“How can I help you this morning?”
“I’m not satisfied with the way I presented my case, so I thought I’d go straight to the horse’s mouth. That’s you.”
I considered neighing, but thought better of it.
“Could I just lay out my argument step by step?” she asked. “As soon as you spot a problem, you can say ‘Stop’ and I’ll stop.”
I smiled. “Just what I was about to suggest.”
“A bit of a rant” he calls it. Read it all and notice carefully where the argument really lies.
When it comes to Facebook, Jesse Rice sees an immensely popular social networking site that’s great for sharing photos and keeping in touch with friends.
He also sees something that encourages attitudes and behaviors that don’t work as well in real life.
Rice, 37, is the author of “The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community.” A former worship leader an evangelical megachurch in California, he has degrees in organizational communication and counseling/psychology and — just as important to his readers — a sense of humor.
Virginity is a hot topic at the moment, prompted by comments from the Leader of the Opposition. He may have copped a lot of flak but Tony Abbott’s advice makes a lot of sense and there’s nothing alarming in it. Besides, being a parent gives him a right to express his views publicly.
I am not embarrassed to admit that my ”gift” remains unwrapped – at least for the time being. Losing your virginity or ”V-plates” (as some of us like to call it) has always been a preoccupation of adolescents. Where to do it? When to do it? Who to do it with? Parents advise us to put it off, young men argue that right now would be the best time and some religions insist we must wait until marriage.
Speaking to about 325 attendees at the annual diocesan convention at the Washington Cathedral, Bishop Chane, 65, admitted he was stepping down during a time of flagging growth and stagnant giving in the 42,000-member diocese.
“Parochial reports filed by the parishes of our diocese for the most part tell a story of no real measurable growth in membership within the last 12 years,” he said. “Financial giving has been stagnant.”
The budget that supports the missionary work of the diocese to its congregations, schools and our mission outreach beyond our borders has been stagnant as well. Any financial growth has come primarily through the bishops annual appeal and from the generosity of individuals, some who are not even Episcopalians.
The Archbishop said:
“The Church in Sudan is completely committed to peace and development and will work with all agencies, governmental and non-governmental, committed to the same goals. Its infrastructure is at the service of the community, the government and international agencies”.
Earlier in the day the Archbishop met the UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Ms Radhika Coomaraswamy. The rehabilitation of children who had become caught up in conflict was a key role for churches, so too was protecting children from the vortex of abuse and violence including trafficking and abduction.
“The nurture of children is the touchstone of our mature care of humanity” said Dr Williams.
Things are calmer these days in the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida.
Following the 2003 election of openly gay priest Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, the largely conservative diocese was in turmoil, contemplating whether to join other dioceses in leaving the Episcopal Church to create a new, traditionalist Anglican church in America.
Under the leadership of Bishop John Howe, the diocese decided not to split from the Episcopal Church, as at least two other dioceses have done, and those in the Central Florida diocese who were advocating for the split mostly have gone. Both clergy and laypersons say the diocese is healthy and moving forward
The diocese will hold its annual convention Saturday at The Lakeland Center, and in an interview earlier this week, Howe predicted the meeting would be calm.
Please note: A list of resolutions to come before the Convention is here.
China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year.
China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.
These efforts to dominate the global manufacture of renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.
“Most of the energy equipment will carry a brass plate, ”˜Made in China,’ ” said K. K. Chan, the chief executive of Nature Elements Capital, a private equity fund in Beijing that focuses on renewable energy.
Four married men with years of clergy experience have been nominated as finalists to be the next bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky, succeeding the retiring Bishop Ted Gulick.
The four men ”” including the pastors of cathedrals in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Missouri and a former Kentucky pastor now leading a Texas church ”” will visit the diocese to meet with parishioners and answer their questions. An election convention is scheduled for June 5, with the new bishop’s consecration on Sept. 25.
The list of finalists is notable for its lack of gay or lesbian candidates ”” given the ongoing controversy involving the Episcopal Church and its global partners in the Anglican Communion over the role of gays in ministry ”” and for its lack of women.
The choice of the theme of this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity the invitation, that is, to a common witness of the Risen Christ in accordance with the mandate he entrusted to his disciples is linked to the memory of the 100th anniversary of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference, in Scotland, widely considered a crucial event in the birth of the modern ecumenical movement.
