Until Friday, when Tiger Woods stood up in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and apologized for his sexual infidelities, the American public confession was a Christian rite. From President Grover Cleveland, who likely fathered a child out of wedlock, to Ted Haggard, who resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals after allegations that he had sex with a male prostitute, our politicians and preachers have bowed and scraped in Christian idioms. Jimmy Carter spoke of “adultery in my heart.” Jimmy Swaggart spoke of “my sin” and “my Savior.” In any case, the model derives from evangelical Christianity ”” the revival and the altar call. You confess you are a sinner. You repent of your sins. You turn to Christ to make yourself new.

Woods was caught in a multimistress sex scandal after Thanksgiving. In January Brit Hume, channeling his inner evangelist on Fox News Sunday, urged Woods to “turn to the Christian faith.” “He’s said to be a Buddhist,” Hume said. “I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.” Woods in effect told Hume Friday thanks but no thanks.

Part of Woods’ carefully prepared statement followed the time-honored formula that historian Susan Wise Bauer has referred to as the “art of the public grovel.” Though he did not sob like Swaggart, Woods seemed ashamed and embarrassed. He took responsibility for his actions, which he characterized as “irresponsible and selfish.” He apologized, not just to his wife and children but also to his family and friends, his business partners, his fans, and the staff and sponsors of his foundation. And he was not evasive. Whereas President Clinton confessed in 1998 to having an “inappropriate” relationship with Monica Lewinsky and took potshots at the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, Woods said, “I was unfaithful. I had affairs. I cheated. What I did is not acceptable, and I am the only person to blame.”

But this was not your garden-variety confession. Though Woods spoke of religion, he did not mention Jesus or the Bible, sin or redemption. He gave us a Buddhist mea culpa instead.

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If you are taking a class, I am interested in what it is, if you are teaching, we want to hear that also.

I am teaching a six week class on C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters–KSH.

The outgoing Anglican Primate suggested that such approach to governance must change and advised the Rivers State Gov. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi to join forces with other true democrats to bring about the needed change in the polity.

“This approach to governance must change and it is people like you who will be vanguards to bring about this change. I want to encourage you Mr. Governor to work with your peers and colleagues, those holding political power to lead the country,” [Peter] Akinola said.

He also condemned what he called “members of a cabal that engage in madness of self preservation and hold the entire nation to ransom”, and urged the state governor to work with his colleagues within and outside his party for the good of the country, “bearing in mind that should this nation collapse, you and I would not be spared”.

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Sana Rahim was born in the cowboy country of southeastern Wyoming, to Pakistani parents who had emigrated so her father could earn a doctorate.

She speaks Urdu with her family, but can’t read or write the language. She recites prayers in Arabic, but doesn’t know exactly what each word means.

Now a 20-year-old junior at Northwestern University, she, like many other American-born Muslims, is most comfortable with sermons and lectures in English, although they can’t always find U.S. mosques that offer them.

“I don’t really get the time to study Arabic,” Rahim said. “With all the different groups in America, English is a unifying thing that ties us together.”

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She sings the litany. He delivers the sermon.

It is Sunday morning at All Saints Episcopal Church in Sacramento and both the Revs. Michael and Betsey Monnot preside over the worship services, one of several ways the church keeps down expenses.

“We trade off duties every week,” said Betsey Monnot.

The two priests, who are married and have two children and another due in three weeks, said the church could afford one full-time clergyperson. So they agreed to job-share and serve as co-rectors.

“When you’re a small church, you have to be creative,” said Michael Monnot.

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With bank bailouts and executive bonuses in the headlines, it’s hard to find the connection between banking and ethics.

But it’s an argument that Stephen Green, chairman of HSBC ”” one of the biggest banks in the world ”” makes in his new book about banking: Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World.

Green is also an ordained priest in the Church of England. In his book, he proposes a “new capitalism” that brings good business and good ethics together. He says moral and spiritual values should take precedence over immediate profit.

