Under the canons of the Episcopal Church (III.11.4), a majority of bishops exercising jurisdiction and diocesan standing committees must consent to a bishop-elect’s ordination as bishop within 120 days of receiving notice of the election.

The consent process for the Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool, who was elected the day after Bruce as a second bishop suffragan in Los Angeles, has not yet been completed. The diocese said March 3 that Glasspool had received 55 of the 56 standing committee consents needed. That information is unofficial, pending verification by the presiding bishop’s office. There is no official information about the number of bishops with jurisdiction who have consented to Glasspool’s ordination and consecration, which is also scheduled for May 15. The 120-day process for Glasspool lasts until May 8 and the diocese has been updating the process each Wednesday on its website here.

As outlined under Canon III.11.4 (a) for every bishop election, the presiding bishop confirms the receipt of consents from a majority of bishops with jurisdiction, and reviews the evidence of consents from diocesan standing committees sent to her by the standing committee of the electing diocese.

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Here’s the kind of question that might violate the rules you learned about proper dinner conversation: Does President Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee need to be a Protestant?

If Justice John Paul Stevens decides to call it a career after he turns 90 next month, the Supreme Court would for the first time in its history be without a justice belonging to America’s largest religious affiliations.

Perhaps that would mean only that religion is no longer important in the mix of experience and expertise that a president seeks in a Supreme Court nominee. There was a time, of course, in which there was a “Catholic seat” on the court, followed in 1916 with the appointment of the court’s first Jew. The days when one of each seemed sufficient are long over.

Catholics became a majority of the nine-member court in 2006 with the confirmation of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. Justice Sonia Sotomayor made it six last summer. And the other two justices besides Stevens are Jewish.

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Pastor Yohanna Gyang Jugu, of Church of Christ in Nigeria, sat outside his burned-down church, tears in his eyes.

“We were sleeping and we heard gunshots all around,” he said. “I woke up and went outside. There was nowhere to pass. Fulani men had surrounded the village. They caught my wife and killed her, and my daughter. They were cutting people down with machetes.”

During the burial service, Solomn Zang, the commissioner for works and transport in Plateau State, where Dogo Nahawa is located, said that the military was not sufficient for protection.

“God willing, we will do something about this,” he said. “Next time if this happens you shouldn’t call the police or the military, call on your neighbors to come and fight.”

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As religion is the corner-stone on which alone we have attempted to rear the fabric of morality, the degree of attention which it has received in the instruction and discipline of the Institute, forms another topic in our report. And here while the retrospect affords cause for congratulation that much has been done, it still leaves room for regret that much also has been left undone. It would be an affectation of modesty, however, to disclaim the consciousness that in all our plans and operations, there has been a uniform and earnest endeavor to sustain our religious professions. Accordingly, pains have been taken to give interest to the services of the chapel, and the decorum with which these have been attended by the students has been peculiarly gratifying. The regular and private reading of the Holy Scriptures has been a prescribed, duty and provision made for it in the daily routine of business. Portions of the inspired volume have been explained, after having been committed to memory, weekly; as also the Catechism and Services of the Episcopal Church. The observance of the Lord’s day has been enforced, on the one hand, with a moderation which perceives the danger of rendering its duties tedious and irksome; yet on the other, with a strictness which would guard against the opposite and more common error, of allowing it to relax into a mere holiday for indulgence and amusement. With this view, the tasks of a sacred character required on Sundays have been light, while alluring and persuasive methods have been varied and multiplied, to induce a profitable employment of the time not appropriated to devotional exercises. We thus have succeeded, to an encouraging extent, in preserving the appropriate quiet of the day, and in using it as a means of spiritual edification, without investing it with the gloom and repulsiveness which not unfrequently counteract the beneficent design of the institution; a point which every one practically acquainted with the government of the young, will acknowledge to be as difficult as any other within the sphere of Christian education. In like manner we have been careful to render all the associations of Religion agreeable. Aware, too, that in moral culture, it is the indirect influence which the young disciple is exposed, in the tone and manner of things and in the every day habits of those around him, that operates to the formation of his sentiments and character more powerfully than any repetition of precepts or formal exhibition of example, we have endeavored that religion should be viewed as the source of contentment and self-government to its possessors, and not at variance with the declaration that its ways are “ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace.” Pious sensibility has been tenderly cherished whenever it has appeared, and in awakening it, much has been done in the way of private and familiar conversation.

