantry by butler’s pantry.

“You have to keep taking things out until you hit a critical point where people reject your product,” said Jeff Kingsfield, senior vice president of sales at Smyrna-based John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods.

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At least a dozen health and budget experts have filled the Web and the airwaves with warnings that the House bill simply postpones the cost controls needed to finance the vast expansion of insurance coverage and Medicaid benefits envisaged by its sponsors.

One of them speaks with special authority: David Walker, the former head of the Government Accountability Office ”” the auditing and investigative arm of Congress ”” told me in an interview on Wednesday that the lawmakers are “punting on the tough choices, rather than making sure they can deliver on the promises they’re making.”

In a speech delivered less than 48 hours after the House acted, Walker, now the president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, laid out the tests that buttress his conclusion.

Acknowledging that “clearly, we need radical reconstructive surgery to make our health care system effective, affordable and sustainable,” Walker cautioned that “what we should not do is merely tack new programs onto a system that is fundamentally flawed” ”” and rapidly drive the national budget into ruin.

I cannot put into words the degree of my agreement with this piece. I once heard David Walker speak as I have mentioned before and he has real knowledge and authority here. The cost issue is not properly handled in this bill. In any event, read it all–KSH

I served my CPE internship in a VA hospital where the two wards I was to help care for had many mentally ill people on them. My supervisor said, early on in the program, “Kendall, the mentally ill are the lepers of modern day society.” It rings ever more true the more distance I get from the remark. During that summer you cannot imagine how FEW of the patients on these wards who struggled with this kind of sickness were visited by their family members. Watch it all–and note particularly her response when she is asked about how she sees her sister–KSH.

The way forward embodied in the proposed revisions to the candidacy process that will be considered this weekend by the ELCA Church Council is a ”˜preserve the status quo’ option. It maintains, at least officially, the unity of the ELCA ministerium and treats the crisis created by the action of the Churchwide Assembly as a passing cloud. The concessions to bound conscience are less even than those granted to opponents of the agreement with the Episcopal Church that committed the ELCA to enter episcopal succession. Candidates opposed to episcopal succession can, in certain cases, be ordained in a way that contradicts Assembly-adopted policy. In our present case, individuals involved in decision making within the candidacy process can remove themselves from participation, but no decision is to utilize sexuality standards other than those approved by national policy.

What would an alternative look like, an alternative that embodies the promise of the Task Force to respect the consciences of synods, bishops, candidacy committees, etc.? It would not be pretty. It would severely compromise the unity of the ELCA ministerium; the ELCA would cease to be a single church in the traditional sense. But that result was built into the Report and Recommendations of the Task Force, as is discussed in the paper to the right (here). That Report was never repudiated by the church leadership. It is late in the day now to say “Oh, those results would be too radical.”

An alternative that avoids chaos as much as possible might look like this….

See what you make of his proposal.

When Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams meets with Pope Benedict XVI here on Nov. 21, the two men will be making the latest gesture in a four-decade-long effort to achieve unity between their churches.

But some Catholics and Anglicans fear the future of that endeavor could be jeopardized by the Vatican’s plans, announced last month (Oct.), to make it easier for Anglicans to convert to Catholicism. Former Anglicans, many of whom are upset by their church’s growing acceptance of female clergy and homosexuality, will be allowed to join special Catholic dioceses while retaining many of their traditional prayers and hymns, and to a limited extent a married priesthood.

Williams, spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, will visit Rome for five days (Nov. 18-22) of meetings and events aimed at “keeping alive the ecumenical endeavor,” said his Vatican envoy, the Very Rev. David Richardson.

“We don’t see it as in any way a comment on the ecumenical conversations,” Richardson said of the Vatican’s move, which he called a “pastoral response” to the requests of disaffected Anglicans. “It’s a side issue for ecumenical dialogue.” Richardson noted that Williams’ visit to Rome was scheduled before the Vatican rolled out its welcome to Anglican dissidents.

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When Simeon moved to put benches in the aisles, the church wardens threw them out. He battled with discouragement and at one point wrote out his resignation.

“When I was an object of much contempt and derision in the university,” he later wrote, “I strolled forth one day, buffeted and afflicted, with my little Testament in my hand ”¦ The first text which caught my eye was this: ‘They found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name; him they compelled to bear his cross.'”

Slowly the pews began to open up and fill, not primarily with townspeople but with students. Then Simeon did what was unthinkable at the time: he introduced an evening service. He invited students to his home on Sundays and Friday evening for “conversation parties” to teach them how to preach. By the time he died, it is estimated that one-third of all the Anglican ministers in the country had sat under his teaching at one time or another.

