The creation of …[the Anglican Consultative Council] required no canonical change in the Episcopal Church’s Constitution and Canons, but it did have implications nonetheless, for someone needed to appoint the three representatives to the ACC, and someone needed to respond to the request for approval of the ACC’s constitution. The special session of the General Convention in 1969 “acceded and subscribed to the Proposed Constitution of the said Anglican Consultative Council,” and took responsibility for election of representatives to that body.34 Subsequent General Conventions approved later changes in the ACC constitution.35 The convention’s Joint Committee on Nominations initially proposed names of ACC representatives for election by convention, but in 1982 the Executive Council (the name adopted in 1967 for what had been called the National Council since 1922) took over the responsibility for selection of ACC representatives.

An additional development in the Anglican Communion had taken place in 1960, which would also bring the Episcopal Church into closer relationship with the Anglican Communion. In that year Stephen Bayne, former Bishop of Olympia in the U.S., had accepted a position as the first Executive Officer or the Anglican Communion, a position later renamed as “Secretary General.” Bayne served until 1964. The fourth person to hold the position (Samuel Van Culin, Secretary General,1983-94), was also an American.

The General Conventions of 1964 and 1967 responded to the call of the Anglican Congress in Toronto that it was time for “the rebirth of the Anglican Communion, which means the death of many old things but””infinitely more””the birth of entirely new relationships.” The Presiding Bishop set up a Committee on Mutual Responsibility, which reported to both conventions. The 1964 Convention adopted a resolution proposed by the committee that resolved

That this Church, speaking through its episcopate and its duly elected representative in the lay and clerical orders in General Convention assembled, accept the message of the Primates and Metropolitans of the Anglican Communion entitled, “Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ”, as a declaration of God’s judgment upon our insularity, complacency, and defective obedience to Mission; and be it further

Resolved, the House of Deputies concurring, That this Church undertake without delay that evaluation and reformation of our corporate life, our priorities, and our response to Mission, which is called for by the leaders of the Anglican Communion”¦.

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Gerry Adams’s appearance on Channel 4, in a programme following the footsteps of Jesus in the Holy Land, won’t be screened for a week but it’s already caused a stir. Victor Barker, who lost his son in the Omagh bombing, is aggrieved, on the grounds that it makes the Sinn Fein leader seem like a “genuine, peaceful person”. That’s understandable. Yet there will be lots more people with no connection to the Troubles who simply don’t like the idea of someone with IRA connections talking about Christ at all.

You have to wonder whether they’ve ever come across that remark by the Man Himself, to the effect that he came for sinners, not the righteous.

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Capital will be made more expensive if this tax ever comes about, hitting the ability of poorer countries to raise investment funds. Fortunately the tax is not likely to come about, since it would require the agreement of every tax jurisdiction to make it work, and the record of international consent, as illustrated by the stalled World Trade talks, is minimal. Without that consent, traders would simply move to where it was not levied.

The “Robin Hood Tax” might look superficially attractive, but it would do profound damage to the world economy and, far from hitting “the rich”, it would be the world’s poor who suffered most. This could be one reason why Bank of England Governor Mervyn King described it as “bottom of the list” of options.

If campaigners want to spend charitable funds on these campaigns, they would be more effective in calling not for higher taxes, but for the end of the protectionist tariffs that prevent poorer countries from selling their goods.

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Yes, Virginia, there really is a Washington’s Birthday.

Shh! Don’t tell any auto dealers, school boards, or mattress salesmen, but today isn’t officially Presidents’ Day across the United States. The more accurate term would be “Washington’s Birthday,” according to the federal statute designating the third Monday in February in honor of the father of our country, who was born on Feb. 22, 1732. So, why the confusion?

In 1968, an attempt to officially change the day to Presidents’ Day, to celebrate both Abraham Lincoln (who was born Feb. 12, 1809) and Washington on the same day, died in a congressional committee. (Lincoln’s birthday is observed, but it’s never been designated an official federal holiday.) Since that failed effort, 12 states have designated an official Presidents Day.

