“Arizona is ground zero for our nation’s broken immigration policies,” [Methodist Bishop Minerva] Carcaño said. “At our borders and in our congregations, schools, workplaces and service programs, we witness the human consequences of our inadequate, outdated system.”

Bishop Gerald Kicanas, who heads the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson, outlined eight principles for immigration reform, among them supporting programs that reduce poverty in developing nations so people won’t have to leave, creating a process for undocumented immigrants in this country to earn legal status and citizenship, and reducing the detention of immigrants for non-violent crimes.

A recent Zogby poll suggested that religious leaders are often at odds with their members over the issue of immigration reform. Commissioned by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that favors less immigration, the poll said 64 percent of Catholics and Protestants favor cracking down on illegal immigrants, compared with 23 percent of Catholics and 24 percent of Protestants who support a legalization program for undocumented immigrants.

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How did you get involved with Haiti?

I first went to Haiti 12 years ago with my friend, Anne Fairbanks, a Skidmore professor who founded the Haiti mission at our church in Troy 25 years ago. I took over the job from Anne in 2005 after I retired. Anne died last year at 85, but I’m so grateful she introduced me to Haiti. I’d never been to a Third World country when Anne dragged me along to Haiti in 1998 and it was an eye-opener for me. I fell in love with the people in Haiti at the church we sponsored, particularly the teachers, who worked so hard for so little money. Since then, I’ve made seven trips to Haiti.”

How does your church support your partner parish in Haiti?

Our members have been very generous to Haiti over the years and we send about $5,000 a year in donations. We’ve purchased school supplies, musical instruments and raised salaries for the teachers. We’ve helped improve the quality of the school in many ways, including expanding it to K-12 and a student body of 350 boys and girls. When I first visited, the fourth- and fifth-graders were barely reading. This year, every single one of the students in 12th grade passed the national exam. Every day at noon, volunteer ladies from the church make beans and rice for lunch. For many of the kids, it’s the only food they’ll get all day. They love sardines on it, which didn’t really appeal to me, but I started bringing cans of sardines on every visit. Every student gets a sardine on the top of their beans and rice and it’s a huge treat for them.

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Last week’s earthquake has devastated Haiti, and prompted a massive relief effort. In a smaller but almost equally intense way, the disaster has pervaded every part of the school day for the 510 students ”” 80 percent of them Haitian ”” at SS. Joachim and Anne, the Roman Catholic elementary school in Queens Village, Queens, a hub of New York’s Haitian community.

They pray. They scrounge up donations. The quake informs class discussions about politics, about helping the poor, about the afterlife. And when the children are not talking about it, their teachers suspect, they are thinking about it.

As classmates played with cubes on Wednesday, learning to add, Michael Constant, 6, squirmed in his seat. His mother had just left for Haiti that morning to bury his father.

As 250,000 Haitian-Americans in the New York area mourn, children bear their own burdens. Many feel as much at home in Haiti as in New York. They struggle to picture the houses where they spent summers now in rubble, grandparents and cousins dead, missing, homeless. For others, Haiti exists in tales parents tell ”” a place they long to visit and now wonder if they will ever see.

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They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

–T.S. Eliot, The Rock (1934), as quoted by Paul McHugh at this week’s mere Anglicanism Conference

The motion is “not about interfering in the polity of other Anglican provinces”, Ms [Lorna] Ashworth says in her background paper. She questions whether the use of the canons for solving property disputes or deposing bishops and clergy in both the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada has “in every regard been proper or in accordance with natural justice”.

It is “not acceptable” that those who have not left either of those Churches for another jurisdiction should be “deposed without canonical process because of what they might do, or that they should be formally advised that they have abandoned their ministry when they have done nothing of the kind”, Ms Ashworth suggests.

Of the 83-year-old Dr Packer, she says: “It is ironic as well as hurtful that a man who, as a young priest, was a doughty defender of the inheritance and doctrine of the Church of England against its detractors should be presumed to have abandoned the ordained ministry.”

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Yenagoa ”” The recent corruption rating of the nation by Transparency International is generating concern among the First Synod of the Diocese of Western Izon, Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion, Patani, Delta State.

As a result, the synod has urged compatriots and the government to tackle the anti-corruption war seriously.

This was contained in a communiqué issued by the Diocesan Bishop, Edafe Emamezi, and Secretary, Church Enoya, at the end of its synod at Patani, Delta State.

