The covenant by itself cannot save Anglicanism ”” I’m not sure it’s structured in a way that would allow it to do that ”” but the process of studying the covenant, responding to it, receiving it, and recommitting ourselves to one another may do so, and it will leave the Anglican Communion stronger. A strengthened Anglican Communion will be confident in itself while actively working for Christian unity through joining with our brothers and sisters in mission and by standing ready to share the understandings born from our comprehensiveness.

Two points in the Ridley Cambridge draft seem especially important in such a task and in light of a call to be reconcilers and interpreters. The first is in §2.1.5, which affirms that “our common mission is a mission shared with other Churches and traditions” and recognizes that “the ecumenical vocation of Anglicanism to the full visible unity of the Church in accordance with Christ’s prayer that ”˜all may be one.’ ”

The other is §4.1.5, which states:

It shall be open to other Churches to adopt the Covenant. Adoption of this Covenant does not bring any right of recognition by, or membership of, the Instruments of Communion. Such recognition and membership are dependent on the satisfaction of those conditions set out by each of the Instruments.

Leaving open the possibility that other churches might adopt the covenant is, in my mind, a wonderful gesture that seems born from reflection on the ecumenical vocation of Anglicanism mentioned in section two. This provision has inspired resistance in some quarters of the Episcopal Church, for fear that it might play into the perceived schemes of some of our departed brothers and sisters to replace the Episcopal Church as the officially recognized Anglican body in the United States. While I understand the origins of such concerns, I wonder if they are the fruit of a conflict mentality that is unhelpful and could lead to an even longer period of being internally focused. The key portion of the provision for those who have these concerns would seem to be that any body’s acceptance as part of the Communion would come only with the approval of all the Instruments of Communion, not simply one or two.

In the end, the inclusion of this provision within the covenant prevents it from being a document purely internal to the Communion as it is, and instead turns a portion of it outward in a gesture of invitation and welcome.

Read it all.

At exactly two minutes after midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant in Onagawa, Japan. Government officials and computer scientists around the globe held their breath. Was this the beginning of a massive Y2K computer meltdown? Actually, no. It was an isolated event, one of a handful of glitches to occur (including the failure of 500 slot machines at two racetracks in Delaware) as the sun rose on the new decade. The dreaded millennial meltdown never happened.

Instead, it was the American Dream that was about to dim. Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post”“World War II era. We’re still weeks away from the end of ’09, but it’s not too early to pass judgment. Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want ”” just give thanks that it is nearly over.

Calling the 2000s “the worst” may seem an overwrought label in a decade in which we fought no major wars, in historical terms. It is a sadly appropriate term for the families of the thousands of 9/11 victims and soldiers and others killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the lack of a large-scale armed conflict makes these past 10 years stand out that much more. This decade was as awful as any peacetime decade in the nation’s entire history. Between the West’s ongoing struggle against radical Islam and our recent near-death economic experience ”” trends that have largely skirted much of the developing world ”” it’s no wonder we feel as if we’ve been through a 10-year gauntlet. Americans may have the darkest view of recent history, since it’s in the U.S. that the effects of those trends have been most acute. If you live in Brazil or China, you have had a pretty good decade economically. Once, we were the sunniest and most optimistic of nations. No longer.

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In the field of investment the man who is reliably wrong is a twisted genius. A good return is possible if the investor can do the precise opposite of everything that he recommends. The Church Commissioners, the asset managers for the Church of England, have a claim on the title of anti-investors supreme. Stung by sinking the lottery plate into property at the top of the market, they switched heavily into equities just as the long boom came to an end.

The result is a severe depletion of the Church’s pension fund at a time when retired clergy are living longer than ever. The clergy live in tied accommodation and earn only a small stipend, which makes reforming their fixed-benefit scheme difficult. As the task force established by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York concluded: “A guaranteed pension and access to affordable retirement housing have come to be seen as important ingredients of the compact.”

The fund is therefore in a parlous state.