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Just what we needed. Another Protestant denomination. This one to straddle the biblicism of the Lutheran Church”“Missouri Synod and the bibliphobia of the ELCA, presumably with its ratio of traditional exegesis/engagement with modernity balanced so precisely that an ambitious busboy could lay his tray of half-eaten cheesy nachos on its presuppositions without fear of tippage.

I sympathize with those Lutherans who could no longer suffer the leftward march of their denomination into the abyss of irrelevancy, and those who find the denomination of my youth tiresome in its calculation of how grizzlies managed the voyage on the ark without their Dramamine. Yet another denomination can only spawn yet another denomination and so on, until there are so many congregations and so little coherence that only a swift end to history can stifle the cacophony of competing theological claims.

And so I have vowed to give up organized religion for Lent. I remain neither spiritual nor religious, but a Lutheran, sans pew.

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The South continues to live up to its Bible Belt reputation, especially Mississippi, which reported the nation’s highest church-going statistics in a new Gallup Poll.

At 68 percent, Mississippi had the highest percentage of weekly church-goers in 2009, Gallup said. Vermont remained the least church-going state, with only 23 percent regularly attending. The top and bottom rankings remained unchanged from last year.

Out of the top 10 states, nine are in the South. Utah’s large Mormon population boosts it to the top as well, making it the odd state in the West. States in the West and all of New England were among the least church-going.

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A century ago, Herbert Croly published “The Promise of American Life,” a book — still in print — that was prophetic about today’s progressives. Contemplating with distaste America’s “unregenerate citizens,” he said that “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities.” Therefore, Croly said, national life should be a “school” taught by the government: “The exigencies of such schooling frequently demand severe coercive measures, but what schooling does not?” Unregenerate Americans would be “saved many costly perversions” if “the official schoolmasters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor insubordinate.”

Subordination is dependency seen from above. Today, it is seen approvingly by progressives imposing, from above, their dependency agenda.

There is no school choice here; no voucher will enable Americans to escape from enveloping dependency on this “government as school.” The dependency agenda is progressive education for children of all ages, meaning all ages treated as children.

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…the basic system works; but that is no excuse for ignoring areas where it could be reformed. In the House the main outrage is gerrymandering. Tortuously shaped “safe” Republican and Democratic seats mean that the real battles are fought among party activists for their party’s nomination. This leads candidates to pander to extremes, and lessens the chances of bipartisan co-operation. An independent commission, already in existence in some states, would take out much of the sting. In the Senate the filibuster is used too often, in part because it is too easy. Senators who want to talk out a bill ought to be obliged to do just that, not rely on a simple procedural vote: voters could then see exactly who was obstructing what.

These defects and others should be corrected. But even if they are not, they do not add up to a system that is as broken as people now claim. American democracy has its peaks and troughs; attempts to reform it dramatically, such as California’s initiative craze, have a mixed history, to put it mildly. Rather than regretting how the Republicans in Congress have behaved, Mr Obama should look harder at his own use of his presidential power.

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How polarized is America today? Not all that polarized by historical standards. In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman beat a Massachusetts Senator half to death with his cane in the Senate chamber ”” and received dozens of new canes from appreciative fans. In 1905, Idaho miners bombed the house of a former governor who had tried to break their union. In 1965, an anti”“Vietnam War activist stationed himself outside the office of the Secretary of Defense and, holding his year-old daughter in his arms, set himself on fire. (She lived; he did not.) By that measure, a Rush Limbaugh rant isn’t particularly divisive. Americans may yell at one another about politics, but we mostly leave our guns and bombs at home, which is an improvement….

What really defines our political era, as Ronald Brownstein notes in his book The Second Civil War, is not the polarization of Americans but the polarization of American government. In the country at large, the disputes are real but manageable. But in Washington, crossing party lines to resolve them has become excruciatingly rare.

