[Episcopal Bishop Stephen] Lane said that after Gov. Baldacci signed the same-sex marriage law earlier this year, the bishop began to work on a set of guidelines for Maine Episcopal clergy to use with legal same-gender marriage. Due to the law’s repeal, these guidelines will not be distributed.

“However, I will continue to work with a small group to consider the ways we may support the faithful, monogamous relationships of faithful gay and lesbian Episcopalians,” Lane added. “Yesterday was a set back to be sure, but we will continue to strive for justice and peace among all people. We are in this for the long haul.”

About 37 percent of Maine’s 1.3 million population is Roman Catholic, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives. Episcopalians represent 8 percent of the population, however 2008 diocesan attendance figures reveal that less than 5,000 of those parishioners are in church each week.

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The Rev. Dale Coleman, who has quietly led St. George’s Episcopal Church in Belleville for two years, believes there are people at his former church in New Mexico “who want to destroy me.”

He said that a vendetta has followed him to Belleville that started over ideological differences involving homosexuals in the church but escalated into a series of personal attacks that he still faces in court, including that the married minister improperly spent church money on a girlfriend.

Coleman opened himself up to scrutiny by his former church by filing a lawsuit to force the church to pay $40,000 left unpaid on a $115,000 severance agreement.

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Bishop Burt was a low churchman, with considerable respect for the breadth of the Episcopal Church’s ecclesiology. He knew the Diocese of Ohio well, working hard to visit every parish every year ”” often three parishes each Sunday. Ohio is a geographically large diocese: from the industrial center in the East to the farmlands of the West; from the wealth of the north to the poverty of Appalachia in the south. He knew it well and traveled it often. He knew each parish and respected the integrity of its history. Anglo-Catholic parishes got Anglo-Catholic clergy; conservative parishes got conservative clergy. Low churches got low churchmen. Nearly all the parishes sought and respected his opinion about who should be interviewed and who should not. More often than not, his opinion prevailed and a good match resulted. When the relationships failed between clergy and parishes, Bishop Burt did his best to protect both parties.

He had a talent for building a collegial group of clergy. Diocesan conventions were among the high points of the year, as was the Boar’s Head and Yule Log Festival at Trinity Cathedral between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Bishop Burt loved this day involving hundreds in costume. He especially delighted in serving the huge mincemeat pie that had been processed in the pageant and presented before the high altar marking the Christmas season. Our whole family participated in this annual event.

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For what may be the first time in nearly two centuries, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church will visit St. Stephen’s Pro-Cathedral Wednesday, spending time at outreach ministries in the afternoon and giving a sermon at an evening service followed by a brief reception and a question-and-answer session.

“We have gone through our archives, and this is the fist time we can find that a presiding bishop has visited St. Stephen’s in about 190 years,” said St. Stephen’s pastor, the Rev. Daniel Gunn. “The last one here was Bishop William White, who consecrated the first St. Stephen’s.” According to the Episcopal Church Web site, White was the first Presiding Bishop, in 1789.

The presiding bishop is “chief pastor” for the Episcopal Church’s 110 dioceses in 16 countries, elected to a nine-year term by the bishops and lay and clergy deputies, according Bill Lewellis, communications minister for the Diocese of Bethlehem, which includes St. Stephen’s. Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori was elected in 2006, the first woman to hold the office, and this is her first visit to this diocese, Lewellis said. She will also be in Bethlehem Monday, Lebanon Tuesday and Scranton Thursday.

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The new Anglican diocese and its 58 parishes are affiliated with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone in South America and the new Anglican Church in North America. Before the split, some of the 28 parishes in the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh sued the Anglican diocese, saying that church law requires property of departing parishes to remain with the denomination. Last month’s court decision dealt only with assets of the central diocese, such as endowment funds, not with parish buildings.

Last night the convention seemed to be taking the litigation in stride. The Rev. Mary Hays drew peals of laughter from the 335 clergy and laity when she preached on a passage from Isaiah that says, “He who has no money, come buy and eat.”

“Hey, you who have no money, do you think Isaiah knew that our funds would be frozen?” she asked.

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We should point out that you were deposed from ministry of the Episcopal Church by the presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, after you threatened to have your diocese in Pittsburgh secede.

