Many of the reports of the vote therefore conclude that the Covenant is dead in the water — even before it is sent to the rest of the Communion.

That is a misreading. Although +Rowan Williams wants as many Anglican provinces as possible to sign up to it, he always knew that introducing a more Catholic ecclesiology — defining boundaries of doctrinal orthodoxy — would alienate both the conservative evangelicals and the liberal Anglicans. The loss of GAFCON and the Episcopal Church of North America are foreseen, if not intended, consequences of the Covenant process.

But the gain lies in a stronger, more unified, and more coherent Anglican Church, even if it will be considerably smaller than now. For Catholics that is good news, because Rome can again have a dialogue partner it can do business with.

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It is hard to believe, but it looks like the government will soon use the taxpayers’ checkbook again to create a vast market for mortgages with low or no down payments and for overstretched borrowers with blemished credit. As in the period leading to the 2008 financial crisis, these loans will again contribute to a housing bubble, which will feed on government funding and grow to enormous size. When it collapses, housing prices will drop and a financial crisis will ensue. And, once again, the taxpayers will have to bear the costs.

In doing this, Congress is repeating the same policy mistake it made in 1992. Back then, it mandated that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac compete with the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) for high-risk loans. Unhappily for both their shareholders and the taxpayers, Fannie and Freddie won that battle.

Now the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed far-reaching new regulation on the financial system after the meltdown, allows the administration to substitute the FHA for Fannie and Freddie as the principal and essentially unlimited buyer of low-quality home mortgages. There is little doubt what will happen then.

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Lord God, make us so reflect thy perfect love; that, with thy deacon Nicholas Ferrar and his household, we may rule ourselves according to thy Word, and serve thee with our whole heart; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Stir up our hearts, O Lord, we beseech thee, to prepare the way of thine only begotten Son; so that when he cometh we may be found watching, and serve thee with a pure and ready will; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

The word which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

–Isaiah 2:1-4

Diana Athill, literary editor and award-winning memoirist, was….[recently] announced as one of this year’s “guest editors” of Today.

The five invitees take the helm of the programme for one day each between Christmas and New Year, with Miss Athill this year’s first guest on December 27.

Unlike the voices who infuriate the ungodly in the Thought for the Day slot each morning, including Indarjit Singh and the Rt Rev Tom Butler, Miss Athill is a non-believer.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

European Union finance ministers agreed late Sunday on more than just an €85 billion bailout for Ireland. They also turned the currency union into a de-facto debt union by choosing to turn May’s €750 billion rescue fund into a permanent feature of the euro zone. What’s more, they promised that no sovereign creditor would face a haircut on their debt holdings until 2013, and that’s at the very earliest….

….here is what the EU has done: In the name of combating speculation against the debt of euro-zone members, the EU has now insured all those speculators against loss for three years at least. Meanwhile, in creating a permanent crisis-management mechanism, the EU has succeeded only in making permanent crisis more likely.

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Its official ”“ Spain and Portugal will need to be bailed out soon. How do I know? In one of my favorite TV shows, Yes Minister, the all-knowing civil servant Sir Humphrey explains to cabinet minister Jim Hacker that you can never be certain that something will happen until the government denies it.

–From Michael Pettis.

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A basic tenet of modern athletics involves separation of the sexes. Yet that principle is increasingly being challenged on the court and in the courtroom.

Earlier this month, Kye Allums, a female-to-male transgender student on the women’s basketball team at George Washington University, publicly discussed his decision to compete after coming out in a story first reported on Outsports.com.

The junior, 21, who once went by Kay-Kay Allums and has not had gender-reassignment surgery, is the first known transgender person to compete in Division I college basketball.

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The Holy Trinity Anglican Church, built in 1842 in Georgetown, P.E.I., will almost certainly be demolished next year.

With a mould-filled basement, a crumbling tower and its need for a new roof, the church is just too expensive to keep.

“It’s a big part of our history, and we’ve exhausted every avenue I think to keep it here,” Georgetown Mayor Lewis Lavandier told CBC News Friday.

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Parishioners at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on Third Avenue took 123 steps toward being a greener, more Earth-friendly parish Sunday in the form of a dedication ceremony for 123 solar panels that were installed in August and September.

