In recent years, some Americans have come to view science and religion as consistent antagonists, butting heads over everything from the origin of the cosmos to when human life begins (abortion) and when it ends (euthanasia).

Conservative denominations, like the Southern Baptists, Catholics, Assemblies of God and some non-denominational evangelicals, object to particular areas of scientific research ”” embryonic stem cells and cloning, for instance. By contrast, mainline Protestant and Jewish denominations, as well as Hindu and Muslim communities, have tended to support embryonic stem cell research, adding a new voice to such highly politicized debates.

What is sometimes obscured by the clamor is that there was once an era in American history when science and religion were considered symbiotic allies, rather than the rancorous adversaries they too often are today.

Read it all.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Fall River reacted with cautious optimism, warning that much is still unknown; local Anglican (American Episcopal) clergy said the Vatican decision will have no impact on their congregations.

“It is a most interesting development and quite preliminary at the same time,” said Father Marc H. Bergeron, director of the diocesan Ecumenical and Interfaith Affairs Office. “There are many details that remain to be worked out and possible ramifications go in many directions: What does it mean about celibacy in general? Will the invite go to men not already ordained? What about the pastoral provision already in place here in the USA in a few parishes?”

In 1980, a Vatican-approved provision allowed conservative Anglicans to convert to Catholicism. Consequently, six of these parishes are worshipping in this country.

Yet, it is unclear whether this model will work when the new provision is in place and difficult to predict how many Anglicans will choose to convert.

“American Episcopalians are quite liberal,” Bergeron said. “That seems to limit local interest.”

Read it all.

There is much litigation going on currently in State courts over the polity of the Episcopal Church. At the same time, there do not appear to be any online versions readily available of ECUSA’s early Constitution, either as originally adopted or as subsequently from time to time amended. The commentary on the history of the Constitution and Canons published in 1981 by Messrs. White & Dykman, and reprinted in 1997, is available for download from this site (along with two supplements written by others, carrying the account through General Convention 1991). However, even it does not have in one place a complete version of ECUSA’s original Constitution, which is so important for understanding the nature of ECUSA’s mixed form of ecclesiastical polity.

Since the nature of ECUSA’s polity is so much in dispute these days, I have decided that as a public service, I will publish in this post the earliest version of the Church’s Constitution, as well as some further historical materials leading up to its formulation. The purpose will be so that everyone may access and understand the Church’s organic evolution (see this earlier post for even more detail and background), out of a meeting of delegates from the various successors, in each new State, of the previously established Church of England in the respective colonies.

Let us begin with the six principles for the formation of a national replacement in the States for the Church of England, as it had existed in the Colonies prior to the Revolutionary War. The Rev. Dr. William White, of Christ Church in Philadelphia, later one of the first Bishops in the newly established Church, first proposed them in a pamphlet which he had published in 1782, entitled The Case of the Episcopal Churches in the United States Considered….

Read it all and please follow all the links also.

Pete Shellem, a reporter for the Central Pennsylvania paper, the Patriot News, died last week. Shellem was best known for his investigative journalism, which directly led to the freeing of four prisoners serving life sentences for murder. Mike Feeley, Shellem’s editor at the paper, recalls Shellem’s accomplished career.

Take the time to listen to it all (a little over 5 minutes total).

In The Warning, veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk unearths the hidden history of the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.

“I didn’t know Brooksley Born,” says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton’s powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. “I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable.” Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group — former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin — convinced him that Born’s attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was “clearly a mistake.”

Take the time to watch it all and take special note of who the key characters are.

A Michigan native who believes his church can make a difference in the staggering rate of reservation suicides was ordained Saturday as the 10th bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota.

Six hundred people gathered in the Sioux Falls Convention Center to witness the ordination and consecration of the Rev. John Tarrant in a two-hour ceremony.
Tarrant will succeed the current bishop, the Rev. Creighton Robertson, who is expected to retire at the end of the year.

Read it all.

But weeks into his reign, [Bishop Lawrence] Provenzano faces another challenge: The Vatican last month announced it is setting up a new structure to allow Anglicans or their entire parishes to more easily switch to the Roman Catholic Church. This would allow married Anglican priests to continue to operate within the Catholic Church.

The move appears aimed at attracting Anglicans – or Episcopalians, as they are known in the United States – who oppose their church’s embrace of female priests and gay bishops.

Provenzano, 54, is taking it all in stride and says he is not taking any special steps to prevent defections. “This all becomes a distraction to us in terms of really doing what we are called to do, and that is preaching the Gospel, taking care of the poor, taking care of the homeless,” he said. He added that “I don’t think any parish in our diocese will take this invitation” by the Vatican. There are nearly 150 Episcopalian parishes in the Long Island diocese.