The result, unsurprisingly, is that Americans don’t like Washington very much. According to a CNN poll conducted in mid-February, 62% of Americans say most members of Congress do not deserve re-election, up 10 points from 2006. Public skepticism about the Federal Government and its ability to solve problems is nothing new, but the discontent is greater today than it has been in at least a decade and a half. Witness the growth of the Tea Party movement, a diffuse conglomeration of forces that have coalesced around nothing so much as a shared hostility toward Washington. Or the Feb. 15 announcement by Indiana Senator Evan Bayh ”” a man who almost made it onto three presidential tickets ”” that he would not stand for re-election because “Congress is not operating as it should” and “even in a time of enormous challenge, the people’s business is not getting done.”

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The U.S. men’s hockey team held off the powerful host Canadians to earn a bye to Wednesday’s quarterfinals. It marks the first time the United States has beaten Canada in a men’s Olympic hockey game since 1960 in Squaw Valley, where the Americans stole a gold medal from the favored Canadians and Russians.

“I still think we’ve got a long way to go,” Team USA coach Ron Wilson cautioned. “There are some great teams out there.”

He cited Canada as a team he thinks is still the best in the tournament despite the American’s win, which forced the disappointed hosts into a qualifying game against Germany on Tuesday.

Wilson might be right.

Goalie Ryan Miller was just awesome. Read it all.

I’m not suggesting that without Christian belief you can’t have these commitments. My point is that, now more than ever, we need to be able in the political and economic context to spell out what our commitments are and why, what kind of human character we want to see. Politics left to managers, and economics left to brokers add up to a recipe for social and environmental chaos, and threaten the possibilities for full humanity. To resist, we need vision; and whether we are religious or not, we need all the resources available for strengthening and deepening that vision.

It necessitates the cultivation of virtue, a word that is hard for many to take seriously. But it’s high time we reclaimed it. We have no other way of talking about the qualities of human behaviour that make us more than reactive and self-protective ”“ courage, foresight, self-critical awareness and concern for balanced universal welfare, which, under various names, have been part of the vocabulary of European ethics for 2,500 years.

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Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
I’ll be re-reading the Ascent of Mount Carmel by St John of the Cross. Since my first reading of it in my twenties it has been the compass for everything I’ve ever thought about prayer as being stripped of all illusions, images and self-pleasing thoughts to come face to face with Truth in person.

Baroness Cox, founder, the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust
Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence, An Omnibus Edition of His Works, translated by Algar Thorold, revised by John Joyce and introduced by Professor David Knowles. Why? Because I feel I need to do more of this.

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So all is coming right. Sales of existing homes in the final quarter of last year were 27.2% above the 2008 level. Home construction jumped 2.8% in January, to its highest level in six months. The mining, manufacturing and utilities sectors also grew at satisfactory rates as did retail sales.

So confident is the Federal Reserve in the recovery that it has raised a key interest rate.

Alas, every silver lining has a cloud ”” in the case of the American economy, several. For one thing, the fiscal deficit, which is fuelling some of the growth, is clearly unsustainable. Even under the rosy scenario posited by the president ”” economic growth at about twice the rate the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is predicting ”” the deficit will still be unsustainably high, and rising, in 2020.

Congress knows this, the president knows this, and the opposition knows this. But the Democrats want to fill the gap by raising taxes, anathema to Republicans, who fear such a move would stifle growth by reducing entrepreneurs’ incentive to create new businesses and jobs. The Republicans want to cut spending, a move the Democrats say would stifle growth by prematurely withdrawing a prop from a fragile recovery.

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Well, on balance the sad news is that [foreign aid] hasn’t worked. It hasn’t achieved the objectives that we had for the foreign aid program. The number one objective, of course, was to promote economic growth out of poverty for the aid receiving countries, and there we see a clear failure. The most aid-intensive countries have actually stagnated over the last fifty years. They’ve failed to see a rise in their living standards. That includes especially sub-Saharan Africa, some of the poorer Caribbean and Pacific Islands.

It’s been wasted both in actual corruption of aid money being stolen, because a lot of aid does go to very corrupt governments, and it’s also just been wasted bureaucratically by the ineffectual bureaucracies and the aid organizations themselves and in the ineffectual bureaucracies of the governments that receive the aid money.