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It’s a lot like bringing the boxes of Christmas decorations out of the attic or wherever you have them stored. Like pulling the Christmas sweaters from the wardrobe closet””that to my mind is the way the Church, each Advent, drags him out of the liturgical mothballs. His given name is John bar Zechariah. You know him as John the Baptist. He is completely out of step with what I have dubbed the Shopmas season. That is a word I coined some years ago to describe the season that begins the day after Thanksgiving and lasts until December 31. It is celebrated with lights, glitter, cards, parties, presents, and most of all shopping accompanied by holiday music. It is enchanting how puissant such songs as “Winter Wonderland” or “White Christmas” can be for the shopkeeper’s business. Some preachers complain about this festive celebration. I kind of like it.

My problem is with the lectionary. Just when I’m in the mood for the nostalgia of Shopmas the Church drags John the Baptizer out of the pages of the Bible and plops him smack dab in the middle of my life and I have to deal with him again. And not just for one Sunday but for two! I can see him there in the barren desert that borders the Jordan River near where it flows into the Dead Sea. The lowest place on earth and the last place most of us want to be during Shopmas. He’s out there preaching. He’s dressed austerely in skins and camel’s hair; living on a sparse diet of locust and wild honey. His voice raging like a furnace; his message burning like a wild fire in the chaparral, uncontained and uncontainable””“Repent,” he cries, “repent.”

There are those people, few and far between, who come into our lives with an austerity, even a harshness that the causes us to grow. They are tough on us, and yet for some reason do not offend us. Or if they do, we get over it and go on. Maybe it’s a teacher, a coach, or even a boss who gets the best out of us. They push us to become more than we thought we were able to be. John the Baptist is like that. This is one of the reasons the Church drags him out each Advent.

Read it carefully and read it all.

For a political horror show, fast-forward to the summer of 2010: The unemployment rate is stubbornly high, hovering between 9.3 and 9.7 percent. Companies are wary about hiring more workers because the economy remains soft. Small businesses, which normally power a recovery, are caught in a credit squeeze.

In this scenario, the jobs outlook will remain bleak for another year. The unemployment rate will remain well above 8 percent in 2011. And the economy won’t bounce back completely for five years after that.

The Democrats, in our scary 2010 movie, will be heading toward the midterm elections hoping to preserve their 81-seat margin in the House. Vulnerable incumbents will be clamoring for more economic stimulus, but the Obama administration will be constrained by the huge budget deficits needed to bail out the economy after the 2008 financial crisis.

I wish that this economic forecast were just a bad dream after too much Thanksgiving turkey. But it’s drawn from the minutes of the Federal Reserve’s Nov. 3-4 meeting, released last week.

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From here:

LORD there are children suffering at the hand of the evil doer, Lives ruined, souls tormented and in despair. Knowing only sorrow, loneliness, suffering and pain, Crying for help, to feel joy and peace again. Souls are marred on earth for all of their days When wicked prevail in evil ways. Children, defenceless against evil schemes, Suffer in silence at the hands of fiends. Oh Christ look down with justice from above, Rescue the children, may they know pure love. Send forth to the victims some rescuers To protect them from horrid monsters. May You heal hearts, souls and minds to live and reclaim normal lives. May children who’ve been deeply abused Once again sing childhood songs and be amused With toys and games and fun filled days. May they know You and Your redeeming ways.

LORD there are children suffering at the hand of the evil doer, Lives ruined, souls tormented and in despair. Knowing only sorrow, loneliness, suffering and pain, Crying for help, to feel joy and peace again. Souls are marred on earth for all of their days When wicked prevail in evil ways. Children, defenceless against evil schemes, Suffer in silence at the hands of fiends. Oh Christ look down with justice from above, Rescue the children, may they know pure love. Send forth to the victims some rescuers To protect them from horrid monsters. May You heal hearts, souls and minds to live and reclaim normal lives. May children who’ve been deeply abused Once again sing childhood songs and be amused With toys and games and fun filled days. May they know You and Your redeeming ways.