In the summer of 1910, in the Scottish capital, over 1,000 missionaries from diverse branches of Protestantism and Anglicanism, who were joined by one Orthodox guest, met to reflect together on the necessity of achieving unity in order to be credible in preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In fact, it is precisely this desire to proclaim Christ to others and to carry his message of reconciliation throughout the world that makes one realize the contradiction posed by division among Christians.
Indeed, how can non-believers accept the Gospel proclamation if Christians even if they all call on the same Christ are divided among themselves? Moreover, as we know, the same Teacher, at the end of the Last Supper, had prayed to the Father for his disciples: “That they may all be one… so that the world may believe” (Jn 17: 21). The communion and unity of Christ’s disciples is therefore a particularly important condition to enhance the credibility and efficacy of their witness.
On Saturday, though, Williams will receive an honorary doctorate from St. Vladimir’s that will recognize his lesser-known contributions to the study of Orthodox Christian theology. And he will speak not about sexual politics, but about the “Philokalia,” a collection of writings about monastic life that date from the 4th to 15th centuries and are revered by Orthodox Christians.
The 12:30 p.m. lecture is free and open to the public.
“We chose to honor him because of the contributions he has made toward increasing knowledge of Eastern Orthodoxy in the West,” said the Very Rev. John Behr, dean of St. Vladimir’s. “Through his work, he has also asked (the) Eastern Orthodox to continue our own thinking through of our tradition .”
Read it all and you may find a Seminary press release on the event there.
“Our immersion in the details of crises that have arisen over the past eight centuries and in data on them has led us to conclude that the most commonly repeated and most expensive investment advice ever given in the boom just before a financial crisis stems from the perception that ‘this time is different.’ That advice, that the old rules of valuation no longer apply, is usually followed up with vigor. Financial professionals and, all too often, government leaders explain that we are doing things better than before, we are smarter, and we have learned from past mistakes. Each time, society convinces itself that the current boom, unlike the many booms that preceded catastrophic collapses in the past, is built on sound fundamentals, structural reforms, technological innovation, and good policy.”
– This Time is Different (Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff)
When does a potential crisis become an actual crisis, and how and why does it happen? Why did most everyone believe there were no problems in the US (or Japanese or European or British) economies in 2006? Yet now we are mired in a very difficult situation. “The subprime problem will be contained,” said now controversially confirmed Fed Chairman Bernanke, just months before the implosion and significant Fed intervention. I have just returned from Europe, and the discussion often turned to the potential of a crisis in the Eurozone if Greece defaults….
Greece is running a budget deficit of 12.5%. Under the Maastricht Treaty, they are supposed to keep it at 3%. Their GDP was $374 billion in 2008 (about €240 billion). If they can cut their budget deficit to 10% this year, that means they will need to go into the bond market for another €25 billion or so. But they already have a problem with rising debt. Look at the following graph on the debt of various countries….
When Russia defaulted on its debt and sent the world into crisis in 1998, they had total debt of only €51 billion. Greece now has €254 billion and added another €8 billion this week, and needs to add another €24 billion (or so) later this year. That’s a debt-to-GDP ratio of over 100%, well above the limit of the treaty, which is 60%.
(Please note the the document quoted has already been posted earlier this week–KSH)
Anglicanism is a tradition that makes decisions on the basis of practice rather than confession. We are a church that determines membership and status by behavior rather than by belief.
–The Rev. Canon Gary R. Hall in God’s Call and Our Response
[John] Chane, 65, made the announcement at the diocese’s annual convention at Washington National Cathedral, where he received a standing ovation. He told the delegates he is not “burned out or bored,” but believes it’s time for someone younger to take over.
“I love what I do and I deeply love this diocese,” Chane said in the annual bishop’s address. “When the time actually comes to turn over the crosier to another, it will be a very emotional time for me.”
Chane’s exit from the diocese, which includes 89 congregations in the District and suburban Maryland, follows that of his counterpart in Northern Virginia, Peter James Lee, who retired in October as bishop of the diocese that includes eastern Virginia.
While Lee was known as a moderate on the social issues that have embroiled the Episcopal Church — as well as mainline Protestantism — Chane was an unabashed liberal on the right of gay men and lesbians to marry. He allows clergy in the diocese to bless same-sex relationships and blesses such relationships himself. He made outreach to the Muslim world a priority and extended a controversial invitation in 2006 to former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami to speak at the cathedral. It’s likely he will focus on Muslim-Christian dialogue after his retirement.
