You’d think being a wife, mother, author and blogger would be enough to keep someone busy.

But not the Very Rev. Katherine Bingham Moorehead, who will be installed today as dean of St. John’s Cathedral and the Jacksonville-based Episcopal Diocese of Florida.

As dean, she’ll oversee the 1,500-member cathedral parish and serve as Bishop Samuel Johnson Howard’s second-in-command of a diocese of 77 congregations in 25 North Florida counties.

As the cathedral’s first female dean, she’ll also be hitting the Internet and pavement to promote existing cathedral ministries to the homeless and other needy people, expanding educational offerings and working with city officials to revitalize the urban core.

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Update: Some statistics on the Cathedral are here.

The breakaway from Christ Episcopal Church was part of a major rupture in the Episcopal Church of North America as conservatives rebelled against the ordination of homosexual priests and other trends in the church.

In the past decade, Africa has become a spiritual center for many Anglicans who have divorced themselves from the national Episcopal Church over divergent views on homosexuality and biblical interpretation, said Frank Kirkpatrick, a professor of religion at Trinity College in Hartford, and author of the book “The Episcopal Church in Crisis: How Sex, the Bible and Authority are Dividing the Faithful.”

When dozens of congregations, like Christ Church in Watertown, broke with the national church, their leaders surrendered their religious authority as Episcopalians, he said. African dioceses, which have led the more conservative wing of the international Anglican Communion, continued to recognize the worshippers and consecrate former Episcopalian priests to lead them.

But for Bywater, his spiritual connection to Tanzania is the result of a personal journey, rather than a political one. He said that unlike other priests who are recognized by an African diocese, he is actually an ordained priest within an African diocese.

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A year ago I wrote about five religious trends to watch for in 2009. I suggested what will happen to the religious right, the religious left, religion-based terrorism, Eastern spirituality and all those people who like to say they’re spiritual but not religious.

With the dawn of our new decade, I’m coming to the conclusion the five trends have real staying power, which could see them sticking with us to 2020 and beyond. Here are the five religious and spiritual shifts I predicted, plus my analysis of what’s happened in the past year or more to indicate they could be long-lasting….

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The question of what it means to be a parent has never been simple. But three recent cases highlight just how complicated things can get””and how inconsistent the courts have been in weighing genetic parenthood against the deals struck by would-be parents (gay and straight) with their partners….

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The early bird special at Cafe Prima Pasta began last year after the restaurant’s owner, Gerardo Cea, lost all his savings in real estate and began seeing his regular customers at the supermarket.

“They weren’t coming anymore,” Mr. Cea said. “They couldn’t afford it.”

He expected his offer of a 50 percent discount before 6 p.m. to attract the usual crowd of frugal retirees. But word kept spreading, and on most nights now, at least half the tables are filled with young families, singles or hip couples ”” women in short skirts and men who prefer “dude” to “sir…..”

“The value of money has changed in America,” said James Accursio, whose family has owned the Capri, an Italian restaurant in Florida City, since it opened in 1958. “We’re not high rollers anymore.”

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The season of Epiphany is about journeys. I love the story of Nevill Mott, Master of Caius College, Cambridge and former Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol. He was on a train from London to Bristol when he simultaneously remembered three things: first, he was no longer Professor of Physics at Bristol but at Cambridge; second, he had gone to London by car and not by train; and third, he had been accompanied by his wife.

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Almighty God, who at the baptism of thy blessed Son Jesus Christ in the river Jordan didst manifest his glorious Godhead: Grant, we beseech thee, that the brightness of his presence may shine in our hearts, and his glory be set forth in our lives; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.

–Genesis 1:31

Almighty God, who to wise men who sought him didst manifest the Incarnation of thy Son by the bright shining of a star: Grant that, as they presented unto him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh, so we also out of our treasures may offer to him ourselves, a living sacrifice acceptable in thy sight; through him who for our sakes was born on earth as a little child, Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Rev. Nelson Pinder stepped off the bus into a segregated Orlando in 1959 and made it his mission to do something about it. On Saturday, Pinder will be recognized by the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida for his 50 years of service to the church and the community.

“He is one of the giants in the church. There’s no question about that,” said Ernest Bennett, an Episcopal Church official who has known Pinder for 44 years.