Still, some of his initial comments created a stir. Shortly after Rome’s announcement in late October, he wrote, “At the heart of all this is the reality that the Roman Catholic Church is willing to welcome angry, reactionary, misogynistic, homophobic people.”

Read it all.

The identity issues facing middle-class black and Latino teenagers might be a clue as to why they don’t do as well academically as their white and Asian counterparts, some researchers and educators say. The teens often live in dual worlds: the suburban one they live in, and the rougher street life they see glorified in the media.

Known as the “minority achievement gap,” the lower average test scores, grades and college attendance by black and Latino students have long perplexed researchers. Many have focused on the values and attitudes of students and whether black students think doing well in school is “acting white.”

Read or listen to it all.

By now, Sekou Jackson is used to the questions: Why does he need to leave a work meeting to pray? Don’t black Muslims convert to Islam in jail? Why would you even want to be Muslim?

“It’s kind of a double whammy to be African-American and Muslim,” said Jackson, who studies the Navy at the National Academy of Science in Washington. “You’re going to be judged.”

Jackson’s struggle may have gotten harder when the FBI raided a Detroit mosque Wednesday, saying its leader preached hate against the government, trafficked in stolen goods and belonged to a radical group that wants to establish a Muslim state in America. The mosque’s imam, a black American named Luqman Ameen Abdullah, was killed in a shootout with agents.

Read it all.

The Dioceses of Western Louisiana and South Carolina have endorsed the Ridley-Cambridge draft of the Anglican Covenant, joining Central Florida as the third American diocese to formally back the Archbishop of Canterbury’s plan for creating a structure to manage the divisions over doctrine and discipline dividing the Anglican Communion.

On Oct 24, a special convention of the Diocese of South Carolina approved a resolution by a margin of 88 to 12 per cent that “endorses” the Anglican Covenant “as it presently stands, in all four sections, as an expression of our full commitment to mutual submission and accountability in communion, grounded in a common faith.”

Delegates to the Oct 9-10 annual convention of the Diocese of Western Louisiana also affirmed their support for the Covenant and backed Bishop Bruce MacPherson’s endorsement of the Anaheim Statement, which reaffirmed his commitment to remain part of the Anglican Communion and the Anglican Covenant process.

Read the whole article.

The resolution states:

Synod ”“
(1) welcomes the creation of the Province of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) under the leadership of Archbishop Bob Duncan and notes the GAFCON Primates’ Council recognition of the ACNA as genuinely Anglican and its recommendation that Anglican Provinces affirm full communion with the ACNA and ”“

(a) therefore expresses its desire to be in full communion with the ACNA, and

(b) furthermore, requests that Standing Committee seek to have a motion brought to the General Synod affirming that the Anglican Church of Australia be in full communion with the ACNA,

(2) welcomes Archbishop Duncan’s assessment that the recent Vatican offer of a Personal Ordinariate ”˜will not be utilised by the great majority of the Anglican Church in North America’s bishops, priests, dioceses and congregations’ and urges all Anglicans to reject the Vatican’s proposal….

Read it all.

Hard but important to look at.

Faced with anxiety in financial markets about the huge federal deficit and the potential for it to become an electoral liability for Democrats, the White House and Congressional leaders are weighing options for narrowing the gap, including a bipartisan commission that could force tax increases and spending cuts.

But even the idea of a panel to bridge the partisan divide has run into partisan objections. Many Democrats, including in the White House, are loath to cede such far-reaching decisions to a commission and doubt Republicans’ willingness to compromise. And most Republicans remain adamantly opposed to tax increases, leaving the prospects for any bipartisan approach limited at best.

The proponents, however, are pressing for a Senate vote this month. “If we have the same process and the same people, we are going to get the same results,” said Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, who recently met with Mr. Obama to discuss the idea. “The Democratic Party wants to spend more than we can afford; the Republican Party tends to want to cut taxes more than we can afford. So we are stuck.”

Concerns about the deficit are building even as the White House and Congress continue to add to it with tax cuts and spending to stimulate a still-fragile economy. Yet those one-time costs do not trouble most economists and market analysts.

Read it all.

What does all of this mean?

Populism is on the rise and conservatism is gaining steam, perhaps at its own expense. (If Hoffman loses in New York, it almost ensures that the Northeast will be almost exclusively Democrat-blue territory).

A sour mood exists among people, with close-to-10-percent unemployment, decreasing health-care benefits and rising taxes – and a view that the well-heeled get bailed-out but John and Joan Q. Citizen do not.

Because our political system was designed to be slow and laborious and to do little, that sour mood grows rather than dissipates.

These political conditions have made the difficult course of lawmaking become nearly impossible, and governing has become highly averse to coherent action.

Read it all.

The Rev. Allan Hawkins, who leads Saint Mary the Virgin church outside of Dallas, said the Vatican’s decision could start unifying the Catholic and Anglican churches after a centuries-old rift.