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Middle-class shoppers who have been hit by the recession are stealing hundreds of millions of pounds of expensive food in an effort to maintain their high standard of living, according to a new survey.

Quality cuts of meat, fresh fish and high-priced cheeses are being taken by mostly middle-class women from speciality food and convenience shops, where thefts have risen sharply in the past year. Thousands of retailers have found that luxury foods are being stolen for individual use rather than to be sold on.

The information comes from more than 42,000 shops in Europe with combined sales of £262 billion, who were questioned by the Centre for Retail Research, an independent organisation, for Checkpoint Systems, the retail security specialists.

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More abortions are carried out in Britain than any other country in Europe, research has shown.

It has overtaken France – which has a larger population – to become the abortion capital of the continent.

The rising rate has been pushed up by abortions among teenage girls, which increased by nearly a third over the past decade.

Half of all pregnancies among girls under 18 in Britain end in abortion.

I had to read the last sentence several times to make I got what it said. Really sad. Read it all

Now here’s the scary part: Even though more than half of all American households now own equities directly or through mutual funds, an increase in equity prices does not figure into the Fed’s calculation of inflation. So while measures of core inflation (which exclude food and energy) carefully register minute gains in the price of a fixed basket of goods and services meant to reflect what a typical family buys to achieve a minimum standard of living, they ignore massive price surges in what has effectively become a widely held consumer good: stocks.

Moreover, the Fed’s inflation-targeting approach overlooks price increases for real estate and rising commodity prices. Don’t even mention gold, which has gone from $707 to $1,114 since a year ago.

Even if the Fed seems blithely unaware of the havoc it may be wreaking through its irrationally loose monetary policy, in tandem with the distortions of moral hazard inflicted by intrusive government, Americans seem willing to accept the insanity of boom-and-bust cycles. Sure, we could be facing the latest Fed-induced bubble””but so what?

We need the eggs.

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[Bishop Don] Harvey said the Pope’s invitation was neither helpful nor welcome.

“This is not the way to foster good ecumenical dialogue,” he said in his charge.

Both Harvey and Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, have said they do not expect many to take up the Pope’s offer.

Despite Harvey’s misgivings, several lay members of the Network at the synod told the Star on Monday they took comfort from the invitation.

“I was absolutely elated,” Phillip Wiebe of Vancouver said Monday.

Wiebe saw the Pope’s move as evidence that the Network has support for its conservative interpretation of the Bible.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury has pleaded with the Church of England’s Anglo-Catholics to resist the temptation to convert to Roman Catholicism over women bishops.

Dr Rowan Williams admitted that the future of the Anglican Communion looked “chaotic and uncertain”.

Preaching in london, he said: “God knows what the future holds.” But he insisted that it remained possible to be at once holy, Catholic and Anglican.

Dr Williams did not refer directly to the response from Pope Benedict XVI to requests from some Church of England bishops and traditional Anglicans around the world for a means of admission to the Catholic Church.

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He grew downward in humiliation before God, and he grew upward in his adoration of Christ.

Handley Moule captures the essence of Simeon’s secret of longevity in this sentence: “‘Before honor is humility,’ and he had been ‘growing downwards’ year by year under the stern discipline of difficulty met in the right way, the way of close and adoring communion with God” (Moule, 64). Those two things were the heartbeat of Simeon’s inner life: growing downward in humility and growing upward in adoring communion with God.

But the remarkable thing about humiliation and adoration in the heart of Charles Simeon is that they were inseparable. Simeon was utterly unlike most of us today who think that we should get rid once and for all of feelings of vileness and unworthiness as soon as we can. For him, adoration only grew in the freshly plowed soil of humiliation for sin. So he actually labored to know his true sinfulness and his remaining corruption as a Christian.

I have continually had such a sense of my sinfulness as would sink me into utter despair, if I had not an assured view of the sufficiency and willingness of Christ to save me to the uttermost. And at the same time I had such a sense of my acceptance through Christ as would overset my little bark, if I had not ballast at the bottom sufficient to sink a vessel of no ordinary size. (Moule 134f.)