One of my favorite stories of the week; I am not going to spoil it by excerpting it you need to listen to it all (almost 6 minutes)

[She was] a single mother of four who wanted a house….in the heady days of the mortgage boom….She only knew that there seemed to be possibilities, even to those with little means such as herself, which is how a woman who had never paid more than $700 a month in rent and who had relied in recent years on Section 8 housing vouchers suddenly owned a house.

A four-bedroom house.

With 3 1/2 bathrooms. And walk-in closets, black granite countertops and a fireplace.

And a sale price of $698,000.

How White was able to buy this house — and the havoc that doing so wrought — is the story of a moment in time when all of the old rules about home-buying suddenly disappeared. It happened even though smart people knew better. It happened in White’s case even though the college-educated day-care provider knew deep down that she was not ready. In the expansiveness of the boom, it was easy to believe. And tens of thousands of people did.

Incredible, except it really happened. It boggles the mind. Read it all.

The rise of College Sports Inc. didn’t happen by accident. Administrators at many universities have allowed athletic departments to operate independently, like stand-alone entertainment divisions. They have separate budgets, negotiate their own TV deals and, in some cases, employ hundreds of coaches and staff. And as long as they continue to collect ever-larger sums from ticket sales, boosters and television, who is going to tell them to spend less?

Another key element fueling the arms race is the increasingly indefensible tax treatment of sports revenues. Decades ago ”” before the lucrative television contracts, Internet marketing, Nike sponsorships and luxury boxes ”” Congress essentially exempted colleges from paying taxes on their sports income. The legislators’ reasoning now appears shockingly quaint: that participation in college sports builds character and is an important component of the larger college experience.

Many booster clubs are recognized as charities under the federal tax code. At Florida and Georgia, to name just two universities, the athletic departments are set up as charities.

Read it all.

Good morning. What I have been asked to do this morning is to report on where we are at this point of time in the Anglican Communion. It’s a fairly complicated picture so I hope I will be given the gift of clarity as I talk to you about this. Since the last time I reported to Synod on these matters, six things have happened. I want to delineate those six things and comment on them and then conclude by talking about a situation which at the moment is absolutely no threat to the Uganda Link but is a potential cause of difficulty in relation to our relationships with the Church of Uganda.

Read it all

Catholic bishops in the state are instructing priests to read or distribute a letter this weekend asking Catholics to pray that lawmakers in New Jersey not allow same-sex marriage in New Jersey.

It remains unclear whether legislators will vote on the issue during the current lame-duck session. Gov. John Corzine favors same-sex marriage, but Gov.-elect Chris Christie opposes it, and supporters realize that unless it passes before Christie assumes office, prospects of passage in the foreseeable future would be bleak.

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Reps. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., are drafting a bill that would slap a 0.25 percent tax on the sale and purchase of financial instruments such as stocks and securities. They estimate it would add about $150 billion a year to the Treasury. They call this crazy idea the “Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Act of 2009.”

In the Democrats’ world, Wall Street financiers exist in a bubble, where their considerable assets never escape to circulate in the broader economy. In reality, Wall Street props up Main Street every day by allowing investors to back promising ventures and well-run companies — voluntarily.

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The Church of Uganda has come under fire from gay activists in the UK for failing to speak out against a proposed law that would toughen the East African nation’s sodomy laws.

However the furore in church circles over the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” speaks more to the rift between the African and Western Anglicans than to the politics of the proposed legislation. The campaign mounted in the West to defeat the bill will likely change few minds in Uganda, while the Church of Uganda’s response will likely been seen in Britain as moral cowardice in the face of injustice.

One senior Ugandan cleric told The Church of England Newspaper, “The Church of Uganda is not passive about current issues, but we have chosen not to be publicly confrontational. People will work behind the scenes to influence current events and discuss issues with the players rather than go to the newspapers. For example, you will never know when the Archbishop meets with the President. This is the way we Ugandans do things, which is different from the West.”

Read it carefully and read it all.

A Yale librarian who cast doubt last year on the origins of the Serenity Prayer, adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and reprinted on countless knickknacks, says new evidence has persuaded him to retain the famed Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as the author in the next edition of The Yale Book of Quotations.