“I didn’t think I would live to see this day,” Hawkins said during a recent Sunday Mass.

Saint Mary the Virgin is one of three churches in Texas to become Catholic after the Vatican’s 1980 approval of the “Anglican use” provision, which allowed U.S. churches to convert on a case-by-case basis but also retain their traditions and identity.

Read it all.

…there is a kind of relentless spirit of androgyny pushed in our intellectual culture, where manliness is actively discouraged and disparaged and womanliness is taken to be a kind of servitude from which women must be delivered. The goal seems to be to make men more like women and women more like men, so that, by their eventual blending together, they become indistinguishable. The result, of course, is that male and female become morally insignificant distinctions in our minds.

The insignificance feeds the notion that there is really nothing wrong with endless technical manipulating of our sexuality and reproduction.

But there is another related sense of obsolescence because the spirit of androgyny takes flesh in the actual culture and through real social and educational institutions and policies. If the distinct aims of manhood and womanhood, fatherhood and motherhood are removed as the proper and good goal of boys and girls, then what, precisely, do boys and girls aim at? They are each taught to aim at the exact same target: becoming self-supporting, individual moneymakers.

The guiding assumption that a boy becomes a man precisely in becoming a husband and provider for his family has been replaced by an entirely indistinct, androgynous image of a large boy making money by himself, for himself, and for the satisfaction of his own pleasures. The guiding assumption that a girl becomes a woman by becoming a wife and mother has been replaced by the same indistinct, androgynous image of individual moneymaker working by herself, for herself, and for the satisfaction of her own pleasures.

Little wonder, given this image, that when men and women do decide to become a couple, the marriage would have as little moral meaning to them as divorce.

Read it all carefully.

Members of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) around the world and other conservative believers have welcomed Pope Benedict XVI’s overture to Anglicans enabling them to become Catholics “en masse”.

The primate of the TAC, which claims 400,000 members worldwide and is not part of the Anglican Communion, said Pope Benedict’s response “more than matches the dreams we dared to include in our petition of two years ago”. Adelaide-based Archbishop John Hepworth expressed gratitude to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, for not standing in the TAC’s way.

A US group affiliated to the TAC is the Anglican Church in America (ACA), which claims 5,200 members. In a statement its House of Bishops said they welcomed the Pope’s announcement “with deep joy”. ACA Bishop Louis Campese told The Tablet the ACA bishops planned to hold a special synod to consider the proposal. Bishop Peter Wilkinson who heads the Canadian TAC organisation, the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, said they shared Archbishop Hepworth’s excitement. He said the next moves would be determined after full details of the Apostolic Constitution were released.

Read it all.

One thing is clear: identity has become problematic in the modern world. The sociologist Peter Berger defined modernity as a state of permanent identity crisis. Many of the secular alternatives to religious identity proved terrifying in their consequences. National identity led to nationalism and two world wars. Ethnicity led to racism and the Holocaust. The “cause” led, among other things, to communism and Stalinist Russia. Even football, more harmless than most, can lead to violence. As for those who deny identity, it’s quite hard to be everyone in general without being anyone in particular. Even cosmopolitans tend to be comfortable in the company of other cosmopolitans, and feel threatened in the presence of other, stronger identities.

This is one reason why religion has returned, centre stage, in the 21st century, because of the waning of secular alternatives. Most of us need identity as our way of being at home in the world. It helps to be able to say: this is my story, this is who I am. It’s within our particular identities that we learn to live, love, create communities and cultivate responsibilities. The best identities speak to the better angels of our nature, especially when they include saintly role models, high ideals, and the imperative to love the stranger.

But there is a great danger, and those of us who are religious must be honest about it. Far too often in the past religious identities have been a source of strife.

Read it all.

Thomas Malthus first published his “Essay on the Principle of Population”, in which he forecast that population growth would outstrip the world’s food supply, in 1798. His timing was unfortunate, for something started happening around then which made nonsense of his ideas. As industrialisation swept through what is now the developed world, fertility fell sharply, first in France, then in Britain, then throughout Europe and America. When people got richer, families got smaller; and as families got smaller, people got richer.

Now, something similar is happening in developing countries. Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places”” such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India””that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less””the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.

Read it all.

[JUDY] VALENTE: Monasteries such as this one stand in contrast to the prevailing culture. They value community over competition, service over self-interest, and in a world of Internet, cell phones, and 24-hour talk, they stress listening and silence.

ANNE] SHEPARD: It’s a way of life here. It’s an absence of noise and clutter, and we come together first, and we’re just silent. We’re in the presence of God. It’s not a deadly silence. It’s a very reverent and beautiful silence. We don’t need noise to be productive. It’s just the opposite. We don’t need noise to communicate. It’s just the opposite.