—William Augustus Muhlenberg, Christian Education (1831)

The state budget presented six weeks ago by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon may have overestimated revenues by as much as $1 billion, lawmakers warned Tuesday.

The stunning deficit could force lawmakers to go beyond program and service cuts to consider major structural changes to state government.

“It is clear that even as Missouri’s economy begins to rebound, state revenues will continue to lag for a prolonged period of time,” Nixon, a Democrat, said in a statement Monday. “As a result, we will need to downsize the scope of state government, while protecting necessary services to the citizens of Missouri.”

That announcement was underscored Tuesday by the release of state revenues for February, which showed a year-to-date decline of 12.7 percent compared with this time last year, and a 14.6 percent drop in revenues for February.

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The Reformation was bad for England, and the nation would do well to become a Catholic country again.

This was the affirmation proposed by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor on Tuesday during a debate hosted by The Spectator magazine as part of its debate series. The topic under discussion was “England Should Be a Catholic Country Again,” and the cardinal — who is a retired archbishop of Westminster — was joined by author Piers Paul Read and Dom Antony Sutch, parish priest of St. Benets Catholic Church, in speaking for the motion.

Speaking against the motion were Lord Richard Harries, retired Anglican bishop of Oxford; Matthew Parris, former Conservative Member of Parliament and currently a columnist for the Times; and Stephen Pound, Labour Party Member of Parliament.

Though affirming that the Reformation “brought a tremendous loss to this country,” the core of Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor’s contribution focused on an ecumenical vision.

“My vision is for the English Church, united with all its history and genius, is to be aligned and in communion with the billion and more Catholic Christians throughout the world, with 4,000 or 5,000 bishops and in communion with the Bishop of Rome, the Pope,” he said.

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Urgent warnings have been circulated throughout Nato and the European Union for secret intelligence material to be protected from a recent surge in cyberwar attacks originating in China.

The attacks have also hit government and military institutions in the United States, where analysts said that the West had no effective response and that EU systems were especially vulnerable because most cyber security efforts were left to member states.

Nato diplomatic sources told The Times: “Everyone has been made aware that the Chinese have become very active with cyber-attacks and we’re now getting regular warnings from the office for internal security.” The sources said that the number of attacks had increased significantly over the past 12 months, with China among the most active players.

In the US, an official report released on Friday said the number of attacks on Congress and other government agencies had risen exponentially in the past year to an estimated 1.6 billion every month.

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There are basically two kinds of homeowners on Dana Lane ”” those who bought high like the Sandovals, and those who had been there awhile and saw their equity ballooning until it stopped.

“Like everybody else, I’m in an upside-down loan,” says Brenda Moore, who owes more than $300,000 on her mortgage. This is remarkable considering she bought her house in 1989 for $80,000. A search of public records reveals that Moore, a retired nurse, has refinanced her home eight times since 1998.

The loans are from a who’s who of subprime lenders. With each loan she took out more equity, and each time the loan terms got worse.

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Almighty God, who hast revealed to thy Church thine eternal Being of glorious majesty and perfect love as one God in Trinity of Persons: Give us grace that, like thy bishop Gregory of Nyssa, we may continue steadfast in the confession of this faith, and constant in our worship of thee, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who livest and reignest now and for ever.

He went away from there and came to his own country; and his disciples followed him. And on the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue; and many who heard him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get all this? What is the wisdom given to him? What mighty works are wrought by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. And Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands upon a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief.

–Mark 6:1-6a

O Thou who hast prepared a place for my soul, prepare my soul for that place. Prepare it with holiness; prepare it with desire; and even while it sojourneth upon earth, let it dwell in heaven with thee, beholding the beauty of thy countenance and the glory of thy saints, now and for evermore.

China’s central bank chief laid the groundwork for an appreciation of the renminbi at the weekend when he described the current dollar peg as temporary, striking a more emollient tone after months of tough opposition in Beijing to a shift in exchange rate policy.

Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, gave the strongest hint yet from a senior official that China would abandon the unofficial dollar peg, in place since mid-2008. He said it was a “special” policy to weather the financial crisis.

“This is a part of our package of policies for dealing with the global financial crisis. Sooner or later, we will exit the policies.”

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College graduates are more likely to consider the Ten Commandments irrelevant, and reject the Bible as the word of God, than those with no college degree, according to a recent study.

A “distinct shift” occurs after college regarding beliefs and opinion, said Richard Brake, director of university studies at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

The ISI surveyed 2,508 Americans on questions intended to measure the impact of a college degree on people’s beliefs. The Wilmington, Del.-based ISI has administered the survey for the past three years.

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Iraq election workers began tallying votes from 47,000 polling stations across the country Monday, a day after the country pulled off a landmark vote despite scattered dozens of explosions that went off in Baghdad and in other parts of the country.

At the bustling headquarters of the Iraqi High Electoral Commission (IHEC), cheers went up as the first boxes of tally sheets from individual polling stations arrived. The boxes, from polling sites from the Rasafah district of Baghdad, were put through metal detectors before dozens of IHEC employees began unsealing the envelopes.

The IHEC said 62.4 percent of eligible Iraqis voted. That’s down from an official figure of 79.6 percent in the last parliamentary elections, when Shiite Arab and Kurdish voters turned out in huge numbers, but represents the first national parliamentary elections with wide Sunni Arab participation.

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Certainly, religion is one of the many dividing lines in Jos and elsewhere in Nigeria. But it is not the main one.

In Jos, as elsewhere, the cause of fighting has, more often been the struggle for resources than it has religion. In Jos, my AFP colleague Aminu Abubakar reports that the original cause of the latest clash was the alleged theft of cattle, blamed by a group of settler-farmers on a group of cattle herders. Often the fighting in the north is between the semi-nomadic cattle herders (who happen to be mostly Muslim) and settler-farmers (who happen to be mostly Christian), fighting about the diminishing access to land.

“For all those who will go out and fight their Muslim or Christian brothers on the streets, there are many more (Nigerians) who will take them into their home to protect them, when fighting breaks out,” a Nigerian Islamic law student once told me, attending an animist festival in the south.

The reason these conflicts turn deadly in Nigeria is not any greater degree of religious animosity there than elsewhere, however much exists. The reason is poor government: one that fails to send in troops early enough to quell trouble when it flares and never jails those responsible when it is over. Mediation of disputes is too often left to others, too.

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Like the diocesan chancellor, Bishop Lawrence viewed the TEC attorney’s actions as adversarial and a challenge to his and the diocese’s authority. Lawrence asked members of the diocese to not strike out in unilateral directions and told them he would be communicating to them in the days leading up to their new convention date.

The Diocese of South Carolina and its bishop have been critical of the national church. In October of 2009, the diocese voted, among other things, that it would limit its involvement with TEC bodies that assented to actions contrary to the faith.

It also appears that the Diocese of South Carolina will not join in an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the case against All Saint’s Waccamaw Island.

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The Vatican’s chief of doctrine said Saturday that the whole point of talks on Anglican-Catholic religious unity is to bring the Protestants back to Rome.

William Cardinal Levada, prefect the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, told a dinner of about 300 in Kingston that “union with the Catholic Church is the goal of ecumenism (at least), we phrase it that way.

“Yet the very process of moving towards union works a change in churches …”

The Catholic Church is enriched when another group adds its means of worship, although he hastened to add it would not be any “essential elements of sanctification or truth.” Those were already provided to the Church by Christ.

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According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s figures, Oregon has grown in population from 3,421,399 in 2000 to 3,825,657 in 2009. This represents a population growth of approximately 11.82%.

According to Episcopal Church statistics, the Diocese of Oregon went from Average Sunday Attendance (or ASA) of 7,553 in 1998 to 6,924 in 2008. This represents an ASA decline of about 8% over this ten year period.

In order to generate a pictorial chart of some Oregon diocesan statistics, please go [url=http://www.episcopalchurch.org/growth_60791_ENG_HTM.htm?menupage=50929]here[/url] and enter “Oregon” in the second line down under “Diocese” and then click on “View Diocese Chart” under the third line to the left.