The church was reacting to the nation’s credibility rating published by Transparency International, which brought down Nigeria from its 121st position to 130th.

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Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd said today that Democrats may need to take more than a month off from the health care debate to regroup, saying it is up to President Obama to lead the way.

Dodd is the first congressional Democratic leader to suggest such an extended break, signaling that Democrats’ may be much further from a workable endgame strategy than they have suggested in the days since Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat and ended the Democrats’ 60-vote majority.

The comments are sure to raise questions about whether Democrats are giving up on reform. A month-long break would almost certainly kill any momentum health reform has left, making it that much harder to pass.

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The bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) are to give the Vatican their answer to the new Anglican provision.

Archbishop John Hepworth, the primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, a group of Anglican churches which have broken away from the mainstream Anglican Communion, said the bishops would come together at Easter to formulate a response to the Pope’s decree Anglicanorum coetibus.

The Anglican provision allows groups of Anglicans who consider themselves Catholic to enter into full communion with Rome while maintaining aspects of their heritage and identity. The document provides a new canonical provision called a Personal Ordinariate which most resembles the structure of military dioceses.

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We live in a culture of boutique self-creation.

–John Yates III this morning at Mere Anglicanism

The bishops have rejected Government concessions designed to allay fears over a Bill they say could force the churches to accept women, sexually active gays, and transsexuals into the priesthood.

Ministers refused repeated requests by the Catholic and Anglican bishops over a period of months to consider an amendment to the Equality Bill that would have been acceptable to them.

But they have decided to act in the face of a protracted battle in the Lords that could result in the Bill falling as it runs out of time. They have tabled an amendment designed to reassure the churches that the Bill does not represent a threat.

But Archbishop Peter Smith of Cardiff, chairman of the Catholic bishops’ department for Christian responsibility and citizenship, said the concession did not go far enough.

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And just as God creates in love so He asks us to create in love. The Abrahamic monotheisms are the only systems to place love at the heart of the moral life. There are other codes of ethics: every civilisation has them, secular or religious. All civilisations have something like the golden rule: treat others as you would wish to be treated. Many of them have forms of justice: treat equals equally. But only a vision that sees the world as God’s work of love makes love the highest value. Love God with all your heart, soul and might. Love your neighbour as yourself. Love the stranger for you know what it feels like to be a stranger.

And yes, there is another way of seeing the world and our place within it. The Universe came into being for no reason, and one day for no reason it will cease to be. There is nothing special about humanity: we are mere primates with a gift for language. There is nothing special about any of us. We are born, we live, we die, and it is as if we had never been. Our ideals are illusions; our hopes mere dreams. We have no souls, only brains; no freedom, only the hardwiring of our genes. And the biggest illusion of them all is love, the smokescreen created by humans to hide the fact that we are here to reproduce.

I know which I prefer. Better is a world built on love than on the Darwinian struggle to survive.

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The confirmation of Ben S. Bernanke to a second four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve ran into further trouble on Friday as two more Democratic senators said they would vote against him.

The White House came to Mr. Bernanke’s defense, but the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, appeared uncertain about whether there were the 60 votes necessary to confirm Mr. Bernanke before his term as chairman expires on Jan. 31. Mr. Reid said late Friday that while he planned to vote for Mr. Bernanke’s confirmation, his support was “not unconditional.”

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and the chairman of the Banking Committee, warned Friday that a no vote would send the “worst signal to the market right now,” and could lead to an economic “tailspin.”

In a statement Friday morning, Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, came out against Mr. Bernanke, who was named to his post during the Bush administration. She said she had “a lot of respect” for him and praised him for preventing the economic crisis from getting even worse. “However, it is time for a change,” she said. “It is time for Main Street to have a champion at the Fed.”

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Voodoo is playing a central role in helping Haitians cope with their unthinkable tragedy. Outside of Haitian culture, few know what Voodoo is. Elizabeth McAlister, a Voodoo expert at Wesleyan University, says at its core, the philosophy is really pretty simple.

“Voodoo in a nutshell is about the idea that everything material has a spiritual dimension that is more real” than physical reality, she says. “So everything living ”” but even rocks and the Earth ”” is considered to have spirit and have a spiritual nature.”