He never lost sight of the need for the heavy ballast of his own humiliation. After he had been a Christian forty years he wrote,

With this sweet hope of ultimate acceptance with God, I have always enjoyed much cheerfulness before men; but I have at the same time laboured incessantly to cultivate the deepest humiliation before God. I have never thought that the circumstance of God’s having forgiven me was any reason why I should forgive myself; on the contrary, I have always judged it better to loathe myself the more, in proportion as I was assured that God was pacified towards me (Ezekiel 16:63). . . . There are but two objects that I have ever desired for these forty years to behold; the one is my own vileness; and the other is, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ: and I have always thought that they should be viewed together; just as Aaron confessed all the sins of all Israel whilst he put them on the head of the scapegoat. The disease did not keep him from applying to the remedy, nor did the remedy keep him from feeling the disease. By this I seek to be, not only humbled and thankful, but humbled in thankfulness, before my God and Saviour continually. (Carus, 518f.)

Please do read it all.

Twenty-seven blissful years of Army life later, last Thursday Martin was at the Soldier Readiness Center getting his final check before deploying to Iraq. He says the first moment he knew something was wrong was when he felt a sudden sharp pain in his arm.

“Then when it hit in my arm, I grabbed my arm and I realized, I ain’t never been hit that hard,” he says. “I said, ‘Golly, this hurts.’

“And then I looked at my hand, my hand was just covered in blood, but I was laying on the floor, and the floor was covered with blood, and in mind, I said, ‘I got to get out of this building.”

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The Rev. Richard Rodgers of Blessed Sacrament Old Catholic Church in Racine, Wis., has presided over Masses since 1989. But Rodgers isn’t a typical priest ”” the 62-year-old pastor is married and has a son and grandchildren.

A former Episcopalian minister, Rodgers leads a seven-member congregation in the Chicago Diocese of the Old Catholic Church, a hybrid of Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions.

“I left the Episcopal Church because it was slowly descending into chaos,” Rodgers said, referring to his opposition to the church’s acceptance of openly gay clergy, blessing over same-sex unions and allowance of female priests and bishops.

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See how many you have seen. I am also interested in what you make of their top 5 and if you disagree, then which films would you include that they do not? KSH.

A radical preacher who allegedly inspired the Fort Hood gunman has a large following in Britain and counts prominent mainstream Muslims among his supporters.

The FBI is investigating communications between Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at the Texas army base last week, and Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Muslim cleric now based in Yemen. Mr al-Awlaki, 38, who described Major Hasan on his blog as “a hero”, has been a regular visitor to Britain and delivers frequent lectures to British audiences by video or via the internet.

Counter-terrorism sources said yesterday that Mr al-Awlaki was barred from entering Britain on security grounds while the anti-extremist Quilliam Foundation said he was “perhaps the most influential pro-jihadist ideologue preaching in English today”

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O loving God, who orderest all things by thine unerring wisdom and unbounded love: Grant us in all things to see thy hand; that, following the example and teaching of thy servant Charles Simeon, we may walk with Christ in all simplicity, and serve thee with a quiet and contented mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

While Massachusetts recipients of federal stimulus money collectively report 12,374 jobs saved or created, a Globe review shows that number is wildly exaggerated. Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started.

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The Episcopal Church loses about 19,000 members a year because more of them die than are baptized into the church, Jefferts Schori said. The average Episcopalian is about 57 years old. The average age American is 37, she said.

“Fifty-seven-year-olds don’t produce a lot of children,” Jefferts Schori said. “But, there are lots and lots of communities and populations among us that are growing.”

Younger generations don’t know what the church has to offer, she said, adding that it’s going to take Episcopalians to become more passionate about ministry to attract new people.

“How are they going to find out if we don’t tell them?” she asked.

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As Mr. Obama nears the end of his review of American strategy in Afghanistan, the issue of how he will prod, cajole or bully Mr. Karzai into taking action on matters he has avoided for the past five years has been catapulted to the center of the discussion.

Administration officials and America’s European allies say that rampant corruption and the illegal drug trade in Afghanistan have fueled the resurgence of the Taliban, and that unless Mr. Karzai moves forcefully to tackle those issues, no amount of additional American troops will be able to turn the country around.

Yet many of Mr. Obama’s advisers said they had seen no evidence that Mr. Karzai would follow through on promises to crack down on corruption or the drug trade. Mr. Obama, who met with his advisers again on Wednesday, is said to be particularly skeptical of Mr. Karzai’s resolve.

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It initially seemed to be a perfect fit. They were, after all, two United Methodist congregations dedicated to sharing the Gospel and working for social justice, so sharing the same church building seemed to make sense.

And so when members of the primarily Spanish-speaking Via Abundante ”” or Abundant Life ”” United Methodist Church moved from their old church building on Cranston Street three years ago, joining with the newly formed Open Table of Christ United Methodist Church in having services at the former Washington Park Methodist Church on 1520 Broad St., both had reason to rejoice: it was a visible symbol of churches working together….