The provenance of the prayer, which begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” became a subject of controversy last year with the publication of an article by the librarian, Fred R. Shapiro, who is also the editor of the book of quotations. Mr. Shapiro had found archival materials that led him to express doubt that Niebuhr was the author.

But now another researcher trawling the Internet has discovered evidence that attributes the prayer to Niebuhr. The researcher, Stephen Goranson, works in the circulation department at the Duke University library, has a doctorate from Duke in the history of religion and, as a sideline, searches for the origins of words and sayings and publishes his findings in etymology journals. This month he found a Christian student newsletter written in 1937 that cites Niebuhr as the prayer’s author.

The prayer in the newsletter is slightly different from the contemporary one often printed on mugs and wall plaques. It reads, “Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.”

Read it all.

Given the high profile of the [Washington] Post, and Bishop [of Washington John] Chane’s standing as a bishop of a prominent (if recently beleaguered) Christian body, one should probably take his remarks seriously. Alas, as a short history his remarks cannot be taken seriously at all, but amount to a tissue of popular myths, used to promote a tired and unfounded historical perspective whose application now has a track record of political intolerance.

Bishop Chane first argues that traditionalists are inconsistent ”” maybe even hypocritical? ”” because Jesus was against divorce and traditionalists are not “demanding that the city council make divorce illegal.” Of course, Jesus did not proclaim all divorce wrong (cf. Matt. 9:9).More important, by begging his own question here ”” just what is the status of divorce, then? ”” Bishop Chane undercuts his case: the state’s accommodation of divorce has indeed encouraged and even created turmoil in social relations. If anything the failures of church and wider culture in this area are actually a good argument for restraint on further social confusion.

Second, Bishop Chane says that traditionalists are inconsistent in their defense of the centrality of heterosexual marriage because, after all, Paul thought marriage inferior to the celibate life. But, of course, the apostle Paul’s teaching does not claim that marriage is an inferior state, but rather that it is often an impractical one in comparison with celibacy. Bishop Chane’s disingenuous assumption that traditionalists ought to apply Paul’s teaching to all of human life was certainly not shared by other writers in the New Testament (or by Jesus), and such an attitude made only partial inroads into the Church’s practical life some centuries later. Most Christians, including Christian priests even in the Middle Ages, understood Paul’s teaching within a larger theological reading of the Scriptures that included a created sexual difference, the blessing of procreation, and the social responsibilities of church and state to nurture families. Within this reading, celibacy is a great gift, and an evangelical vocation for some, and it remains so.

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The phrase mere Christianity can be misleading, suggesting we can act independently of traditions that guide our interpretations of the Bible. It’s quite American to position ourselves above tradition, Sometimes even denominational churches do this by hiding their theological distinctives, thinking they will narrow the pool of potential parishioners. If you take Presbyterian out of the church name and avoid teaching about predestination and the sacraments, more people will come, right?

A friend of mine has a daughter-in-law who attends a large nondenominational church. My friend sent her the Heidelberg Catechism to introduce her to his Reformed theological tradition. Her response surprised him. She wrote back saying that her nondenominational church uses the Heidelberg Catechism all the time. It is one of her church’s key resources for educating people in the faith. Consider the irony: While many Reformed churches push their own catechism to the side, this large nondenominational church discovers the same catechism to be a profound tool for teaching the Christian faith. Still, both churches illustrate problems with mere Christianity.

One church claims to be nondenominational instead of naming its tradition. The other fails to uphold its explicitly named tradition.

Read the whole article.

The Anglican Church has faulted the government’s Mau Forest Eviction programme saying so far it has been inhumane.

ACK Archbishop Eliud Wabukala said the government had a duty to ensure that the evictees’ basic rights were not abused in the process of restoring the water tower.

“We recognize that the government has duty to protect the environment. To this end the intention to reverse the destruction of Mau complex is noble. However it is grossly inhuman that people removed from the water tower are left to live on road sides. Such people should be given alternative settlements as soon as possible to reduce their suffering,” he observed.