That was a year ago, but what’s interesting is that virtually no one in the Anglican world accepted that sentence. Within two weeks of being deposed, I was received at Lambeth Palace in London by the archbishop of Canterbury, who continues to consider me a bishop.

Bishop Schori heads the Episcopal Church in this country, and you opposed her election in 2006?

She was the least qualified, the least experienced, of the candidates, but I hoped that what she would bring if she were elected was the kind of grace that women often bring. She turned out to be far harder, far less willing to bend or compromise, than any of the men.

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The President and his economic team have claimed that the plan is working as intended, that they’re on track to save the original goal of 3.6 million jobs, but somehow, despite practically drowning in success, we’re going to have to live with high unemployment for years to come. Oh, and that everything is still Bush’s fault.

These claims have been debunked by a variety of sources, including the AP (and here), the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and blogs such as Political Math (H/T d3ft punk).

But forget the quantitative treatment for a moment and consider what the Obama team’s graph said on a qualitative level. The graph says that within a couple of quarters, the stimulus package will stop the increase in unemployment and reverse the employment trend. That was the real mission of the stimulus. Stop job loss. Get the private sector hiring again.

So no matter how convoluted and fanciful the “jobs created or saved” numbers get, we just have to remember what the point used to be, and realize how far short we’ve fallen. And whose fault that really is.

Read it all and look carefully at those graphs.

As military and law-enforcement investigators waited to interview Major Hasan, a contradictory portrait of him emerged. Neighbors described him as a man who dressed alternately in a military uniform and flowing white robes, and who gave a copy of the Koran to his next-door neighbor a day before the shooting.

Reports from the shooting suggested that soldiers may have heard him shout something like “Allahu Akbar” ”” Arabic for “God is great!” ”” just before he fired two automatic handguns. He was shown on a security video tape from a local convenience store wearing white robes just hours before the shooting. And family members said that he had complained about being harassed expressly because he was a Muslim, and that he had expressed deep concerns about deploying.

Acquaintances said Major Hasan was upset about his future deployment in a war zone, and heatedly opposed United States foreign policy in discussions with fellow soldiers. Earlier this year law-enforcement officers monitoring Islamic Web sites identified a man of the same name as a blogger who posted comments on suicide bombings in which he equated such acts to those by soldiers who use their own bodies to shield fellow soldiers from exploding shrapnel.

Read the whole thing.

The American unemployment rate surged to 10.2 percent in October, its highest level in 26 years, as the economy lost another 190,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The jump into the realm of double-digit joblessness ”” from 9.8 percent in September ”” provided a sobering reminder that, despite the apparent end of the Great Recession, economic expansion has yet to translate into jobs, leaving tens of millions of people still struggling.

“The guy on the street is going to ask, ”˜What recovery?’ ” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at the PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “The job market is still in reverse.”

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Which brings me to the recent overture by the Vatican to invite disaffected Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church. A lot has been said and written about this development. I am not sure how it will be played out. Yet I can’t help but hear the beginnings of another contract between men ”“ from men who have institutional power in one tradition offering a place to men in another tradition who have felt their institutional power undermined and don’t want to give it up. Women are no doubt included in the invitation from Rome, but I don’t think that disaffected women Anglican priests will be allowed to keep their clerical collars should they make the switch.

I take inspiration from Jesus who insisted on the equal value of every human being. I take great joy in the Episcopal Church and in the Diocese of Newark in its invitation to all people to be a part of the Christian community ”“ and that whatever their gender or orientation, their gifts will be honored ”“ and that their life-long relationships can be blessed.

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“Papal Gambit Stuns Church” was how The Times of London headlined its front page Oct. 21. Inside, an editorial thundered that Rome’s newly announced legal structure allowing Anglicans to join the Catholic Church without giving up their rites and traditions had “dangerously weakened” Anglicanism. The editors said that Pope Benedict XVI stands accused of damaging church unity and ecumenical cooperation.