The Diocese of Oregon’ website may be found here.

…any time the word “bomb” comes up at all ”” in a lesson on a war in history, in a novel in literature class ”” kids start laughing and pointing at …[my nephew].

It’s a problem that’s affecting his slang.

“Everybody’s favorite phrase is ‘That’s the bomb.’ You know, like ‘That video game’s the bomb.’ But I can’t say that because kids will make fun of me.”

What’s a parent to do?

“Do the teachers know this is going on?” I asked.

“Sure, they see it and they hear it. But they’d rather not get involved. Mostly, they just pretend that it’s not there.”

“I’ve told him I can come to his school and talk to the principal, the teachers, the kids, whoever,” said his father, an immigrant from India who works as an engineer and moved to this particular suburb for the good schools and seeming openness to diversity.

My nephew reacted like I would have when I was 14 ”” as if he’d rather be run over by a truck than have his father come to school to talk about what a great religion Islam is….

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I agree with Richard Harries’ defence of faith groups who want to conduct civil partnerships in places of worship. But I really dislike the way he poses as a defender of religious liberty. We Lords-spiritual have no right to oppose them holding civil ceremonies in places of worship, he loftily says: “it would harm no one, and it accords with their deepest religious convictions. Religious freedom is indivisible”. This is laughable. For an Anglican bishop to say this is like a Thatcherite saying “compassion must always come first”.

The Church of England has many things going for it: it has lovely buildings, lovely music, lovely liturgies, lovely literature, and a lovely habit of theological vagueness. But it does not have the moral high ground in terms of religious liberty. Indeed it is founded on the denial of religious liberty. This is too often obscured by its reputation for “liberalism”, which is based in the fact that it is more liberal than certain other churches on certain issues, and manages to find a few nice people to say nice things on Thought for the Day.

According to the vague, lazy orthodoxy about our history, the C of E is deeply entwined in the story of British liberalism. From the time of the first Elizabeth, did this Church not nurture the distinctive English tradition of toleration, pluralism, fair play? Did it not reject the authoritarian ways of another church we won’t name, and choose freedom? No, actually. It is truer to say that our tradition of liberty arose in opposition to the established Church.

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The Rt Revd Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has complained of a “strident and bully­ing campaign” to marginalise Chris­tianity in the UK.

At a symposium organised in the House of Lords last week by the Christian Broadcasting Council, Lord Carey said: “Christianity, which has given so much to our country, is now being sidelined as never before as though it is a stranger to our nation.”

Britain had “reached a point”, he said, “where politicians are mocked for merely expressing their faith. I cannot imagine any politician expres­sing concern that Britain should remain a Christian country. That reticence is a scandal and a disgrace to our history.”

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I mention that some Christian theologians seem to say that Allah is not the same God as the Judaeo-Christian God. At that question, Dr Nazir-Ali becomes visibly uncomfortable. He pauses a long time, formulating his reply, as if his life depended on the answer.

The terrifying truth is that, in modern Britain, his life could indeed depend on how he answers this question. He knows this well, for he has received death threats in the past, and has been under police protection.

“I would say that Islam has a sense of the God of the Bible but, for various reasons, understands the nature of that God, and God’s action in the world, quite differently,” he says.
I then ask whether he regards it as an open theological question as to whether they are the same.

He replies quickly: “I don’t think that they are the same. Muslims, like everyone else, have some sense of the One God… but the way in which they understand the nature and the work of that God is very different from the Judaeo-Christian way.

“While Islam wants to take power to change the world, Christianity is about turning away from power to change the world. And that has to do with a view of God. We have a God who humbled himself and took the form of a slave, and accepted death. And that is the source of Christian power, the Cross. So, clearly, in any Christian view of polity, and Muslim view of polity, there must be a radical difference.

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This new program of legal mayhem began with the filing of this suit against the parish of St. Francis Anglican Church in Turlock. St. Francis is a duly constituted member of the only true Diocese of San Joaquin, and wants nothing to do with the non-Diocese. But the non-Diocese wants to claim its property and assets — its bank accounts, its prayer books and altar furnishings, and the building which it owns, and in which it worships.

