But I trust in thee, O LORD, I say, “Thou art my God.” My times are in thy hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors! Let thy face shine on thy servant; save me in thy steadfast love!

–Psalm 31:14-16

Grant, O Lord, that in thy wounds we may find our safety, in thy stripes our cure, in thy pain our peace, in thy cross our victory, in thy resurrection our triumph; and, at the last, a crown of righteousness in the glories of thy eternal kingdom.

It came as a surprise this month to Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, that he had been described as a potential cyberwarrior before the United States Congress.

Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that it should be concerned because “Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.”

When reached by telephone, Mr. Wang said he and his professor had indeed published “Cascade-Based Attack Vulnerability on the U.S. Power Grid” in an international journal called Safety Science last spring. But Mr. Wang said he had simply been trying to find ways to enhance the stability of power grids by exploring potential vulnerabilities.

“We usually say ”˜attack’ so you can see what would happen,” he said. “My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.” And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang’s work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid.

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Should the House pass the Senate bill and the package of reconciliation fix-its tonight, Senators will take over the reconciliation fix-its as soon as Tuesday.

That will set in motion a week or longer parliamentary floor battle with points of order, references to the budget act, the Byrd Rule and more.

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Congress was poised tonight to approve the boldest piece of American social legislation in half a century after President Obama issued a last-minute executive order to reassure anti-abortion Democrats who had been threatening to vote against his health reforms.

After 14 months of debate, the group of eight Democrats announced their support for a $940 billion health bill with just four hours to go until an historic vote that could transform Mr Obama’s presidency ”“ but could also cost his party dearly at elections later this year.

The Bill, if passed, will bring near-universal health coverage to the US for the first time in the country’s history by requiring individuals to buy insurance and subsidising coverage for those who cannot afford it.

Facing solid Republican opposition and multiple defections from their own ranks, Democrats needed 216 votes in the House to pass the Bill, which would outlaw abuses by the health insurance industry and extend coverage to 32 million Americans who now lack it.

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On 25 March 1995, the Solemnity of the Annunciation, Pope John Paul II promulgated the encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae, on the value and inviolability of human life. Today, four days before the fifteenth anniversary of that glorious defense of the Gospel of Life, the Congress of the United States, led to this moment by the President of the United States, is poised to enshrine in American law a savage assault on human life and the freedom of conscience of those pledged to help heal the sick. Make no mistake: This is a dark hour in the history of our Republic, and the tyranny of abortion is about to be enshrined under the guise of health care reform as a public entitlement which will be paid for by public funds collected from every tax payer and from which, in due course, no doctor, nurse, hospital, or clinic will be permitted to withdraw on a conscientious objection. This is a dark hour in the history of our Republic, and we have been led to this hour by self-described Catholics.

It must be said that the general effort to change the ways in which we Americans pay for our health care is a prudential matter about which reasonable people are free to disagree in good conscience. Passionate arguments have been advanced in this debate by partisans of every viewpoint, and in most of these arguments no absolute moral truths have been at stake. But there is one absolute moral truth at stake now, and it is this: Abortion is a crime against God and man which no human law can legitimize. And as John Paul the Great taught us in Evangelium Vitae, not only is there no obligation to obey such laws; there is, instead, a grave and clear obligation to oppose such laws by conscientious objection and civil disobedience.

In these last days of this national debate, some voices have been raised by those who identity themselves as Catholic to say that the bill which will be voted on today does not provide funds for abortion, but that is simply false. Our Bishop Robert wrote to every priest of the diocese on Friday to say that “It is evident the current health care legislation before the House of Representatives violates the teachings of Jesus Christ and His Church in several areas. As pastors of souls we have an obligation to form our people to understand the end can never justify the means. The lives of the innocent unborn cannot be sacrificed so that health insurance can be extended to some who do not have it.” Then in a companion letter addressed to all the faithful of the Diocese of Charleston, Bishop Guglielmone asks all of us to oppose this legislation “because it will allow for federal funding of abortion and will not provide conscience protection for health care professionals and health care institutions.” The bishop then adds that “Unfortunately, some organizations and individuals have decided that it is better to pass something to help a few. We can never allow evil to be done for own personal gain or for the benefit of some. Abortion should not be a part of health care reform, nor financed with tax dollars.”