It was gloriously retro, as if out of an 1850 Punch cartoon showing a sinister pope and cardinal trying to force their way through a door over the caption: “Daring attempt to break into a church.” The Times’s metaphors””Rome was “annexing” parts of the Church of England, parking its tanks on Lambeth’s lawns, fishing in troubled Anglican water””glossed over important facts. The move was announced by the archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster together; the pope was responding to insistent requests from disaffected Anglicans who had decided in conscience they could no longer remain in the Church of England; he had not done so before out of fear of undermining Anglican unity; and he was doing so now with an imaginative piece of canonical engineering that could do more to thaw relations between the Catholic and Anglican churches than anything since their official unity talks began in the 1970s.

Still, the sense of violation was real””not least because the papal bombshell had dropped out of a clear blue sky with little warning. The former archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, was outraged that his successor, Rowan Williams, learned of the move only two weeks previously and had been notified formally only when the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal William Levada, visited London the weekend before. But even Lord Carey admitted that the proposal had vast potential. “Straightforward ecumenism at the theological level is going nowhere,” he said. “This fresh initiative could have surprising consequences.”

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There is an old, snooty church joke that goes something like this: Miss Smith approaches her pastor, incensed that he has replaced the King James Bible with the New International Version. “Pastor, bring back the King James,” she says. “If it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

Last week the joke was ignited””literally, at the Halloween book burning sponsored by Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, N.C. The church’s Web site declared the burning to be “a great success.” Works thrown into the flames included those by supposed heretics Billy Graham, Mother Teresa and emergent church guru Brian McLaren. “It was a success because God’s Word was glorified and uplifted,” according to the Web site. Claiming scriptural warrant for the burning, the site quoted Acts: “And many that believed, came and confessed and shewed their deeds. Many of them also which used curious arts, brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.”

Most disturbing, Scripture itself was burned””onto the pyre flew modern translations of the Bible like those that the woman in the joke deplored. Amazing Grace is a self-proclaimed King James Only church.

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[The] Rev [Rod] Garner was a guest of honour at historic St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery ”“ where the priest-in-charge is a female of Indian descent.

He told Church News how Episcopalian worship ”“ effectively protestant ministry ”“ in New York had long finished the debate on whether women or homosexuals should be allowed to serve God ”“ and encouraged the Anglican church to take note.

Rev Garner said: “Instead of closing down the door of the church to people based on their sexuality or gender, places like St Mark’s have harnessed it and set the church forward as a model for the human community.”

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Episcopal priest Gregory Malia did not injure anyone when he allegedly waved a handgun at his two daughters and their boyfriends outside a Jenkins Township tavern in July, his lawyer said on Thursday.

Attorney Nanda Palissery said there was no evidence the gun was loaded.

Jenkins Township police allege in arrest records that Malia, 44, of Laflin, waved a gun as his daughter, Marilyn Malia, 23, was being assaulted by Angela Sweet, 24, in the parking lot of the River Street Ale House on July 7.

After nearly two hours of testimony, District Judge Diana Malast agreed with Palissery, dismissing four felony counts of aggravated assault, the most serious charges, against Malia.

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The secretary-general of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, urged religious leaders gathered with their action plans at Windsor Castle on Tuesday to use their unique position in society to help the world deal with the “mo­mentous global challenge” of climate change.

They had come from around the world to the conference “Many Heavens, One Earth: Faith Commit­ments for a Living Planet”, organised by the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) in conjunction with the United Nations’ Develop­ment Programme.

More than 200 leaders of faith groups and secular environmental organ­isations discussed how they could take a lead.

Protecting the planet was an “ethical and scientific imperative”, said Mr Ban. He emphasised the influence that faith groups could exert: “You are the leaders who can have the largest, widest, and deepest reach.”

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North Texas Muslims called for calm and civility after shootings Thursday by an Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood.

Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was identified as Muslim ”“ a detail that sent some in the Muslim community into a defense mode.

“I am so sad,” said Nia McKay, the Indonesian-born president of Peacemakers, a Dallas-based nonprofit dedicated to events centered on peace. “Islam means Salaam. Its root word means peace. There are nonviolent resolutions.” Others in the 150,000-strong Muslim community of North Texas called the Fort Hood situation evolving and full of nuance.