Most of the success stories did not get a lot of aid, and most of the countries that did get a lot of aid are not success stories. We always have something in statistics we call confirmation bias, that if you strongly believe a given idea like aid works then you select a couple examples that fit the story. But when we look at the whole range of experience of success and failure, I’m afraid there is no reason to believe that aid has contributed to success.

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“Confession” is a word that strikes fear in the hearts of many who grew up under a stricter model than the Episcopal Church offers. We have the General Confession as part of our weekly service, but we also have private confessions available by appointment. This comes as a surprise to many, but I assure you it’s true. We don’t use little booths for confession, we hold them in more comfortable manner, such as in an office. Still, confession and pastoral conversations are ways to address some of the issues that surface during our meditations, issues that can reach anywhere from slight embarrassment to perhaps making us feel unloved or unworthy of the love of God. And sometimes the issues are not of a negative nature, but calls of discernment. Sometimes there are goals or projects or even life changes that are exciting and scary and silence brings them up too.

—The Rev. Bernard W. Poppe of Saint George’s Episcopal Church in Maplewood, New Jersey

The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia hedged on recognizing same-sex unions Saturday, instead voting to form a committee to set standards for church-sanctioned blessings of such unions once they are approved by the entire 2-million-member Episcopal Church.

About 346 delegates to the dioceses annual council meeting at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria narrowly voted — by a show of hands — to form the committee.

It was a less radical choice for the 80,000-member Virginia diocese, the largest in the Episcopal Church. A substitute amendment suggesting the diocese allow openly gay clergy and same-sex blessings failed after a lengthy debate.

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Indonesia’s leading clerics are considering a religious edict against riding a motorbike without a crash helmet to promote safety on the chaotic and deadly roads of the world’s most populous Muslim country.

Such a fatwa would not carry a penalty for those who ignore it, but advocates said Sunday making road safety a moral issue could be more effective than the law.

Helmets have been compulsory in Indonesia since 1988, but a 2005 government study found that up to 30 percent of riders in cities still did not wear one. Even fewer riders wear them in rural areas.

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In addition to providing hospitality and programs at 25 different places in Metro Vancouver, the group is also supporting social justice initiatives in the city such as the memorial march for murdered and missing women and raising money for homeless people.

Some Vancouverites are uncomfortable with this mixing of religion and the Olympics. But the two have long been entwined, going right back to the origin of the Games themselves.

Back then, “there was no such thing as secular athletics,” says David Gilman Romano, director of Greek Archaeological Projects at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.

His museum’s website notes that the ancient Games were part of a religious festival in honour of Zeus, the father of the Greek gods and goddesses. The name of the Games themselves comes from Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece and home to those same deities.

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MR. GREGORY: The fight is going to be tough. As you have said, there are questions about how long the U.S. will be there in the fight, whether the Afghan army is capable enough to take over that fight. What should Americans expect as there’s more engagement, as there’s more fighting, in terms of U.S. losses?

GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, David, the same as in the surge in Iraq. When we go on the offensive, when we take away sanctuaries and safe havens from the Taliban and the other extremist elements that we and our Afghan and coalition partners are fighting in that country, they’re going to fight back. And we’re seeing that in Marja. We will see that in other areas. But we are going after them across the spectrum. We have more of our special, special operations forces going in on the ground, and you’ve seen the results, you’ve heard some of the initial results of that with more Afghan shadow governors, the Taliban shadow governors being captured, more of the high value targets being taken down. Then, through the spectrum of providing additional security for the people, supporting additional training of Afghan security forces, as I mentioned, 100,000 more of those over the course of the next year and a half or so. And then also, out on the local defense and even the reintegration of reconcilables effort that will be pursued and is being pursued with the Afghan government.

MR. GREGORY: But U.S. losses, significant?

GEN. PETRAEUS: They’ll be tough. They were tough in Iraq. Look, I am–I have repeatedly said that these types of efforts are hard, and they’re hard all the time. I don’t use words like “optimist” or “pessimist,” I use realist. And the reality is that it’s hard. But we’re there for a very, very important reason, and we can’t forget that, David. We’re in Afghanistan to ensure that it cannot once again be a sanctuary for the kind of attacks that were carried out on 9/11, which were planned initially in Kandahar, first training done in eastern Afghanistan before the attackers moved to Hamburg and then onto U.S. flight schools.