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So how does this religious nonbeliever practice his Judaism? By highlighting an overlooked aspect of Jewish culture. Together with his wife, Robyn, Mr. [Charles] Krauthammer runs Pro Musica Hebraica, a concert series they launched last year to change the common view that “Jewish music” is hava nagila, liturgical music, klezmer and not much else. Earlier this month, Pro Musica Hebraica presented its fourth concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

There is a rich tradition of Jewish classical music, though it is largely unknown even within the Jewish community. For Pro Musica Hebraica, such music is not defined strictly by the composer’s ethnicity. It must simply be “self-consciously Jewish”””by drawing on Jewish folk music, Hebrew texts or Jewish themes. Pro Musica Hebraica is an attempt to recover a tradition, Mr. Krauthammer says, and to encourage audiences to judge whether it might be worthy of “a place in the Western canon.”

Last year, the series focused on 20th-century Russian music, specifically on the St. Petersburg School, the Jewish students of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908). As nationalism rose across Europe, Rimsky-Korsakov challenged his Jewish students to create a Jewish national music of their own. They responded, Mr. Krauthammer notes, by sending “ethnographic expeditions to shtetls, where they wrote down and recorded””their wax recordings still exist in the St. Petersburg library””synagogue and folk music of the time.”

The Church of England is facing the loss of as many as one in ten paid clergy in the next five years and internal documents seen by The Times admit that the traditional model of a vicar in every parish is over.

The credit crunch and a pension funding crisis have left dioceses facing massive restructuring programmes. Church statistics show that between 2000 and 2013 stipendiary or paid clergy numbers will have fallen by nearly a quarter.

According to figures on the Church of England website, there will be an 8.3 per cent decrease in paid clergy in the next four years, from 8,400 this year to 7,700 in to 2013. This represents a 22.5 per cent decrease since 2000.

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Caught this one through the paper edition that I get through the mail–a long searching piece which is a good illustration of the sheer agony of sustained mental illness. Money line (for me):

Leonard is still struggling, for reasons no one understands. He keeps odd hours, working through most nights and sleeping much of the day. He is not unhappy, he said, but he has the same aversion to washing and still lives like a hermit.

“I still don’t know why I’m like this, and I would still try anything that could help,” he said. “But at this point, obviously, I’m skeptical of the efficacy of surgery, at least for me.”

Read it all–KSH.

Check it out.

(ACC News) The Anglican Church of Canada’s House of Bishops has issued this statement regarding the proposed Private Member’s Bill in Uganda called “The Anti-Homosexuality Bill”:

The House of Bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada, along with the Conference of Bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, express our dismay and concern over the draft proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill currently before the Parliament of Uganda.

The proposed Bill would severely restrict the human rights of Ugandan citizens both at home and abroad by infringing freedom of speech, peaceful assembly, freedom of organization, and legitimate advocacy of civil rights. It would impose excessive and cruel penalties on persons who experience same-sex attraction as well as those who counsel, support, and advise them, including family members and clergy.

We, the House of Bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada, affirm that our baptismal covenant requires us to “respect the dignity of every human being” and to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbour as ourselves.” We further note that 1998 Lambeth Conference Resolution 1:10 called upon all bishops to reject the irrational fear of homosexual persons and to create opportunities to listen to the voice and experience of homosexual Christians. We recall that the Primates Meeting in Dromantine, Ireland 2005 condemned all persecution and violence towards homosexual persons. Clearly, the proposed Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill fails to meet these standards.

We therefore call upon our colleagues in the House of Bishops of the Province of Uganda to oppose this Private Member’s Bill. Together with our colleagues in the Conference of Bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, we call upon our own Government of Canada, through the Minister of Foreign Affairs, to convey to the Government of Uganda a deep sense of alarm about this fundamental violation of human rights and, through diplomatic channels, to press for its withdrawal.

The bishops of England and Wales have set up a commission to prepare the ground for an exodus of possibly thousands of disaffected Anglicans into the Catholic Church.

The move was announced in London as Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, protested in person to the Pope over the way the Vatican announced plans to receive Anglican converts en masse.

Read it all.