“A major is a big-deal officer, and there is something complicated in this situation and we need to let investigators do their work,” said Mohamed Elibiary, president and CEO of the Carrollton-based Freedom and Justice Foundation. The nonprofit group works on public policy issues related to the Muslim community from state legislation to national security.

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Major Hasan was not speaking to investigators, and much about his background ”” and his motives ”” were unknown.

General Cone said that terrorism was not being ruled out, but that preliminary evidence did not suggest that the rampage had been an act of terrorism. Fox News quoted a retired Army colonel, Terry Lee, as saying that Major Hasan, with whom he worked, had voiced hope that President Obama would pull American troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, had argued with military colleagues who supported the wars and had tried to prevent his own deployment.

As a parade of ambulances wailed to the scene of the shootings, officials said the extent of injuries to the wounded varied significantly, with some in critical condition and others lightly wounded. General Cone praised the first-responders and the medics who acted quickly to administer first aid at the scene.

“Horrible as this was, I think it could have been much worse,” the general said.

Utterly horrifying. Please join me in praying for the families of those killed and injured and also those who will minister to them.

St. Nikolai Evangelical Lutheran Church hasn’t changed much since the 16th century. Bach once played the organ here and the music remains alluring, but it is the church’s more recent history in the last days of the Cold War and its role in the fall of the Berlin Wall that draw tourists today.

The Rev. Christian Fuhrer became the pastor at St. Nikolai in 1980, when the world was divided by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Germany itself was split in two, most visibly by the wall the East German government ”” the German Democratic Republic”” built in Berlin in 1961 in an attempt to keep its people from fleeing to the West.

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The killing of five British soldiers in Afghanistan by a police officer has raised questions over security progress in the country. The British army has been training Afghan security and police forces to enforce the rule of law for the long-term future of the country. Mark Grant-Jones, padre with 2 Rifles Battle Group, and Mark Christian a padre serving with British soldiers in Helmand, comment on the implications of the killings on the British cause in Afghanistan, and Afghan journalist Nadene Ghouri discusses the Afghan reaction to the incident.

Go here and scroll down to the 8:10 segment and listen to it all.

The Hypertherm factory sits hidden in the woods not far from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H….

…late last year, production of ships and cars pretty much ground to a halt. And sales of cutting systems at Hypertherm dropped 50 percent.

How many workers did the company lay off? None.

It put them to work doing other things. While layoffs remain a reality in this economy, a few firms ”” as a matter of policy ”” refuse to lay off a single employee.

Caught this one on the morning run via podcast. Inspiring outside the box thinking. Read or listen to it all–KSH.

An emotional debate over the role of Islam in Switzerland is heating up as a referendum approaches that would ban the construction of minarets on mosques.

On Nov. 29, the Swiss will vote on a referendum to ban the construction of minarets, an initiative promoted by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, who argue that a minaret is a symbol of Islamic intolerance. Minarets are tower-like structures capped with crowns; while the structure has no special religious significance, it is often used for the call to prayer for Muslims.

The debate comes in a country that has prided itself on integrating its large immigrant population and that largely avoided the clashes over the rights of Muslim minorities seen elsewhere in Europe. Business and political interests are especially worried about a possible backlash from the Muslim world.

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In a bad mood? Don’t worry – according to research, it’s good for you.

An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.

In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.

While cheerfulness fosters creativity, gloominess breeds attentiveness and careful thinking, Professor Joe Forgas told Australian Science Magazine.

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For thou, O Lord, art my hope, my trust, O LORD, from my youth. Upon thee I have leaned from my birth; thou art he who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of thee.

–Psalm 71:5,6

On a recent afternoon, stagehands prepared the Protestant meeting hall on the Place de la Fusterie for a musical, “The Calvin Generation,” to be performed there that evening. Springtime for Calvin?

Not quite. The religious reformer, best known for his doctrines about a depraved humanity and a harsh God predestining people to hell or heaven, would not dance or sing that night. But the show was one of a vast program of commemorations ”” theater, a film festival, conferences, exhibits, even specially concocted Calvinist wines and chocolates ”” described by some who have tasted them as somewhat bitter ”” of the birth of John Calvin 500 years ago.

“Our idea was to show Calvin so that people could see his personality in the richness of his thought and activities,” said Roland Benz, 66, the Calvin Jubilee chairman, as he watched workers preparing the stage, lights and costumes.