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What we can hear, or choose to hear, or prefer not to hear, form a theme in the book from which the quotation about Adam comes. It is Our Sound Is Our Wound: Contemplative Listening in a Noisy World by Lucy Winkett (Continuum, £9.99). The Archbishop of Canterbury has named it as his Lent book. Lent starts on Wednesday and many Christians like to use a book to focus their thoughts in the six weeks before Easter.

Lucy Winkett, a singer by training, is Precentor of St Paul’s Cathedral, responsible for its music and liturgy. She also, she tells us, has tinnitus, which means for her that she hears a high-pitched whistle.

The sounds of the modern city match, she thinks, the dominant modern feelings of anxiety and fear ”“ principally fear of death. In opposition, she presents the liberating forces of justice and beauty. Beauty, she believes, leads to justice, partly by bringing us out of ourselves.

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According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s figures, Nebraska has grown in population from 1,711,263 in 2000 to 1,796,619 in 2009. This represents a population growth of approximately 4.75%.

According to Episcopal Church statistics, the Diocese of Nebraska went from Average Sunday Attendance (or ASA) of 4,078 in 1998 to 3,153 in 2008. This represents an ASA decline of about 23% over this ten year period.

A pictorial chart of some Nebraska diocesan statistics may be found here.

What we in the western world are about to learn is that there is no such thing as a Keynesian free lunch. Deficits did not “save” us half so much as monetary policy ”“ zero interest rates plus quantitative easing ”“ did. First, the impact of government spending (the hallowed “multiplier”) has been much less than the proponents of stimulus hoped. Second, there is a good deal of “leakage” from open economies in a globalised world. Last, crucially, explosions of public debt incur bills that fall due much sooner than we expect

For the world’s biggest economy, the US, the day of reckoning still seems reassuringly remote. The worse things get in the eurozone, the more the US dollar rallies as nervous investors park their cash in the “safe haven” of American government debt. This effect may persist for some months, just as the dollar and Treasuries rallied in the depths of the banking panic in late 2008.

Yet even a casual look at the fiscal position of the federal government (not to mention the states) makes a nonsense of the phrase “safe haven”. US government debt is a safe haven the way Pearl Harbor was a safe haven in 1941.

Even according to the White House’s new budget projections, the gross federal debt will exceed 100 per cent of GDP in just two years’ time. This year, like last year, the federal deficit will be around 10 per cent of GDP. The long-run projections of the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the US will never again run a balanced budget. That’s right, never.

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Q: Your book implies that authenticity is what cities should strive for, yet it also seems a somewhat elusive concept. For instance, is a Starbucks in a renovated building authentic? Aren’t cities always evolving in authentic ways ”” it’s just that some find certain forms of authenticity more marketable or desirable than others?

A: ‘Absolutely, and this is the tragic part of authenticity. It’s a very uncertain idea, and authenticity can mean different things to different people. ”¦ What I’m arguing for is that we think about authenticity in terms of social diversity, ethnic diversity, and cultural diversity. It may be in a neighborhood that has been in a sorry state, Starbucks is a sign of renewal but in another neighborhood, Starbucks might be a sign of cursed homogenization.’

Q: What would you hope mayors and City Council members take away from the book? What encourages you about what you’ve seen from municipal government?

A: ‘What’s positive is any kind of law that encourages residents to hold onto their homes, that encourages new people to set up small businesses in places where they already have been trying to put down roots. I want local officials to take away the idea that we have to protect the cities that we have with the people that we have and the buildings that we have for the most part rather than to run after the goal of constant growth and constant tearing down and rebuilding.’

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Following the defeat of Egypt and other Arab armies by Israel in the 1967 war, Nasserism, a k a Arab nationalism, the abiding ideology of the day, was demolished. In its wake came two broad alternatives: The first, manifested by President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in his 1977 trip to Israel, was a bid to cast the Arab world’s future with the West, economic liberalization, modernization and acceptance of Israel. The weakness of “Sadatism,” though, was that it was an elite ideology with no cultural roots. The Egyptian state made peace with Israel, but Arab societies never followed.