Pinder will be honored at a reception after the 10:30 a.m. service at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, 130 N. Magnolia Ave., Orlando.

5 decades. Wow. Read it all.

[Paul] Barker begins his book by watching a tower block in Hackney being blown up. He ends it by reflecting that scarcely any semis have ever been demolished, except when they stood in the way of road-building schemes. The sourest critics eventually succumb. John Betjeman, after all, began as a modernist, but by 1940 had repented to become the laureate of the suburbs. Even Slough forgave him in the end. But the orthodoxy was strong. Stationed in the Middle East during the war, J. M. Richards wrote a homage to the suburbs, Castles on the Ground, but on his return to the Architectural Review he toed the modernist line.

The planning laws in their present rigid state give rise to the only serious corruption in British politics: they enable landowners to capture enormous unearned profits; even in a time of prosperity such as we have just enjoyed, they cause crippling housing shortages. Above all, in an age when thousands of acres are no longer needed for agriculture, they prevent ordinary people from living where they would most like to live (and from fostering biodiversity in their back gardens). As the Treasury report on land supply pointed out in 2003, current policy is bringing about “an ever widening economic and social divide”.

Paul Barker does not press these lines of argument too far. He stresses that he is not proposing to “concrete over” the English countryside; he is as keen as anyone to protect the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales. He argues only that “”˜positive’ planning is best done with the lightest of hands”. He urges too a gentle bias towards preserving the streets as they are, for they are a city’s memory bank. But none of these things should be achieved at the cost of preventing people living the life they wish to live….

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Blogging on the site FailedMessiah.com, Mr. [Shmaraya] Rosenberg, 51, has transmuted a combination of muckraking reporting and personal grudge into a must-read digest of the actual and alleged misdeeds of the ultra-Orthodox world. He has broken news about sexual misconduct, smear campaigns and dubious business practices conducted by or on behalf of stringently religious Jews.

Operating thousands of miles from the centers of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn and Jerusalem, waking at 3:30 a.m. and working a dozen hours at a stretch in an apartment cluttered with books, Mr. Rosenberg has had his scoops cited by The Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journalism Review, PR Week and Gawker. The national Jewish newspaper The Forward listed him among the 50 most influential American Jews, and the hip, cheeky magazine Heeb put him in its top 100.

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Whether or not there is a God, human beings did not create themselves ”” perhaps an obvious but nevertheless salutary truth. We are the products of an amazing (perhaps even ultimately mysterious) array of causes that operated long before we came on the scene and will continue to operate long after we are gone.

That alone is enough to produce a sense of vertigo, of amazement, as we contemplate our own fragility and seeming insignificance against the infinite backdrop of time and space ”” the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces” that terrified Pascal. Yet so far from accepting, as the 20th-century existentialists did, that our lives are absurd, or that we are free to invent any values we chose, many, perhaps most, are drawn in an opposite direction.

As we struggle through life, we seem compelled to acknowledge, sooner or later, that our human good, our flourishing and fulfilment, depends on orienting ourselves towards values that we did not create. Love, compassion, mercy, truth, justice, courage, endurance, fidelity ”” all belong to a core of key virtues that all the world’s great religions (and the secular cultures that have emerged from them) recognise, and which command our allegiance whether we like it or not.

We may try to go against them, to live our lives without reference to them, but such attempts are always, in the end, self-defeating and productive of misery and frustration rather than human flourishing.

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Too often in recent years the call for a rational debate on mass migration has degenerated into name-calling and charges of racism. Even the campaign for Balanced Migration, which I have supported, representing cross-party politicians, has barely been heeded by party leaders who have run scared of the issue.

This is why we have launched a declaration calling on the leading political parties to make manifesto commitments to prevent the UK population reaching 70 million, which is projected in official figures by 2029.

The fact is that a rise in the UK population by ten million in two decades will put our nation’s resources under considerable strain, stretching almost to breaking point the enormous reserves of tolerance and generosity of the British people.

The declaration by no means spells out a halt to immigration. In fact we welcome the contribution of both economic migrants and asylum seekers to our lively cosmopolitan culture. But we urge a return to the levels of the early 1990s, about 40,000, compared with 163,000 in 2008. Failure to take that action could be seriously damaging to the future harmony of our society.

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