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President Obama, rallying last-minute support for landmark health-care legislation nearing a crucial vote in the House, announced Sunday that he will issue an executive order after passage attesting that the bill is consistent with longstanding restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortions.

The arrangement won the support of a key bloc of anti-abortion House Democrats, whose leader, Rep. Bart Stupak D-Mich.), said at a news conference, “I’m pleased to announce we have an agreement.”

Appearing with Stupak were half a dozen other holdout Democrats. With them on board, “we’re well past” the 216 votes needed in the House to approve the health-care legislation, Stupak said.

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Wyoming Episcopalians elected the Rev. John Smylie of St. Mark’s Episcopalian Church in Casper as their ninth bishop during an election convention Saturday.

Smylie has been the rector of St. Mark’s since January 2007. Before that, Smylie held various positions at Episcopal institutions in Washington, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, according to the Web site www.wyomingbishopsearch.org.

He received a Bachelor of Arts at Syracuse University in 1975 and a Master of Divinity at the Episcopalian Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., in 1981.

“Spring has arrived and today we begin a new season in the life of the Episcopal diocese of Wyoming,” he said through a spokesman Saturday.

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It could hardly get worse. Sex scandals are breaking over the Catholic church with such fury…that the Vatican has felt bound to defend Pope Benedict XVI himself. Children at some Catholic schools in Germany have been systematically abused; paedophiles were transferred to other jobs, rather than dismissed or prosecuted. Abuse has surfaced in Austria and the Netherlands. In Ireland Cardinal Sean Brady, the primate, has admitted that he was present in 1975 when two teenage boys were persuaded to sign oaths of silence about their abuse by Father Brendan Smyth. The church defrocked Smyth, but nobody, including Cardinal Brady, told the police about his crimes and he remained free to abuse boys for two decades.

Yet denial still reigns. Bishop Christopher Jones, head of the Irish episcopate’s committee on family affairs, has complained that the church is being singled out, when most abuse happens inside families and other organisations. “Why this huge isolation of the church and this huge focus on cover-up in the church when it has been going on for centuries?” he asked.

He is right that other secretive outfits (orphanages in authoritarian countries, say) are home to shameful abuse, but that misses the point. No church can expect to be judged merely against the most depraved parts of the secular world. If you preach absolute moral values, you will be held to absolute moral standards. Hence, for Catholics and outsiders alike, the church hierarchy’s inability to deal with the issue is baffling.

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But whether banishing children from schools really makes them safer or serves the community well is increasingly questioned by social scientists and educators. And now the punishment is before the courts in what has become a stark legal test of the approach. Lawyers for the girls ”” who are black ”” say that denying them a semester’s schooling was an unjustified violation of their constitutional right to an education.

The case will be argued on Monday in the North Carolina Supreme Court and has drawn the attention of civil rights, legal aid and education groups around the country.

At issue is the routine use of suspensions not just for weapons or drugs but also for profanity, defiant behavior, pushing matches and other acts that used to be handled with a visit to the principal’s office or detention. Such lesser violations now account for most of the 3.3 million annual suspensions of public school students. That total includes a sharp racial imbalance: poor black students are suspended at three times the rate of whites, a disparity not fully explained by differences in income or behavior.

On March 8, the education secretary, Arne Duncan, lamented “schools that seem to suspend and discipline only young African-American boys” as he pledged stronger efforts to ensure racial equality in schooling.

A growing body of research, scholars say, suggests that heavy use of suspensions does less to pacify schools than to push already troubled students toward academic failure and dropping out ”” and sometimes into what critics have called the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

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It was Easter Sunday last year and Joe Cabuk, the pilot of a chartered plane carrying Doug White of Archibald, La., and his family, suffered a heart attack and died soon after takeoff in Florida.

White is certified to fly single-engine planes, but not the twin-engine turboprop he was aboard ”” but he took control and, with the help of air traffic controllers in Miami and Fort Myers, landed the aircraft safely.