The second Arab-Muslim response emerged in 1979. To start, there was the takeover that year of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamist extremists who challenged the religious credentials of the Saudi ruling family. The Saudi rulers responded by forging a new bargain with their Islamists: Let us stay in power and we will give you a free hand in setting social norms, relations between the sexes and religious education inside Saudi Arabia ”” and abundant resources to spread Sunni Wahabi fundamentalism abroad.

The Saudi lurch backward coincided with Iran’s revolution in 1979, which brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power. That revolution set up a competition between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia for who was the real leader of the Muslim world, and it triggered a surge in oil prices that gave both fundamentalist regimes the resources to export their brands of puritanical Islam, through mosques and schools, farther than ever.

“Islam lost its brakes in 1979,” said Mamoun Fandy, a Middle East expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. And there was no moderate countertrend.

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Pope Benedict XVI has summoned more than two dozen Irish bishops to the Vatican for meetings to discuss Ireland’s massive clerical sex abuse scandal. The meetings, Monday and Tuesday, could lead to a major shake-up in the Irish Church hierarchy.

Two months ago, an investigation known as the Murphy Commission Report into the Dublin diocese revealed that the Irish Church had been covering up crimes by dozens of pedophile priests against hundreds of young people for decades.

The report came just seven months after another investigation revealed chronic beatings, rapes, near-starvation and humiliation of 30,000 children in state-run schools and orphanages all run by the Catholic Church.

Bishop Joseph Duffy, a spokesman for the Irish Bishops Conference, acknowledges that the meetings with the pope will have to lead to major changes in the Irish Church.

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O my God, in thee I trust, let me not be put to shame; let not my enemies exult over me. Yea, let none that wait for thee be put to shame; let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous. Make me to know thy ways, O LORD; teach me thy paths. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me, for thou art the God of my salvation; for thee I wait all the day long.

–Psalm 25:2-5

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Monday that the United States feared Iran was drifting toward a military dictatorship, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seizing control of large swaths of Iran’s political, military, and economic establishment.

“That is how we see it,” Mrs. Clinton said in a televised town hall meeting of students at the Doha campus of Carnegie Mellon University. “We see that the government in Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the Parliament, is being supplanted and that Iran is moving towards a military dictatorship.”

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There are a lot of fun pictures here.

This touches on the still-essential question that historians will write books about: How did the president lose the room? How did he lose popularity?

The leftward edge of the left says he did it by being too accommodating, by trying for a bipartisanship that doesn’t exist. The rightward edge of the right says he did it by revealing his essentially socialistic agenda. The center has said, in polls and at the polls, that it didn’t like his administration’s first-year obsession with a health-care bill that was huge, costly and impenetrably complicated, and would be run by those people who gave you the DMV and the post office.

The political class this week blamed it on the Chicago Mafia, the longtime Obama friends and associates who surround him in the Oval Office. But even that doesn’t explain it. What did they do wrong? And why do people think Mr. Obama’s advisers are different from Mr. Obama?

Washington’s pundits have begun announcing that the White House is better at campaigning than at governing, but that was obvious last summer. The president and his advisers understand one thing really well, and that is Democratic primaries and Democratic politics. This is the area in which they made their careers. It’s how they defeated Hillary Clinton””by knowing how Democrats think. In the 2008 general election, appealing for the first time to all of America and not only to Democrats, they had one great gift on their side, the man who both made Mr. Obama and did in John McCain, and that was George W. Bush.

But now it is 2010, and Mr. Bush is gone. Mr. Obama is left with America, and he does not, really, understand it. That is why he thinks moving to the center would be political death, when moving to the center and triangulating, as Bill Clinton did, might give him a new lease on life.

Read it all from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

KIM LAWTON:…At the CORE/El Centro natural healing center in Milwaukee, Sister Madeline Gianforte is using Reiki on one of her clients. In this Eastern healing technique, practitioners place their hands on or above someone in an effort to enhance the body’s flow of energy. They say that can lead to physical and spiritual healing.

SISTER MADELINE GIANFORTE (CORE/El Centro): As a practitioner, I’m just facilitating that energy. But you are doing your own healing in the sense of connecting to the divine and the healing that happens within.