McAlister says there is no unified Voodoo religion. There’s no “Voodoo Pope” or central authority, no Voodoo scripture or even a core doctrine.

Read or listen to it all.

The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh’s new bishop, Kenneth L. Price, is seeking face-to-face meetings with area congregations that left the Episcopal Church over issues ranging from abortion to the consecration of a non-celibate gay bishop.

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What about the future? The problem in the job market going forward is not so much layoffs in the private sector, which are abating, but a lack of hiring. The federal stimulus program is offset by a 2010 budget shortfall for state, city, county and school districts, which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently estimated will be in the range of an astonishing $200 billion nationally. Since virtually all states and cities have to run balanced budgets, the result will be reduced services, layoffs and tax hikes.

The consequence is that the U.S. economy””for decades the greatest job creation machine in the world””is taking longer and longer to replace the jobs already lost. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jane Sasseen noted in a recent report in BusinessWeek, it took as little as one year from the end of a recession to add back the lost jobs. After the eight-month downturn ending in March of 1991, for example, jobs came back in 23 months. After the downturn from the dot-com bust in 2001, it took 31 months. This time it could take as many as five years or even more to recover all of the eight-plus million jobs lost since March 2007. That’s because we would have to create an additional 1.7 million jobs annually beyond those for the 1.3 million new people who enter the work force every year.

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Prior to becoming the devout, busybody next-door neighbor on the animated hit “The Simpsons,” Ned Flanders was an out-of-control brat whose beatnik parents didn’t believe in discipline. To reform Ned, a child psychologist enrolled him in the University of Minnesota Spankalogical Protocol, which included eight months of continuous spanking. It cured his rambunctiousness and set him on the path to becoming the cartoon world’s most famously pious Christian.

Indeed, conservative Christian parenting is often unfairly presented as little more than “spare the rod, spoil the child,” advice distilled from the Bible’s book of Proverbs. Spanking””punishment delivered with an open hand, not a rod””used to be socially acceptable and frequently utilized by parents, even in public. But at some point in the past century, child-rearing books began discouraging spanking and encouraging such new proverbs as “let’s all take a ‘timeout’ so that our anger might melt away, leading to fruitful conversation, peace and harmony in the home.”

Some parents have taken the advice to such an extreme that they’re hesitant to impose any consequences at all on their children….

Read the whole thing from today’s Wall Street Journal.

A Canadian man who admits to having multiple wives is suing the government of British Columbia for “unlawful” prosecution after it charged him with practicing polygamy.

The polygamy charge was thrown out last September after a judge ruled that the provincial attorney general had no jurisdiction to appoint a special prosecutor in the case.

In his statement of claim, filed in the British Columbia Supreme Court, Winston Blackmore said, “The (attorney general) acted in a manner that was high handed, arbitrary, reckless, abusive, improper and inconsistent with the honor of the Crown and the administration of justice.”

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Dressed in Sunday church finery and fashionable hats, these devout Baptist women looked decades younger than their ages, 70s and 80s ”” evidence, it seemed, of virtuous living.

The group of a half-dozen or so gathers every Sunday after church to talk about their shared bonds: faith in Jesus, and memories of long-ago journeys from sleepy Southern country towns to the big city with its smokestacks and sirens.

“We fellowship,” said Gloria Davis, a native of the Mississippi Delta, “and we remember the days.”

These women were part of one of the nation’s most important periods, the Great Migration, the mass trek of blacks going north for jobs and the hope of civil rights. It has been more than a half-century since the peak of migration to Chicago.

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Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The 5-to-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle ”” that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.

The ruling represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision to reshape the way elections were conducted. Though the decision does not directly address them, its logic also applies to the labor unions that are often at political odds with big business.

The decision will be felt most immediately in the coming midterm elections, given that it comes just two days after Democrats lost a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and as popular discontent over government bailouts and corporate bonuses continues to boil.

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Brown’s victory ”” some called it “the Scott heard round the world” ”” on the eve of the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s Inauguration was an ominous sign for Democrats for the midterm elections ahead and a potentially crippling blow to Obama’s entire agenda. Brown ran explicitly on a promise to be the “41st Senator,” who would give the Republicans the power to block what he called “the trillion-dollar health care bill that is being forced on the American people,” one that will “raise taxes, hurt Medicare, destroy jobs and run our nation deeper into debt.”