How can this be? Well might you ask. For in the make-believe world of Bishop Lamb, the Presiding Bishop and President Anderson, St. Francis still “belongs” in some fashion to ECUSA — in their eyes, it never left. And so they want to “embrace” it in their loving grasp, and to take all of its property and assets. Never mind that although there are some Episcopalian parishioners in Turlock, who are worshipping for the time being in other premises, they by themselves would not be enough to maintain and insure the property, and pay for a full-time rector. If the Anglican parishioners choose not to return to the fold and support their church, well, the Episcopal remnant will just run through the parish bank accounts until the property can be sold to someone else (but certainly not to the Anglicans, because they are in “competition”, and the Presiding Bishop is dead-set against helping “competitors”), and then that money can be used to prop up the non-Diocese. What a wonderful and Christian-like plan!

And now, as I have reported, the non-Diocese has embarked on a program to sue all of the individually incorporated parishes in the Anglican Diocese, using the St. Francis complaint as a template. A second such lawsuit has now been filed against St. Michael’s in Ridgecrest, and still others are in the works. Each of the lawsuits seeks a “declaration” from the court where it has been filed that the parish corporation’s assets are held in trust for ECUSA and Bishop Lamb’s group, and so cannot be controlled or used by the people who are the current vestry members and clergy. (The latter have been “deposed”, don’t you remember? So they cannot function in an Episcopal church, and must be made to hand their churches over to those who will “loyally guard and preserve the Parish Premises and Parish Assets for the mission of the Church, . . . adhere to the Church and Diocesan Canons and . . . protect and serve loyal Episcopalians in the Parish”, to quote from paragraph 80 of the complaint.)

Other lawsuits against the remaining incorporated parishes in the Diocese of San Joaquin are surely coming….

Read it carefully and follow all the links.

The Diocese of Rio Grande and the Episcopal Church thought they’d received a favorable court ruling in a property dispute involving a breakaway congregation.

Then the judge changed his mind and ordered both parties to appear in 210th District Court in El Paso County, Texas, on March 3.

“He basically said he wants to make a decision based on findings of fact, that he wants this to go to trial, either a bench trial or a jury trial,” said diocesan associate chancellor Bill Juvrud in a March 3 telephone interview from his office. No trial date has been set.

“We’ve been in the middle of litigation on this for awhile,” acknowledged Juvrud.

The case stems from the Oct. 21, 2008 vote by a majority of members of St. Francis on-the-Hill Episcopal Church in El Paso to disaffiliate from the local diocese and from the Episcopal Church.

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Given its focus and central argument, it is particularly alarming that the address offers no engagement with Scripture or Christian tradition or Anglican teaching either in relation to sexuality or in its attempt to argue that ethical diversity in this area is legitimate. Although many of the practical implications of his argument for diversity remain rather vague it is clear that he is seeking to move the Church of England and the Communion away from its current position. In so doing he also makes a number of claims in passing that raise deeper theological questions about the nature of sin and grace and the relation of church and society.

In summary, the general position advocated is one which would move the Church of England away not only from its current teaching but also from its methodology of careful, rigorous engagement with the complexities of this subject rooted in Scripture, tradition and wider ecumenical reflections. What is being advocated instead is the sort of approach taken by the North American provinces which has moved from the seemingly uncritical (and theologically undefended) acceptance of a diversity of views on sexuality within a small part of Christ’s church to the inevitable abandonment of traditional teaching and discipline within the Anglican province and then to the marginalisation and exclusion of those who seek to uphold the biblical and traditional Christian sexual ethic. It is, sadly, for that reason, that the address is of such significance and concern and merits careful analysis, critique and engagement from the wider church, including others in episcopal leadership.

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“This is not a criminal proceeding,” Weinstein says. “We are talking about a code of conduct, which, I want to emphasize, both students and their parents sign before they begin any extracurricular activity, and they’ve all agreed to it.”

The code of conduct specifically prohibits students from consuming alcohol or drugs away from school.