When he moved back home here 12 years ago, the Rev. Moses Berry wanted to settle down to small-town life with his wife and two children. He did not intend to become a one-man racial reconciliation committee.
But some residents of this nearly all-white, rural town of 1,400 people 15 miles west of Springfield say that he has done just that.
By founding a black history museum here, cleaning up his family’s cemetery and telling his family’s sometimes controversial story, beginning with its roots in slavery, Father Moses, as everyone calls him ”” an African-American, Orthodox Christian priest in a flowing black cassock ”” has tried to remind people of a part of the region’s often-forgotten past, and to open up hearts and minds along the way.
“He brings peace to people. I’ve seen it,” said Gail Emrie, 56, a local history buff who helped get the Berry family’s 135-year-old cemetery ”” one of the region’s few black cemeteries not located on a plantation ”” listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. “It is reconciliation, and it is his mission, reconciliation of our history between the races.”
The Obama administration announced the sale Friday of $6 billion worth of Patriot anti-missile systems, helicopters, mine-sweeping ships and communications equipment to Taiwan in a long-expected move that sparked an angry protest from China.
In a strongly worded statement on Saturday, China’s Defense Ministry suspended military exchanges with the United States and summoned the U.S. defense attache to lodge a “solemn protest” over the sale, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
“Considering the severe harm and odious effect of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, the Chinese side has decided to suspend planned mutual military visits,” Xinhua quoted the ministry as saying. The Foreign Ministry said China also would put sanctions on U.S. companies supplying the equipment.
…it should not be impossible for a president who pledged to change Washington’s culture to introduce a note of competence and sobriety in his justifiable fight against banks.
Not that the financial industry has done much to deserve a more adult debate. Wall Street’s normally loquacious titans have so far been deafeningly silent. Their contributions to a battle that could shape their industry for years have been limited to private rants and a misguided attempt at suing the government. (Only bankers could think that hiring lawyers would increase their popularity.)
Here is a novel idea for banking chiefs: get down from your ivory towers and propose (not lobby for, propose) a plan to reduce reckless risk-taking without harming the financial system or the economy. A nation awaits.
On the very day this week when the Congressional Budget Office warned that the succession of previously unimaginable trillion-dollar-plus budget deficits could inflict ruin on the United States, the Senate faced a moment of truth.
For the first time, a truly bipartisan proposal aimed at averting such a calamity came to a vote. By 53 to 46, the senators approved the measure officially described as a bill for “responsible fiscal action, to assure the long-term fiscal stability and economic security of the federal government of the United States, and to expand future prosperity and growth for all Americans.”
Of course, this being the 21st-century Senate, it meant defeat because of a failure to command the 60-vote supermajority the opposition now always requires.
In a surprising departure from protocol, the Queen has sent the Lord Chamberlain, the most senior official of the Royal Household, to see Archbishop Vincent Nichols, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, to discuss Pope Benedict XVI’s offer to Anglicans wanting to convert to Rome en masse.
My source says Her Majesty ”“ who is expected to meet the Pope when he visits Britain this autumn ”“ was “unhappy” about aspects of the scheme as she understood it. So, late last year, she dispatched Lord Peel with a list of questions for the Archbishop. The nature of the questions has not been revealed, but Archbishop’s House confirms that the meeting took place and was “mutually beneficial”.
The Queen ”“ a somewhat “Low Church” Anglican who feels it is her solemn duty to preserve the Protestant identity of the Church of England ”“ appears to have been alarmed by press reports of Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Constitution, Anglicanorum coetibus.
Item 14 Anglican Church in North America (GS 1764A and 1764B)
The Rt Revd Mike Hill, Bishop of Bristol, is to move as an amendment:
Leave out everything after “That this Synod” and insert:
“(a) recognise and affirm the desire of those who have formed the Anglican Church in North America to remain within the Anglican family;
(b) acknowledge that this aspiration, in respect both of relations with the Church of England and membership of the Anglican Communion, raises issues which the relevant authorities of each need to explore further; and
(c) invite the Archbishops to report further to the Synod in 2011”.
Check them out. Note that there is a slideshow option if you prefer that.
What really knocked readers out about “The Catcher in the Rye” was the wonderfully immediate voice that J. D. Salinger fashioned for Holden Caulfield ”” a voice that enabled him to channel an alienated 16-year-old’s thoughts and anxieties and frustrations, a voice that skeptically appraised the world and denounced its phonies and hypocrites and bores.