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Haji Abdul Manaf, the district governor for this region of Helmand province, was incensed.

An employee from the agricultural ministry of the provincial government refuses to come to Nawa unless he is assured a desk and a telephone at the district headquarters, where those items are in short supply.

Improving crop yields and persuading farmers to plant wheat rather than the poppies that produce heroin are key points in the U.S.- NATO coalition’s plans to upgrade the standard of living in this farm belt in southern Afghanistan.

But for months, Manaf has been unable to get the support he wants from the provincial government.

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Senior church leaders in West Yorkshire have called on politicians to focus on narrowing the gap between rich and poor during the General Election.

In a joint declaration, the leaders of all the major churches in the region warned that inequality “strains the sinews of society”.

The “Every Person Matters” statement was signed on Ash Wednesday in Bradford and states: “Nationally, and across Yorkshire, the wide gap between the richest and poorest people brings mental and physical illness, rising crime and fear of crime, and lowers educational results.

“An unsustainable divide between levels of wealth and poverty leads to disrespect for other people and a strain on family life and social order.”

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Words like “peace” and “mercy” are vital to talking about Christianity. They’re just two of many English words difficult to translate smoothly as an evolving Episcopal congregation tries to create a Hmong version of the denomination’s Book of Common Prayer.

“Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. You can see it is important,” said Cher Lor, a member of the congregation at Holy Apostles, an Episcopal church in St. Paul that is the only Hmong-majority congregation across the entire denomination. “But the word mercy itself, we don’t have in Hmong. So we are using ‘hulb,’ which is a concept something like love. We believe that is the closest.”

The Book of Common Prayer is the foundational text of the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion. Its roots trace to the Church of England’s split from Roman Catholicism in the 16th century, and ever since it has dictated morning and evening prayers, the rites of Holy Communion, baptism, marriage and funeral services, and much more. It typically runs to about 1,000 pages.

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In [Peter] Beckwith’s absence, the diocese’s standing committee, made up of four clergy members and four lay people, will carry on day-to-day activities, according to the Venerable Shawn Denney, the diocesan archdeacon. The standing committee has also begun the election process, with guidelines and nomination forms going out last week.

A nominating synod will whittle the list to four or five candidates, who will meet with clergy and church members at several locales in the diocese. An electing synod, made up of clergy and lay delegates from the various congregations, is scheduled to convene in mid-September to finalize the choice.

The candidate is then put on the national stage, to the bishops and dioceses’ standing committees.

Carlinville’s Bettman said he hopes the diocese doesn’t get a re-play of what happened in the Diocese of South Carolina in 2007. The electing synod’s first vote to name the Right Rev. Mark Lawrence, a conservative, was declared void. Lawrence was subsequently re-elected, approved and consecrated bishop in 2008.

“It’s hard to come up with a majority sometimes,” said Bettman. “It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. “People have deep-held beliefs (about their candidates.)”

Denney said the timeline is realistic and that the process is not being rushed.

“We have everything lined up,” he said. “There’s no reason the selection of the bishop can’t take place.”

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The diocese revoked the affiliation because the school’s board of trustees includes some of St. Paul’s major financial backers who have influence in the school’s direction.

The switch to what the diocese calls a patron-controlled model “disregards generally accepted practices for a school of this kind.”

Ten of 17 board members resigned over the issue, including Craig Anderson, bishop and representative of the diocese, and Jonathan Weldon, priest-in-charge of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

“Because this new direction is inconsistent with the identity, heritage and core values of the current school and because opposing the financial backers presents unacceptable financial risks to the school, we must resign our trusteeship,” stated a resignation letter signed by all 10 members.

Sadler disagrees with their view, saying the board will still be independent and include parent and teacher representatives, as well as others. There will be a change to the board’s bylaws, however, removing the bishop designee and priest.

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