That such a message would resonate here was poignant, given that no one had fought harder and longer than Kennedy for universal health care, something that the terminally ill liberal lion had referred to before his death in August as “the cause of my life.” And it was all the more ironic considering that Massachusetts has come closer than any other state to assuring coverage to all of its citizens, thanks to a 2006 law that was championed by a Republican governor, Mitt Romney, who was celebrating onstage with Brown on election night.

Although the rest of the country sees Massachusetts as the bluest of blue states ”” it had not elected a Republican Senator since Richard Nixon was President ”” its political complexion is actually more subtle. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1, but fully half the state’s voters are registered “unenrolled” ”” not affiliated with any party. And four of its last five governors have been Republicans, albeit ones of a more moderate stripe than that of the national party.

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THE NEXT General Synod meeting will take place in Church House, Westminster, from Monday 8 to Friday 12 Feb­ruary. It has a very full agenda, said the secretary general of the Arch­bishops’ Council, William Fittall, at the press briefing on Monday, because it will be “clearing the decks for the Synod at York in July” when the ordination of women bishops will next be debated.

Mr Fittall went on to “refute the myths” that were current in the press that the revision committee on women in the episcopate had been deliberately dragging its feet in order to miss the February sessions and therefore delay any decision, or that the committee had “misapplied itself”.

A large number of proposals had come to the committee, and it was having to examine each in turn, giving the proposers the chance to put their cases personally, and to consider all the legislation line by line.

Asked whether the recent offer from the Pope had further slowed the process down, Mr Fittall refused to commit himself, saying that the committee had had to look at “a lot of big ideas” as well as details. He did not think there was any reason to change the view that 2014 was likely to be the earliest date that a woman bishop could be appointed.

Read it all from the Church Times.

Gordon Fleming is, by his own account, an environmentally sensitive guy.

He bikes 12 1/2 miles to and from his job at a software company outside Santa Barbara, Calif. He recycles as much as possible and takes reusable bags to the grocery store.

Still, his girlfriend, Shelly Cobb, feels he has not gone far enough.

Ms. Cobb chides him for running the water too long while he shaves or showers. And she finds it “depressing,” she tells him, that he continues to buy a steady stream of items online when her aim is for them to lead a less materialistic life.

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House Republicans were keen Wednesday to find out why a report titled “Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood” fails to discuss Islamic extremism as a possible motive for Maj. Nidal Hasan’s attack in November, which killed 13 and wounded 43.

Frustrated by the Department of Defense’s description of the Fort Hood rampage as an “incident” by an “alleged perpetrator,” several members of the House Armed Services Committee wondered if political correctness is besting common sense as the US tries to understand the nature and strategy of its enemies.

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The economic pattern of the early 1980s may well be repeated. The US economy is likely to start to recover strongly, with a growth rate of more than 5 per cent expected this month.

But it looks increasingly doubtful that Mr Obama and the Democrats will enjoy the benefits. Having won Massachusetts, the Republicans will have no compunction in claiming that what saved the US economy was the conservative backlash. If the Democrats fail to challenge them, this is the version of reality that American voters will start to believe.

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Most people in this quiet all-American town describe themselves as devoutly Christian, but even here they are deeply divided over what should happen to John Freshwater.

Mr. Freshwater, an eighth-grade public school science teacher, is accused of burning a cross onto the arms of at least two students and teaching creationism, charges he says have been fabricated because he refused an order by his principal to remove a Bible from his desk.

After an investigation, school officials notified Mr. Freshwater in June 2008 of their intent to fire him, but he asked for a pre-termination hearing, which has lasted more than a year and cost the school board more than a half-million dollars.

The hearing is finally scheduled to end Friday, and a verdict on Mr. Freshwater’s fate is expected some months later. But the town — home to about 15,000 people, more than 30 churches and an evangelical university — remains split.

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The theme for this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is “You Are Witnesses of These Things” (Luke 24:48). Coinciding with the Scottish centennial celebration of the World Mission Conference at Edinburgh, widely acknowledged as an ecumenical milestone, the theme strikes at the soul of collaboration between churches: what we memorialize together, what we work on, what we anticipate through God’s grace. Whether we speak in a prophetic voice, like the Paul Wattsons of a prior generation, there is always a call to set aside a passive stance and move.