Read the whole article.

Last week I was in a thunderstorm in Medina del Campo when I read about Pope Benedict’s offer to accommodate some Anglican practices of those who wanted to join the Roman Catholic Church. I don’t want now to go on about the substance of the affair. What still intrigues me is the cultural incomprehension I found.

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The Catholic League was formed to promote reunion. Many do not know this, but the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity began in 1908 as an Anglican initiative to promote unity between Anglicans and Catholics; only from 1936 was it decided, under the influence of a French priest, Abbé Paul Couturier, to widen its scope to embrace all Christians.

After the Appeal for Christian Unity at the 1920 Lambeth Conference, Cardinal Mercier of Belgium and Lord Halifax gathered a group of theologians into what became known as the Malines Conversations, producing a plan for a Uniate Church similar to that proposed in the reign of Charles II. The talks ended when the Archbishop of York visited the Pope, the first Anglican archbishop to visit the Pope, and explained that Lord Halifax had no official standing.

It was not until the Second Vatican Council that the time became more auspicious, and through the visit of Archbishop Michael Ramsey to Pope Paul VI in 1996, the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC)_was created “to work for the restoration of complete communion of faith and sacramental life”. Archbishop Ramsey had already indicated what form he thought it might take.

Building on the plans of past centuries he suggested: “Unity could take the form of the Anglican Communion being in communion with Rome, having sufficient dogmatic agreement with Rome, accepting the Pope as the presiding bishop of all Christians, but being allowed to have their own liturgy and married clergy and a great deal of existing Anglican customs….”

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Nearly 700 Ohio Catholic priests and bishops will gather in Columbus this week (Nov. 5-6) in an unprecedented attempt to bolster marriage, which they see as an imperiled institution.

The two-day conference is in response to soaring divorce rates, people living together without marital commitments and the growing trend of same-sex unions, said Dan Andriacco, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.

“In general, the state of marriage is not as healthy as we would like it to be,” he said.

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Anyone writing a history of British journalism in the 20th century will need to use plenty of ink printing the name Harold Evans. And they’d do well to spend some time with the words Evans himself has committed to paper. His new book, My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, covers Evans’ life from his childhood in Manchester, his run as editor of the Sunday Times and his two decades in the United States.

During his tenure at The Sunday Times, Evans was known for pursuing stories that had been hidden or lost from public view. One of his most famous crusades was his drive to cover the stories of families who had been affected by use of the drug thalidomide. The sedative, prescribed to pregnant mothers, had been shown to cause birth defects in children, but the case to compensate families languished in the courts for years.

When Evans arrived at the paper in 1967, the story was an immediate priority.

“When I became editor of the Sunday Times, I thought I must check how these children are doing,” Evans tells Steve Inskeep.

My wide Elizabeth put me on to this one–I highly recommend the audio (seven minutes plus).

3. On the Report, you said you wouldn’t join the Catholic Church (which recently offered to open membership up to Episcopalians and Anglicans) because Catholicism defines itself in negative terms. If the Vatican opened its doors to women and gay priests, would you consider rejoining then? Or do you feel that the divide between the Episcopalian and Catholic Churches is an important, necessary one?

I have nothing against the Catholic Church and certainly nothing against Roman Catholics. At the same time, I have no desire to sign up! I was reared as an evangelical (a fundamentalist, really), and my parents once informed me that if I ever married a Catholic I would be disowned. I was convinced, growing up, that Catholics were not even Christians.

I no longer believe that, of course, but at the same time I have no hankering whatsoever to convert to Rome. I’m very content as an Episcopal priest, and I happen to believe that we Episcopalians are addressing some vitally important issues right now, including (but not limited to) homosexuality, same-sex unions, and the role of women. We’re approaching these matters thoughtfully, prayerfully, and with integrity. The decisions we’ve made as a Church may well precipitate a continued diminution of our numbers, but that really doesn’t bother me. Sometimes the price of faithfulness to the demands of the gospel is popularity. In my judgment, moreover, the most effective religious movements throughout American history have positioned themselves on the margins of society, not in the councils of power.

Read it all.