Mr. Salinger had such unerring radar for the feelings of teenage angst and vulnerability and anger that “Catcher,” published in 1951, remains one of the books that adolescents first fall in love with ”” a book that intimately articulates what it is to be young and sensitive and precociously existential, a book that first awakens them to the possibilities of literature.
As its title implies, “Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life” reflects Kaplan’s effort to redefine how modern American Jewry thinks of itself. Judaism is not only a religion, Kaplan stated; it is a people with its own history, identity, culture and civilization. Moreover, like any civilization, to remain vital it must continue to evolve to meet and adapt to the challenges and needs of each new generation. It must be reconstructed, so to speak””or else risk losing its purpose.
Kaplan practiced what he preached at Sabbath and holiday services at his synagogue, SAJ (where I am an active member and am teaching a course on Kaplan’s thought this winter). Seeking to reinvest traditional ritual and liturgy with relevance to contemporary Jews, he emphasized modern interpretations while also revising or discarding prayers (like the traditional prayer for rain) he thought incompatible with the progressive, rational-minded, science-oriented world of 20th-century America.
A believer in gender equality long before the term political correctness became a cliché, Kapan in 1922 “invented” the modern-day bat mitzvah””in which 12-year-old girls (like their male counterparts, 13-year-old boys, at their bar mitzvahs) symbolically accept the religious responsibilities of adulthood””when, at Sabbath services one Saturday morning, he called his oldest daughter to the pulpit and had her read from the Torah scroll. Since then, of course, this then-unheard-of custom has become an accepted, even expected rite-of-passage among Jews in all but the Orthodox branch of the faith.
Indeed, Kaplan held the goals and ethics of democracy and equality so high that he declared anachronistic the idea of Jews being the Chosen people””and changed or deleted the wording of traditional prayers that implied that belief from his 1945 Sabbath Prayer Book.
The whole world, and not just Britain, is broken, with continents such as Africa feeling forgotten and uncared for, the Archbishop of Canterbury said in the heart of New York’s financial district yesterday.
Any money men who might have happened in to Trinity Wall Street to shelter from the snow would have found a different sort of chill as Dr Rowan Williams delivered his lesson.
Standing at the lectern of the famously wealthy US Episcopal church, which lies at the head of Wall Street, the leader of the Anglican Communion condemned the “straw man” of self-interest.
His theme was that financiers, wordsmiths ”” in fact anyone in the Western world connected in any way with economic reality ”” should look at themselves in the mirror and repent.
Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”
“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.
Malaysia’s simmering religious and racial conflicts could worsen after worshippers Wednesday found the severed heads of wild boars at two mosques, amid a dispute over whether Christians can use the term “Allah” as a translation for “God.”
Muslims consider pigs unclean, and leaving boar heads at a mosque is a potentially inflammatory insult, mirroring an incident last year when Muslim activists flung a severed cow head on a proposed site for a Hindu temple near Kuala Lumpur.
Wednesday’s incident is considered the most offensive case of sacrilege against a Muslim place of worship since a storm erupted over the use of the Arabic word “Allah.” It threatens to further upset this resource-rich, racially diverse country and complicate Prime Minister Najib Razak’s efforts to build a multiracial support base before national elections, which must be held by 2013.
Adding to tensions, the trial of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on sodomy charges–the second he has faced in little more than a decade–is scheduled to begin next week. Mr. Anwar leads a multiracial opposition alliance trying to replace Malaysia’s government after 57 years in power. Prosecutors accuse him of sodomizing a young male aide in 2008–an illegal act in Malaysia. Mr. Anwar, 62 years old, says the story was fabricated to destroy him.
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Read it all.
The Archbishop of Canterbury reflected on Pope John Paul II’s concept of “martyrial ecumenism” on Jan. 25 when he received an award named for a Roman Catholic priest martyred by English Protestants.
America, a magazine published by North American Jesuits, chose Archbishop Rowan Williams as the 2009 recipient of its Campion Award, which honors Christian achievement in literature. The award is named in honor of Edmund Campion, S.J., the magazine’s patron saint. He was martyred by hanging in 1581 after refusing to renounce his Roman Catholic faith. Both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England designate feast days for Fr. Campion.
America gave the first Campion Award to Jacques Maritain in 1955. Among its other recipients are Karl Rahner, S.J.; New Testament scholar Raymond E. Brown; novelist Walker Percy; Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe; and U.S. Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan of New York.