Neither had realized it at the time, but their shared fellowship was about to be tested. In much the same way a number of mainline denominations across the United States have had to wrestle with divisions in their ranks over issues involving homosexuality, the two congregations were about to discover that what was perfectly acceptable to most members of one was not acceptable to the other.

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What happens now? Democratic supporters of abortion rights need to accept that their House majority depends on a large cadre of antiabortion colleagues. They can denounce that reality or they can learn to live with it.

There is also a challenge for abortion’s foes, above all the Catholic bishops who have a long history of supporting universal coverage but devoted most of their recent energy to the abortion battle. How much muscle will the bishops put behind the broader effort to pass health-care reform? Their credibility as advocates for social justice hangs in the balance.

And if the Senate forces a change in the Stupak language, one obvious approach would involve a ban on abortion in the public plan — if such an option survives — and the application of Ellsworth’s rules to the private policies sold in the insurance exchange. The alternative would be Stupak’s original compromise offer to Pelosi. There are not many other options.

Read the whole piece.

The threats hanging over the central bank could compromise its independence, warn Fed watchers. Several crucial decisions are approaching, including how to continue phasing out its emergency efforts to support the economy. The Fed has already said it will wind down the purchases of mortgage securities in March after buying about $1.25 trillion worth. In the more distant future, to avoid the risk of inflation, the central bank will need to raise its target interest rate above the current level near zero.

Rate increases are always unpopular, particularly when the unemployment rate is still high. But the political environment could make the decision even tougher.

“The current unpopularity of the Fed will make it more difficult for them to raise interest rates when the economy recovers,” said Karen Dynan, a former senior Fed economist who now heads the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution. “With the Fed under such close scrutiny, any move to raise interest rates will be challenged even more strongly than in the past.”

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The fiscal 2009 budget deficit, triple that of 2008, was 10 percent of GDP. Lawrence Lindsey says probable policies will produce deficits of 7 percent of GDP for a decade. Ronald Reagan’s worst deficit was 6 percent of GDP and for only one year.

Lindsey — a former member of the Federal Reserve board of governors and director of George W. Bush’s National Economic Council (2001-02) — says Americans’ net worth has dropped at least $13 trillion since the recession began in December 2007. What is to be done?
Americans could suddenly begin saving substantially more, but this would deepen and prolong the recession. Alternatively, America could reflate the value of its assets by printing money. Lindsey says it is already doing that — printing bonds promiscuously and lending money to banks at negligible rates, money that banks can use to buy the bonds. This sharply increases the money supply, which sets the stage either for inflation — too much money chasing too few goods — or for recovery-snuffing higher interest rates to try to prevent inflation. Or for something like Japan’s lost decade — banks pouring money into government bonds rather than the real economy.

America, says Lindsey, will not be Weimar Germany, where hyperinflation caused people to rush to stores with satchels of rapidly depreciating currency. But, he adds, no country has successfully behaved the way the United States is behaving.

Read it all (emphasis mine).

Although later perceived as a “church in socialism”, it was a Church in opposition which understood itself as a fellowship of the Crucified, thus echoing Bonhoeffer’s words in The Cost of Discipleship: “Every call of Christ leads to death.” A key text for them was Bonhoeffer’s influential book Life Together, first published in 1939 and greatly influenced by his time at the Anglican Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in West Yorkshire.

What the Church achieved in East Germany before 1989 cannot be underestimated. Great sacrifices had to be made. There was no room for cheap grace; it was sacrifice lived as well as believed in. It was their network of contacts, which enabled them as a minority church to survive against a background of discrimination that was not always subtle. The University Church in Leipzig, for instance, had been pulled down by the communists and a bust of Karl Marx placed where the altar was.

However, during the 40 years of the German Democratic Republic the churches provided the forum where people could speak freely and democracy be exercised. Their strong pacifist emphasis was particularly inspired by the vision of Isaiah of turning swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.

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White House budget director Peter Orszag has his hands full these days trying to wrangle down a deficit that has ballooned to an estimated $1.4 trillion. Part of that borrowing was necessitated by the recession, while part of it was designed to shorten the economic crisis.

Orszag says the federal deficit needs to be cut to about 3 percent of economic growth in the coming years to reduce the sea of debt. At the same time, the U.S. has to guard against sending the economy into a tailspin by pulling back too soon on stimulus programs.

Striking a balance is “extraordinarily challenging,” Orszag tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep….

Orszag makes no apologies for not projecting a balanced budget anytime in the near-term: “You have to remember the situation that we inherited.”

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