Monastic life is a life of living together in prayer and community. We as Benedictines, we monastics””we’re not founded to do a particular work. The particular work of a monastery is community, and believe me, that’s hard work. Living with 165 women is hard work.

Read it all.

A U.S. Navy admiral expressed new concern Friday over China’s military buildup and urged Beijing to be clearer about its intentions.

With China’s military growing at an “unprecedented rate,” the U.S. wants to ensure that expansion doesn’t destabilize the region, Rear Adm. Kevin Donegan told reporters on a visit to the Chinese territory of Hong Kong.

Donegan referred to China’s expanded weaponry. His remarks echoed the concerns of other U.S. military leaders who have said the growth in China’s military spending ”” up almost 15 percent in the 2009 budget ”” raises questions about how Beijing plans on deploying its new power.

“When we see a military growing at that rate, we’re interested in transparency and the understanding of the uses of that military,” said Donegan, commander of the USS George Washington aircraft carrier strike group, a key part of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Read it all.

Minnesota’s 22,000 Episcopalians will be led by a 50-year-old priest from Spokane, Wash.

Delegates at the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota’s 152nd annual convention Saturday voted to name the Rev. Brian Prior as their next bishop.

In doing so, they sidestepped three potentially historic choices for the 106-congregation diocese’s ninth bishop: a woman, a Native American or an openly partnered lesbian.

Read it all.

This is an earthquake. For two reasons:

First, this is Pope Benedict’s latest initiative in what is now clearly a papal policy of trying to rally the vibrant, sacramental Christian churches around the Papacy in response to the collapse of the other mainline Christian churches and the on-coming threat of jihadi Islam, especially in Europe. As such, by offering concessions in exchange for lost sheep returning to the Church and the Sacraments, the Holy Father is seeking to build up a new Christendom and to gather in the still-faithful remnants of the collapsed Protestant Churches ”“ hierarchy, clergy and laity together. The intended symbols of this new, united Christendom, in my estimation, will be the Papacy and the Mass, including the newly revived Extraordinary Rite of the Mass, which now under Benedict’s motu proprio, is required to be the liturgy celebrated at all international gatherings….

The second possibility is more elusive because we haven’t yet seen the text of the Apostolic Constitution.

Will the new structures contemplated by the Pope and his men establish a precedent for the Orthodox, Lutheran and other Christian churches which have the Mass, are hierarchically-based and sacramentally-centered, to become “sister churches” to Rome?

Read it all.

The Rev. David Thurlow, rector of St. Matthias Episcopal Church in Summerton, was a member of the standing committee that drafted the resolutions, along with Barr. Thurlow said that despite a certain consensus on the issue, the decision wasn’t easy for anyone.

“It’s sad that it’s come to this, that this is the situation that the church finds itself in, where members of the church are clearly going in a direction that is apart from the Scripture and tradition,” he said. “Our church voted for the resolutions because we are taking a stand for the catholic faith and order, which has been passed down to us through the centuries … These resolutions are the diocese’s way of differentiating itself from those in the church who are doing just that ”“ conforming matters of faith and doctrine to the pattern of the world, rather than the pattern of God’s word.”

[The Rev. John] Barr said he believes good things will come from the crisis.

“It’s been agonizing; it’s been painful,” he said. “But it’s also been a huge blessing, in that people are searching for Christian essentials ”” not the bric-a-brac. Not the side alleys, the ancillaries. People want to know when everything falls apart, what are the essentials of my Christian faith?”

Read it carefully and read it all.

Small-business owners are more concerned about the administration’s emerging $1 trillion healthcare plan, which will drive up their costs, and with the new taxes that are aimed squarely at the income groups into which owners of small firms generally fall. So they won’t expand or hire.

Which is why the White House is so unhappy. The only indicator that matters to the president is jobs, jobs, jobs, about which he quizzes his staff every day. That’s another way of saying votes, votes, votes. The latest polls show that the portion of Americans approving Obama’s handling of the economy has dropped from 58% to 50% in the past six months, approval of his handling of the deficit is down from 49% to 40% and that 67% believe it is “not possible” that his healthcare plan will not add to the deficit. Nevertheless, the president remains personally popular. He would like to keep it that way and is considering a programme that would give tax credits to employers who add to their workforces.

Consumers are the third unhappy group, completing the gloomy business-political-consumer troika.

Read it all.

There’s an old joke: How do you become a millionaire? Have $1 billion ”” then buy the Chicago Cubs.

But Tom Ricketts, who recently bought the storied franchise and its famous ballpark, Wrigley Field, for almost $900 million ”” the most ever paid for a baseball team ”” says he thinks it’s going to be “a fair investment over time.”

“You don’t buy sports teams just because you’re looking at the investment side of it,” Ricketts tells NPR’s Scott Simon. “We’re fans, too. And we feel the pain of the fans; we understand the magic that is Wrigley.”

Read or listen to it all.