Action of some sort never negates a stillness of mind and heart, but flows from it. Achieving that quietude comes from asking ourselves sometimes difficult questions: What do I believe? To whom shall I turn? Who am I? What is impressive about the path Fr. Wattson took is not so much his rather spectacular conversion or the issues attendant upon it, as much as the authenticity of its genesis, together with its manifold fruits. Roman Catholics cannot ignore the abiding fealty Fr. Wattson had toward the purest elements of the Anglican spirit, since part of that is its desire toward the vocation of unity. In an era of ordinariates, Roman Catholics will do well to observe how a new injection of Anglican culture into their midst will serve to heal and make whole again a body broken for too long.

In speaking of ordinariates today, canon lawyers refer to “extra-territorial” sees or “non-territorial particular churches,” which serve as instruments for service to the people of God that have, for purposes of identification, no visible boundaries but a clear governance structure that is necessarily flexible to meet extraordinary circumstances. One reason for the recent Anglicanorum Coetibus, the apostolic constitution of Pope Benedict XVI establishing personal ordinariates for those Anglicans entering a new relation with the Roman Catholic Church, is to supply a flexible response to legalistic questions. Both communions will do well to study whether the ecclesiological principles articulated in the constitution will be in service to the great challenge of ecumenism in our time, particularly as it conforms or departs from the legacy of visionaries like Fr.Wattson.

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The Biblical Tradition that gives unique dignity to the human person must not be understood in terms of domination but in terms of respect and solidarity. This requires of us a sense of a “human ecology” in which our responsibility for the eco-system is bound up with and reflective of our obligations to one another and in particular “a special generosity towards the poor, towards women and children, strangers, the sick, the weak and the needy” (Papal Address at the Synagogue of Rome, 17 January 2010, sect. 7).

The ethical aspect of human intervention in the natural order lies in the limitation on the power of science and its claim to absoluteness, and in the expression of human solidarity and moral responsibility towards all. To that end the bilateral commission strongly urges that all scientific innovation and development work in close consultation with religious ethical guidance. Similarly States and international bodies should engage in close consultation with religious ethical leadership in order to ensure that progress be a blessing rather than a curse. A genuine environmental ethic is a key condition for world peace and harmony.

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England, of course, is the nation that once gave us preachers the likes of Charles Simeon, Charles Spurgeon, and Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Now, with the rare and blessed exception of some faithful evangelical churches, preaching has fallen on desperate times.

Some observers of British life now estimate that in any given week Muslim attendance at mosques outnumbers Christian attendance at churches. That means that there are probably now in Britain more people who listen to imams than to preachers.

This raises an interesting question: Is the marginalization of biblical preaching in so many churches a cause or a result of the nation’s retreat from Christianity? In truth, it must be both cause and effect. In any event, there is no hope for a recovery of biblical Christianity without a preceding recovery of biblical preaching. That means preaching that is expository, textual, evangelistic, and doctrinal. In other words, preaching that will take a lot longer than ten minutes and will not masquerade as a form of entertainment.

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According to e-mails released this month, AIG was asked to limit what the public knew about the Maiden Lane transactions. The payments have been called a “backdoor bailout” by lawmakers because banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, were reimbursed at 100 cents on the dollar for mortgage-linked securities that had declined in value.

“This has been terribly mishandled,” said James D. Cox, a professor of corporate and securities law at Duke University School of Law. “There’s this pattern that emerges that the New York Fed, for a variety of reasons including not causing nervousness about who was an AIG counterparty, covered up its rather heavy-handed approach to the bailout.”

Absolutely sickening–read it all.

Walking down Trade Street in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, Melinda Graham spied the Bank of America football stadium a few blocks away. “That’s all my money, right there,” said Graham, one of hundreds who marched on B of A and Wachovia one day last October to demand a 10 percent cap on credit-card interest rates.

A few minutes later, Graham noticed a pair of brown leather stilettos on a sharply dressed young woman. “Look at her shoes,” she urged her 21-year-old daughter. Then she looked at me, who had just asked her about her credit-card debt: “I’m a shoe fanatic,” she admitted.

Graham can no longer afford such luxuries. She started cutting her spending after her debt topped $8,000, which is about average for the nearly half of all Americans who carry a credit -card balance. She used to go to the cinema once a week or rent half a dozen movies to watch over the weekend, but not these days. “I can’t do the things I like doing, like getting away on the weekend,” she said. “I buy only the necessities.”

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