Tenth-grader Justin Janowski says he doesn’t like the policy and thinks parents should be the ones making decisions about how to punish their kids outside of school. But he grudgingly admits the policy is effective.

“I mean, when I was a wrestler and played football like that’s one thing I didn’t want to do was get kicked off the team for getting bad grades. Or I don’t know, get caught smoking cigarettes outside of school, so I didn’t do it,” says Janowksi. “I stayed good.”

Janowski attends high school in a nearby district with the same policy. In the past decade, following the Columbine shooting, schools have suspended students for all sorts of misdeeds away from campus ”” vandalism, minor drug possession or cyber-bullying. Courts have tended to uphold these policies as long as officials can show some connection to school safety. But beyond the legal issues, there is also rigorous debate about whether “zero-tolerance” policies are effective.

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While Britain was panicking about a sterling crisis and the terrifying financial consequences of a hung parliament, I spent last week in Japan. It was a good vantage point to put Britain’s financial and political travails into perspective.

Japan’s budget deficit of 10.5 per cent of GDP is this year second to Britain’s among the G7 countries, but in every other respect the fiscal situation in Japan is far worse. Because the Japanese Government has borrowed similarly prodigious sums almost every year since 1990, it carries by far the world’s heaviest debt load, with net public debt now running at 115 per cent of GDP, about the same as in Italy and Greece. And there is not the slightest prospect of any reduction in borrowing in the foreseeable future because of the political situation in Japan. It has had four prime ministers in three years, its civil service is in more or less open warfare with the elected politicians and there has been no effective government since the resignation of Junichiro Koizumi in 2006.

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(The above is my title, you can see his by going to the link below–KSH)

The Christian churches in the United States are in trouble for all the usual reasons ”” human sinfulness and selfishness, the temptations of life in an affluent society, doctrinal and moral controversies and uncertainties and on and on and on ”” but also and to a surprisingly large degree they are in trouble because they are trying to address the problems of the twenty first century with a business model and a set of tools that date from the middle of the twentieth. The mainline churches in particular are organized like General Motors was organized in the 1950s: they have cost structures and operating procedures that simply don’t work today. They are organized around what I’ve been calling the blue social model, built by rules that don’t work anymore, and oriented to a set of ideas that are well past their sell-by date.

Without even questioning it, most churchgoers assume that a successful church has its own building and a full-time staff including one or more professionally trained leaders (ordained or not depending on the denomination). Perhaps no more than half of all congregations across the country can afford this at all; most manage only by neglecting maintenance on their buildings or otherwise by cutting corners. And even when they manage to make the payroll and keep the roof in repair, congregations spend most of their energy just keeping the show going from year to year. The life of the community centers around the attempt to maintain a model of congregational life that doesn’t work, can’t work, won’t work no matter how hard they try. People who don’t like futile tasks have a tendency to wander off and do other things and little by little the life and vitality (and the rising generations) drift away.
At the next level up, there is another level of ecclesiastical bureaucrats and officials staffing regional offices. When my dad was a young priest in the Episcopal diocese of North Carolina back in the late 1950s the bishop had a secretary and that was pretty much it for diocesan staff. These days the Episcopal church is in decline, with perhaps a third to a half or more of its parishes unable to meet their basic expenses and with members dying off or drifting away much faster than new people come through the door ”” but no respectable bishop would be caught dead with the pathetic staff with which Bishop Baker ran a healthy and growing diocese in North Carolina back in the 1950s. (Bishop Baker was impressive in another way; he could tie his handkerchief into the shape of a bunny rabbit, put it flat on the palm of his hand, and have it hop off. I was only six when he showed me this trick, but it was clear to me that this man had something special to offer. Since that time I’ve traveled all over the world and met bishops, archbishops, cardinals and even a pope ”” but none of them made quite the impression on me that Bishop Baker and his jumping handkerchief did.)