The Rev. John Sosnowski said Monday that the project will result in parishioners being “better stewards” of the Earth.

“It’s an investment in our future,” Sosnowski said, adding that once the power-purchase agreement is completed between the church and 95th Street Power Associates LLC, the company that funded most of the project, the panels will become church property.

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Prof. Hunter may be right about the Anglican Church in Britain today. But there is a problem if his readers confuse what is going on in Britain ”” or Canada or the United States, for that matter ”” with the reality of worldwide Anglicanism.

First, Anglicanism is not dying; it is growing at a stupendous rate in Africa, where more than half the world’s 80 million Anglicans live. Philip Jenkins, the distinguished professor of history and religion at Pennsylvania State University, has estimated that by 2050 there will be 150 million Anglicans in the world, “of whom only a tiny minority will be White Europeans.”

Second, while it is true some Anglicans are defecting to the Catholic Church there are also conservative Anglicans who are leaving their national Churches ”” such as the group in Canada that separated itself from the Anglican Church of Canada ”” but remain aligned with the global Church and seek oversight from orthodox African Anglican bishops. This group has little interest in becoming Catholic. If anything, they want to be more Protestant and put the Bible at the center of their lives….

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The first personal ordinariate for former Anglicans is expected to be established in Australia by next Easter, according to Bishop Peter Elliott, the Australian Catholic Bishops’ delegate for assisting lay Anglicans join the Church.

The first such ordinariate is to be established in England and Wales in early January.

Bishop Elliott says “we’re hoping to follow a similar timeline”, but it “may be a few months later”.

“We’re yet to work out with the Vatican what would be the best procedure, but it ought to focus around Easter and Pentecost,” said Bishop Elliott, auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne.

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A journalist working closely with WikiLeaks says that secret documents about the Vatican and the volatile territories of North Korea and Israel are to be made public soon.

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The [New York] Times has…erected a series of filters between the 250,000 raw documents that WikiLeaks obtained and complete public exposure. The paper has released only a tiny percentage of the cables. Information that might endanger informants has been redacted. Specific cables have been put into context with broader reporting.

Yet it might be useful to consider one more filter. Consider it the World Order filter. The fact that we live our lives amid order and not chaos is the great achievement of civilization. This order should not be taken for granted.

This order is tenuously maintained by brave soldiers but also by talkative leaders and diplomats. Every second of every day, leaders and diplomats are engaged in a never-ending conversation. The leaked cables reveal this conversation. They show diplomats seeking information, cajoling each other and engaging in faux-friendships and petty hypocrisies as they seek to avoid global disasters.

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The Times was the only American news organization to receive a massive cache of government documents that were released by WikiLeaks, the “stateless” Internet organization that specializes in exposing government secrets through leaked information.

But the Times wasn’t on WikiLeaks’ list of original recipients. The newspaper got its hands on the trove of about 250,000 cables thanks to the Guardian newspaper of Great Britain, which quietly passed the Times the raw material that it had received as one of five news organizations favored by WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks had worked with the Times this summer in releasing about 90,000 documents prepared by U.S. military sources about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the group pointedly snubbed the Times this time around, offering the State Department cables to two other American news outlets, CNN and the Wall Street Journal. Both turned WikiLeaks down, deciding that its terms – including a demand for financial compensation under certain circumstances – were unacceptable.

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China has signalled its readiness to accept Korean reunification and is privately distancing itself from the North Korean regime, according to leaked US embassy cables that reveal senior Beijing figures regard their official ally as a “spoiled child”.

News of the Chinese shift comes at a crucial juncture after the North’s artillery bombardment of a South Korean island last week that killed four people and led both sides to threaten war. China has refused to condemn the North Korean action. But today Beijing appeared to bow to US pressure to help bring about a diplomatic solution, calling for “emergency consultations” and inviting a senior North Korean official to Beijing.

China is sharply critical of US pressure tactics towards North Korea and wants a resumption of the six-party nuclear disarmament talks. But the Guardian can reveal Beijing’s frustration with Pyongyang has grown since its missile and nuclear tests last year, worries about the economic impact of regional instability, and fears that the death of the dictator, Kim Jong-il, could spark a succession struggle.