LAWTON: Gianforte is a nun with the Sisters of Saint Agnes. She’s also a trained Reiki master. She says Reiki fits well with her faith.
post01-gianforte

GIANFORTE: It’s an incredibly spiritual, prayerful experience for me. It calms the inner part of my being so much that I can tap that deepest place, the core place of who I am.

LAWTON: But the US Catholic bishops say Reiki is superstition, and they’ve urged Catholics not to provide or support it….

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Last year it was banks; this year it is countries. The economic crisis, which seemed to have eased off in the latter part of 2009, is once again in full swing as the threat of sovereign default looms.

Europe’s leaders are struggling to avert the biggest financial disaster in the euro’s 11-year history…. This week all eyes have been on Greece. If it defaults, it will be the first EU member to do so. As The Economist went to press EU leaders were meeting to discuss what to do, and there was talk of a German-led rescue scheme. If it happens, other European candidates may be queueing up. Bond markets are worried about the capacity of Spain (see article), Ireland and Portugal to repay their debts, forcing these countries to increase taxes and cut spending, even as they remain mired in recession.

Europe’s troubles have given investors good reason to worry; but they are not the only cause for concern.

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Traditionally, there have been three main models:

Ӣ Power in the hands of the bishops in councils (as in the Eastern Orthodox models: the Catholic model displays an unusual dominance over councils of one bishop, the pope)

Ӣ Oversight and authority in the hands of elders

Ӣ Congregational: with the leadership in the democratic voting hands of the church members

Typically the Anglican model has a touch of each. The General Synod is divided into three houses ”“ bishops, clergy and laity.

As a former BBC religious affairs correspondent, I reported on some fine debates, as well as some woeful ones. But all too often the adversarial nature of procedures were all too like Parliament.

Read the whole piece.

According to a 1982 study by two Indian researchers, the level of self-reported love in arranged marriages increased over time until they surpassed the level of self-reported love in marriages that were freely chosen. Incredible as it sounds, people with a very limited say in choosing their own spouses eventually became happier with their relationships than people with the freedom to choose anyone they wanted.

Although we almost always read “Romeo and Juliet” as the quintessential story of love at first sight,Shakespeare actually offered his own sly critique of romantic love at the beginning of the play. Romeo is pining away for love — but not for Juliet. There is another fair damsel who has rejected Romeo’s advances, and he declares himself inconsolable. He disdains finding someone else and tells Benvolio, “Thou canst not teach me to forget” — which is, of course, precisely what happens a few scenes later when Romeo meets Juliet and realizes that he was completely wrong before and only now has discovered true love.

We never remember that part of the story, though, because if we think of “Romeo and Juliet” from that perspective, the whole play starts to skew in ways that contradict our usual romantic notions.

Perhaps the time has come for us to take a skeptical view of romance, particularly the over-the-top variety peddled so effectively on Valentine’s Day.

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As U.S. Marines battled Sunday to consolidate their hold on the southern Afghanistan town of Marja, Western commanders reported the first serious setback of the 2-day-old offensive: the deaths of a dozen Afghan civilians in an errant rocket strike.

U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of Western forces in Afghanistan, apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the deaths. The fatalities marked the first instance of large-scale civilian casualties since the start of fighting in Nad Ali, the district in central Helmand province where Marja lies.

Civilian casualties are among the most contentious issues between Karzai and his Western allies. A day earlier, as the assault on Marja began, Karzai had demanded “absolute caution” on the part of coalition troops to avoid hurting or killing noncombatants.

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Via email:

The Standing Committee of the Diocese of Quincy, Peoria, Illinois, has announced that a special synod to elect its next bishop will meet on Saturday, June 12, 2010, at Grace Anglican Church in Galesburg, IL. Registration will begin at 9:00 AM, with the election to begin at 10:00 AM. Per diocesan canons, an official slate of nominees will be put forth, followed by nominations from the floor.

On May 8th at 10:00 AM, the Search Committee charged with bringing nominations will host public visits with the nominees who have been selected. This event will also be hosted at Grace Anglican Church in Galesburg. On that day, members of the diocese will have an opportunity to meet the nominees in separate sessions and ask questions of the candidates. These interviews will also be videotaped and made available to all churches of the diocese.