Bishops today in their sinking, decaying dioceses surround themselves with large staffs who hold frequent meetings and no doubt accomplish many wonderful things, although nobody outside the office ever quite knows what these are. And it isn’t just Anglicans. Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, UCC, the whole crowd has pretty much the same story to tell. Staffs grow; procedures flourish and become ever more complex; more and more years of school are required from an increasingly ”˜professional’ church staff: everything gets better and better every year ”” except somehow the churches keep shrinking. Inside, the professionals are pretty busy jumping through hoops and writing memos to each other and grand sweeping statements of support for raising the minimum wage and other noble causes ”” but outside the regional headquarters and away from the hum of the computers and printers, local congregations lose members, watch their buildings fall year by year into greater disrepair, and in the end they close their doors.

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It is hard to overestimate the hostility that the philosophical community has shown toward evolutionary psychology. With very few exceptions — although I am skeptical about much I am prepared to take it seriously — it is hated and despised, often, it seems to me, on less than convincing grounds. (Misreading statistics and so forth.) But even if the objections are well taken, this does not explain the visceral hostility. My strong suspicion is that the philosophers are using their clever critiques to mask the same fear as that of Bishop Wilberforce. The nonbelievers stand side by side with the believers in wanting humans on a unique, higher-than-anyone-else pinnacle.

The fact is, however, that we are animals and we were produced by natural selection, so even if you reject evolutionary psychology you had better get over your worries and start looking for a convincing and profitable approach. A number of people have been trying to do this, showing how culture is connected to our biology and how this connection has been shaped by selection. Leaders in this direction are Californian researchers Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd. In their Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, they argue that culture is influenced and spread because humans have certain biases or tendencies — biases or tendencies rooted in selection — that direct the success of some ideas or practices over others….

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To the young Tom Hanks, history was as dull as an algebra equation. For Hanks ”” a classic baby boomer, born in 1956 ”” World War II was just a string of long-ago muzzle flashes in black-and-white. Yet he did have a more direct connection to the global cataclysm. His father had been a U.S. Naval mechanic (second class) in World War II. But Amos Hanks wasn’t the type to tell his son tales of bravery and sacrifice. “Growing up, I always knew Dad was somewhere in the Pacific fixing things,” Hanks says. “He had nothing nice to say about the Navy. He hated the Navy. He hated everybody in the Navy. He had no glorious stories about it.”

Occasionally, Hanks enjoyed a war thriller like Battle of the Bulge, but he much preferred the Three Stooges, James Bond and any film with Sophia Loren. Like a lot of Americans, he found memorizing historical facts boring. Because his family was directly related to Nancy Hanks Lincoln, mother of the 16th U.S. President, he routinely recycled the same short paper he had written about her for easy classroom grades. “My idea of American history was just a course you were forced to take,” Hanks says, laughing.

Yet over the past two decades ”” from his movies Saving Private Ryan and Charlie Wilson’s War to the HBO miniseries he has produced, From the Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers, John Adams and The Pacific, which begins March 14 at 9 p.m. ”” Hanks has become American history’s highest-profile professor, bringing a nuanced view of the past into the homes and lives of countless millions. (HBO is owned by TIME’s parent company, Time Warner.) His view of American history is a mixture of idealism and realism, both of which have characterized all the work he has produced; he’s a Kennedy liberal with old-time values, the kind that embraces Main Street on the Fourth of July. The success of Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers turned him into a Tom Brokaw”“like spokesperson for the Greatest Generation. When he visits Johnson Space Center in Houston or Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he is feted as if Neil Armstrong had entered the room. He’s the visual David McCullough of his generation, framing the heroic tales of explorers, astronauts and soldiers for a wide audience. (McCullough’s John Adams has sold about 3 million copies; Hanks’ John Adams brought in 5.5 million viewers per episode.) And in the history world, his branding on a nonfiction title carries something like the power of Oprah.

But the context for Hanks’ history lessons has changed. Band of Brothers, HBO’s best-selling DVD to date, began airing two days before 9/11; The Pacific, his new 10-hour epic about the Pacific theater in World War II, plays out against a very different backdrop, when the country is weary of war and American exceptionalism is a much tougher sell. World War II in the European theater was a case of massive armies arrayed against an unambiguous evil. The Pacific war was mainly fought by isolated groups of men and was overlaid by a sense that our foes were fundamentally different from us. In that sense, the war in the Pacific bears a closer relation to the complex war on terrorism the U.S. is waging now, making the new series a trickier prospect but one with potential for more depth and resonance….

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