Leaders of a new religious body affiliated with the Anglican Communion are scheduled to speak next weekend at Christ Church on Johnson Square.
The Most Rev. Robert William Duncan Jr., Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), will deliver the sermon at the 8 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. services Feb. 14. The church is located at 28 Bull St.
The Rt. Rev. Charles Bernard Obaikol, recently retired Bishop of Soroti, Uganda, will teach a 9 a.m. Sunday school class.
“The church’s parliament” it may be, but the General Synod’s house of laity is democratic in the pure ÂAthenian sense that only a tiny proportion of the Âpunters get a vote. A while ago I questioned this aspect of the setup, but gilded ones who sit in the tearoom and make our futures told me that, even using the internet, it would self-evidently be ludicrously costly and Âbothersome to have ordinary Anglicans voting. So there.
It’s an imperfect system, but alterÂnatives could be even worse. It would not suit the English to govern the church entirely by clergy, or a clique of senior clergy, or, perish the thought, a Divine Right Supremo. Not this side of 1688. Not only do I cherish liberty, as do all of us who live in the County of John Milton, but it strikes me as exactly what Jesus assiduously told his followers not to do….
Omar Hammami had every right to flash his magnetic smile. He had just been elected president of his sophomore class. He was dating a luminous blonde, one of the most sought-after girls in school. He was a star in the gifted-student program, with visions of becoming a surgeon. For a 15-year-old, he had remarkable charisma.
Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every bit as Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprinkles her conversation with blandishments like “sugar” and “darlin’.” Brought up a Southern Baptist, Omar went to Bible camp as a boy and sang “Away in a Manger” on Christmas Eve. As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo. In the thick of his adolescence, he was fearless, raucously funny, rebellious, contrarian. “It felt cool just to be with him,” his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. “You knew he was going to be a leader.”
A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in one of the world’s most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. That guerrilla army, known as the Shabab, is fighting to overthrow the fragile American-backed Somali government. The rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery. With help from Al Qaeda, they have managed to turn Somalia into an ever more popular destination for jihadis from around the world.
Leading conservative clergy have declared their support for a motion at this week’s General Synod which would ally the Church with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).
This was formed in opposition to the consecration of Gene Robinson, the first openly homosexual bishop, and the actions of liberals in the Episcopal Church of the US, which is the official Anglican body.
And…the unemployment rate fell 0.3% to 9.7%. This of course means that more people are dropping out of the labor pool, and it also means they will at some point come back.
On the negative side, a loss of 22,000 jobs is nowhere close to the 100,000 new jobs that are needed just to hold unemployment steady. 41% of those unemployed have been so for over 6 months.
And quoting David Rosenberg:
“While there will be many economists touting today’s report as some inflection point, and it could well be argued that we are entering some sort of healing phase in the jobs market just by mere virtue of inertia, the reality is that the level of employment today, at 129.5 million, is the exact same level it was in 1999. And, during this 11-year span of Japanese-like labour market stagnation, the working-age population has risen 29 million. Contemplate that for a moment; fully 29 million people competing for the same number of jobs that existed more than a decade ago. That sounds like pretty deflationary stuff from our standpoint.
“Not only that, but consideration must be taken that in 2009, we had a zero policy rate, a $2.2 trillion Fed balance sheet and an epic 10% deficit-to-GDP ratio. You could not have asked for more government stimulus. Yet employment tumbled nearly 5 million in 2009.”
Here’s a sign of the times: when Jenny Sanford sat down to tell her young sons that their father, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, was having an affair, one of them reacted in an unusually worldly way.
“Oh my gosh,” exclaimed 13-year-old Bolton Sanford. “This is going to be worse than Eliot Spitzer.”
—Janet Maslin in her book review in this past Thursday’s NY Times
You really need to take the time to listen to it all (just over 65 minutes).