The Diocese of Quincy is a founding member diocese of the Anglican Church in North America, which was recognized this week by a resolution by the General Synod of the Church of England, the mother-church from which the 78-million member Anglican Communion grew. The resolution declared that “this synod recognize and affirm the desire of those who have formed the Anglican Church in North America to remain within the Anglican family.”

“This is a great encouragement,” said Fr. John Spencer, President of the Standing Committee and press officer for the diocese. “We are excited to soon have our next bishop. And as part of the ACNA, we’re energized for mission here at home, and with our partner churches around the world.”

What a splendid picture!

Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.

As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.

Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November ”” three months before Athens became the epicenter of global financial anxiety ”” a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills, according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.

The bankers, led by Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards.

Read it all from the front page of today’s New York Times.

Even following Thursday’s EU summit, an orderly resolution of these problems seems unlikely. The Germans will push for draconian cuts to Greece’s government spending and public sector wages but they won’t budge on relatively tight monetary policy and the overly strong euro””and they definitely won’t agree to loosen their own (German) fiscal policy.

Ireland is already cutting hard. Such fiscal austerity leads to double-digit declines in GDP, and risks massive political revolts. Ireland’s banks are today probably insolvent. Who can afford to repay their mortgages when wages are falling and unemployment rising? Irish house prices continue to speed downward. This is not an example of a “careful” solution””it is a nation in a financial death spiral.

Other EU countries will lobby for a continuation of the status quo. They would prefer the ECB keep lending to the periphery, and the problems be pushed off for another day. This too is no solution.

For now Europe will try to muddle through. Greece will promise a pound of flesh, hoping not to pay, and other nations will be spared with promises of continued financing””but just for now.

Financial markets know that this makes no sense, hence the “largest ever” short euro positions, betting on a further decline of the currency. If one country must make a substantial and painful fiscal adjustment, eventually the rest will follow.

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So though the remarkable decline in the annual Social Security surplus from 2008 to 2009 qualifies as surprising news, the inevitable bottom-line debacles awaiting it and Medicare do not. Anyone capable of doing simple arithmetic — and willing to face the hard truths of a protracted, persisting drop in the workers-to-beneficiaries ratio — could long ago see that those massive federal entitlement programs were unsustainable without comprehensive transformations.

Those needed makeovers grow more costly with every passing year of inaction. Something’s got to give, likely on both sides of the funds collected/funds dispersed equation, or the system will go bankrupt.

That dire outcome will occur even if Washington stops robbing the Social Security trust fund. Nor has that regular raiding kept the regular federal budget deficit from rising to record levels, and the White House budget plan predicts another $1.6 trillion in red ink.

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But while the president preached unity, this year’s National Prayer Breakfast was surrounded by controversy. There were signs this event on the semi-official Washington calendar may no longer be able to serve as a safe forum in which a wide variety of religious and political leaders can unite their voices. The breakfasts began in 1953 and every president since Dwight Eisenhower has taken part.

Before the event, the leaders of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent a letter to the White House and to congressional leaders calling for a boycott. They also urged C-SPAN not to televise the breakfast. Meanwhile, a coalition of gay-rights activists and religious liberals announced a series of alternative “American Prayer Hour” events in Washington and other cities nationwide.

Both groups focused intense criticism on The Fellowship, the nondenominational Christian organization that sponsors the prayer breakfast and similar networking events in Washington and around the world. The key is that numerous Ugandan leaders are active in Fellowship activities in that country, including the politician who introduced anti-gay legislation that includes capital punishment for some offenses.

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The Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina announced last week it was rescheduling its Diocesan Convention, originally slated to begin March 4 at St. Paul’s Church in Summerville, to March 26 so it could “adequately consider a response to (an) unprecedented incursion into the affairs of the diocese,” according to a pastoral letter by Bishop Mark Lawrence.

A recent exchange of letters between attorneys, available for viewing on the diocese’s newly designed Web site (www.diosc.com), has prompted the delay.

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