Those air traffic controllers won the Archie League Medal of Safety Award, given by the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. When they receive that award Monday, Doug White will be there. Host Liane Hansen speaks with Brian Norton, one of the air traffic controllers who helped White land the plane.

I caught this on the way to worship this morning–the audio is just riveting. Listen to it all.

Grace and forgiveness break the frozen imprisonment of guilt and death, the dead albatross falls into the sea, there is a roaring wind (the wind of the Spirit in creation and in new creation at a Pentecost) and the ship moves on. And so the mariner, who tells this story of redemption, is brought to the point of prayer as the universal language of love and grace.

He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

The tension of explanation between “it is” and “I am” continues to challenge us in our own world, and in our own lives. The old billiard ball model of atoms has given way to seemingly solid matter being in reality patterns of energy, and yet for all the sophistication of analysis the language of “I am” cannot be reduced to the language of “it is”.

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The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.

This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. The Tea Party movement rallies against big government, big business and the ruling class in general. Even beyond their ranks, there is a corrosive cynicism about public action.

But there is another way to respond to these problems that is more communitarian and less libertarian. This alternative has been explored most fully by the British writer Phillip Blond….

To create a civil state, Blond would reduce the power of senior government officials and widen the discretion of front-line civil servants, the people actually working in neighborhoods. He would decentralize power, giving more budget authority to the smallest units of government. He would funnel more services through charities. He would increase investments in infrastructure, so that more places could be vibrant economic hubs. He would rebuild the “village college” so that universities would be more intertwined with the towns around them.

Essentially, Blond would take a political culture that has been oriented around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around relationships and associations….

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The global economic crisis has left “deep scars” in the fiscal balances of the world’s advanced economies, which should begin to rein in spending next year as the recovery continues, the No.2 official at the International Monetary Fund said Sunday in Beijing.

In a speech at the China Development Forum in Beijing, the I.M.F. official, John Lipsky, who is the deputy managing director, offered a grim prognosis for the world’s wealthiest countries, which are at a level of indebtedness not seen since the aftermath of World War II.

For the United States, “a higher public savings rate will be required to ensure long-term fiscal sustainability,” Mr. Lipsky said.

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In a final, urgent plea to prevent the passage of the current form of the Senate health care bill, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) on Saturday evening sent a letter to Congressmen asking them to vote “no.”

“For decades,” the letter says, “the United States Catholic bishops have supported universal health care. The Catholic Church teaches that health care is a basic human right, essential for human life and dignity.”

“Our community of faith,” the bishops continue, “provides health care to millions, purchases health care for tens of thousands and addresses the failings of our health care system in our parishes, emergency rooms and shelters. This is why we as bishops continue to insist that health care reform which truly protects the life, dignity, consciences and health of all is a moral imperative and an urgent national priority.”

Nevertheless, they add, “we are convinced that the Senate legislation now presented to the House of Representatives on a ”˜take it or leave it’ basis sadly fails this test and ought to be opposed.”

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On Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that, if enacted, the latest health care reform legislation would, over the next 10 years, cost about $950 billion, but because it would raise some revenues and lower some costs, it would also lower federal deficits by $138 billion. In other words, a bill that would set up two new entitlement spending programs ”” health insurance subsidies and long-term health care benefits ”” would actually improve the nation’s bottom line.

Could this really be true? How can the budget office give a green light to a bill that commits the federal government to spending nearly $1 trillion more over the next 10 years?

The answer, unfortunately, is that the budget office is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed. So fantasy in, fantasy out.

In reality, if you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.

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This is a sad time for all people. We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me, it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help and God’s.

–Then Vice-President Lyndon Johnson on November 22, 1963 speaking of the death of John F. Kennedy. These 58 words were drafter by Liz Carpenter, an aide to the Vice President at the time

Liz Carpenter, a Texas humorist and women’s rights crusader who trolled the corridors of power in Washington as a journalist and trusted aide to Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, never shedding her common touch and flair as a friend-maker, party-thrower and mentor, died Saturday morning in Austin. She was 89.