I was very sorry to read this upon returning from an afternoon run.

Update: a little more there.

Another update: “The agent for Tiger Woods has told USA TODAY that the golf superstar is fine after crashing his vehicle near outside his Florida home early Friday.”

For the investor (the person who risks the capital to create real live self-sustaining jobs), every investment, whether it results in a profit or not, would be taxed two more times.

What is near certainty is that this bill will succeed at driving traders to international markets that are escaping the stilted centralized economy that DeFazio and Perlmutter feel the need to champion.

It’s a given that this misguided vengeance against Wall Street is comfort food for populist legislators, but “Wall Street” isn’t stocked exclusively with revolting would-be criminals. It is made up of retirees, small-business owners, entrepreneurs and parents who invest in their kids’ college funds. At last count, nearly 50 percent of Americans are, on some level, invested in the stock market.

If one was a hopeless skeptic, he might believe these legislators were trying to undermine private sector growth by re-appropriating wealth in such a ham-handed way. Even reliable liberal Sen.Chuck Schumer said that a Wall Street transaction tax had the potential to “harm economic recovery efforts by deterring capital investment.”

Read it all.

The state on Wednesday told bond investors it is facing a $1 billion hole in this year’s budget ”” a shortfall five times bigger than previously disclosed ”” and will cut funding for schools, municipalities, higher education, hospitals and pension plans to close the gap.

For months, Governor Corzine has been hinting at the need for such cuts as New Jersey grapples with the fallout from the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Officials previously acknowledged a deficit of at least $8 billion for fiscal year 2011 and $190 million for this fiscal year. The depth of the state’s current shortfall was not revealed until Wednesday.

“It is going to be a gut-wrenching experience,” said Bill Dressel, executive director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities.

Read it all.

However, that pricey pendant most assuredly does serve as a symbol of an unfortunate quirk in American buying habits. We are a nation that specializes in producing and consuming items that have little purpose except to facilitate extravagance, and it’s a proclivity that hardly begins or ends with jewelry. Millions of us insist on paying a great deal of money for goods that would cost little or nothing in a world where everything was ranked strictly by functionality.

Although bemoaning taxes is the true national pastime, the one tax nobody really considers is this “vanity tax”: the difference between what a thing needs to cost (to fulfill a given function) and what it ends up costing (after being artificially inflated by imperatives besides function).

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The Secretary General intends to appoint a Director for Communications to implement this vision. The post will be based at St Andrew’s House, London and will involve providing leadership and support across the full range of communication roles, both internal and external. The development and implementation of a communications strategy including the editing of the website are current priorities.

The candidate will:

* Have an understanding of and be sympathetic to the life and work of the Anglican Communion;
* Have significant experience in the field of communications, including the development of appropriate strategies for a variety of situations;
* Have experience of working collaboratively as part of a team, and of managing staff;
* Have experience of Website editing and development, with appropriate technical skills;
* Have excellent writing and personal communications skills;
* Be familiar with modern IT, and its application in a modern office context;
* Be prepared and able to travel extensively throughout the Anglican Communion and elsewhere.

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Following the resolution passed at ACC-14 (14.05) ‘The Bible in the Life of the Church’ a Steering Group has been appointed to take the work forward. It meets for the first time with the Chair, Archbishop David Moxon, Bishop of Waikato, New Zealand at the Anglican Communion Office from November 30th to December 3rd, 2009.

The work of the project will be undertaken in six regional groups hosted, in the main, by theological colleges within the Communion and a number of ‘user groups’ who will test out the work of the regional groups. Each regional group will have a coordinator who will be a member of the Steering Group. The Regional Groups are located in East Africa (St Paul’s, Limuru, Kenya), Southern Africa (University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Anglican House of Studies), North America (University of the South, Sewanee, USA), SE Asia (Trinity Theological College, Singapore), Oceania (drawing on the resources of the theological colleges in Melbourne, Australia) and Europe (Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, England).

In addition to the co-ordinators of the Regional Groups the Steering Group will have three ”˜theological consultants’ from Nigeria, Cuba and USA.

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