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Almighty God, who didst give such grace to thine apostle Andrew that he readily obeyed the call of thy Son Jesus Christ, and brought his brother with him: Give unto us, who are called by thy Word, grace to follow him without delay, and to bring those near to us into his gracious presence; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Keep us, O Lord, while we tarry on this earth, in a serious seeking after thee, and in an affectionate walking with thee, every day of our lives; that when thou comest, we may be found not hiding our talent, nor serving the flesh, nor yet asleep with our lamp unfurnished, but waiting and longing for our Lord, our glorious God for ever and ever.

–Richard Baxter (1615-1691)

For our appeal does not spring from error or uncleanness, nor is it made with guile; but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please men, but to please God who tests our hearts.

–1 Thessalonians 2:3-4

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has denounced the release of classified diplomatic cables as an “attack on the international community”.

She spoke after the release of some 250,000 messages from US envoys around the world by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

The cables offer candid and sometimes unflattering views of world leaders and frank assessments of security threats.

But Mrs Clinton said diplomats often needed confidentiality to be effective.

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About 50 Church of England priests opposed to the consecration of women as bishops are expected to be in the first wave of Anglicans to take up an offer by Pope Benedict and convert to Rome. The traditionalist priests will be joined by five bishops and 30 groups of parishioners, in a structure called an ordinariate, or a Church subdivision, in the new year.

About 300 priests switched in the early 1900s when women were ordained as priests. Then they did not have the comfort of moving over in groups, and nearly 70 returned to the Anglican fold.

Here, one priest explains why he stayed, while another describes why he returned.

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The more interesting question that English bookies might ponder is whether there will be anything left of the Church of England when the putative King finishes his reign? Judging by recent events, I should say: Not very likely.
Already more people worship weekly in England’s mosques than in the Church of England. And just a few days ago, five Church of England bishops ”” bishops, mind you, not priests ”” publicly announced their resignation and explained why they are heading to Rome.

The bishops’ joint statement (from Andrew Burnham, Keith Newton, John Broadhurst, Edwin Barnes and David Silk) said that they were “distressed by developments in faith and order in Anglicanism which we believe to be incompatible with the historic vocation of Anglicanism and the tradition of the Church for 2,000 years.”

You can say that again. Whether one examines liturgy, doctrine, or the trendy issues like women bishops and homosexual marriages, the reality is that the contemporary Anglican Church bears hardly any resemblance to the spirit of the 39 Articles of Religion that once defined this historic institution.

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Europe’s challenge is no longer just economic. It’s also social and political. Cherished values and ideals are under assault. The euro, intended to nurture unity, has bred discord, as countries assign blame and argue over sharing costs. The social contract is being rewritten, with government benefits and protections being cut. In Ireland, the governing coalition seems doomed; one minority party has withdrawn its support.

The rescue of Ireland, as with Greece before, represents a gamble that Europe can arrest growing doubts and win the patience of bondholders and voters: persuading the investors not to continue dumping bonds (those of Ireland and other countries) in panic, which raises interest rates and could precipitate a self-fulfilling financial collapse; and persuading ordinary citizens to tolerate austerity (higher unemployment, lower social benefits, heavier taxes) without resorting to paralyzing street protests or ineffectual parliamentary coalitions. Whether the gamble will succeed is unclear, as are the potentially chaotic consequences if it doesn’t.

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How does all of this work together?

There is, it seems, something for everyone in this exhaustive interview ”” something to annoy everyone on every side of these issues, that is as recent events clearly showed. The truth is, though, that for anyone who has been following Benedict and read any of his numerous works over many years, none of this is shocking or a surprise, and it’s all quite consistent.

It only puzzles us when we insist on filtering the pope’s words through our own expectations and ideologies, our own understanding of what religion and rationality and morality must be all about. We’re not starting from the same page, which might explain much of the invective directed at the pope by a curious, but often oblivious, press.

The thing is, he really believes the stuff. Really. He believes that God exists and we exist because God loves us. We’re free to love him back, or not. So the basic job of the church is to be Christ in the world, inviting human beings to find love and truth. To find themselves. As Benedict puts it in Light of the World, the church “communicates the light of Christ.”

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