Carpenter, who had been suffering from pneumonia, died at University Medical Center Brackenridge in Austin, her daughter Christy Carpenter told The Associated Press.

Liz Carpenter, who was in President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas, penned the 58 words Mr. Johnson spoke to a grief-stricken nation as he arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., hours after Kennedy’s assassination elevated him to the country’s highest office.

“I will do my best,” Mr. Johnson concluded. “That is all I can do. I ask for your help, and God’s.”

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Growing up the son of a Detroit pastor in the 1970s, Bishop Charles Ellis III says he remembers sitting in pews where there was a fairly even mix of men and women.

But today, the head of Greater Grace Temple in Detroit looks out over his flock on Sunday mornings and gazes at a scene where women outnumber men about 2-1. The demographic shift worries him and other Christians looking for ways to draw men back to church.

Nationwide, 61% of those who attend church are women, while 39% are men, according to the U.S. Congregational Life Survey in 2009. The divide is even greater in some African-American and mainline Protestant congregations.

To bridge the gap, churches are developing nontraditional programs to reach out to men ”” from sponsoring hunting trips and car clubs to holding annual men’s conferences. Some have toughened their messages to emphasize power, using masculine imagery in their services.

Read the whole article.

But Moses said to the LORD, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either heretofore or since thou hast spoken to thy servant; but I am slow of speech and of tongue.” Then the LORD said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.”

O God, who by the cross and passion of thy Son Jesus Christ didst save and deliver mankind: Grant that by steadfast faith in the merits of that holy sacrifice we may find help and salvation, and may triumph in the power of his victory; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

This was an accident waiting to happen. In a way it is almost surprising that it took seven years from the ordination of Gene Robinson, a partnered gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire, for a second such incident to occur. That event has been seen as tearing the fabric of the Anglican Communion, which has been held together in little more than name ever since. Is this the final nail in the coffin? Will the Anglican Communion be torn apart by intractable divisions?

The fourth Anglican Global South to South Encounter is set to take place in Singapore, April 19-23. The current situation in the Episcopal Church is not their principal focus. Yet they represent the large and growing majority of Anglicans in the world, and the primates (archbishops) and others who will be present are unequivocally committed to Resolution 1.10 of the 1998 Lambeth conference of bishops, which remains the official position of the Anglican Communion….

Many of the provinces (national church bodies) represented at this Global South encounter are already out of communion with the Episcopal Church or in “impaired communion”. Please pray for these godly brothers and sisters as they prepare for this important gathering.

Pray also for the Archbishop of Canterbury, and also for the godly bishops who still remain in the Episcopal Church, such as our own Visitor Bishop, Russell Jacobus of the Diocese of Fond du Lac. And let us believe that the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead is more than able to bring light into this dark turn of events, to bring good out of evil, and breathe life into a culture of death.

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St. Stephen’s Anglican Church, at 10909 96th St., was scheduled to be knocked down this past Wednesday. The Anglican diocese wants to clear the property and sell the 6,600-square-foot double lot as a building site. It’s asking $475,000 for the land, which is currently zoned for a duplex.

Late Tuesday, hours before demolition was to start, the diocese agreed to give McCauley activists and heritage buffs a two-week reprieve. They now have until Easter to find a buyer with the will and means to effect the building’s resurrection.

The little red brick church, with its Tudor-style wood beam accents, was built in 1914, which makes it the second-oldest Anglican church in the city. For years, it served the diocese’s Anglo-Catholic community, but the congregation had dwindled to only some 50 members. The diocese says the building’s original brick foundation has badly deteriorated, as has the exterior mortar.

Diocese executive officer David Connell says it didn’t make sense to pay for the expensive repairs the building requires. Connell is “ambivalent” about knocking down the church, but his big regret is that it wasn’t demolished in November, as originally planned.

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See one answer from Saint Stephen’s, Edina, Minnesota.

Faced with a church sexual abuse scandal spreading across Europe, Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday apologized directly to victims and their families in Ireland, expressing “shame and remorse” for what he called “sinful and criminal” acts committed by clergy.

But the pope did not require that church leaders be disciplined for past mistakes as some victims were hoping; nor did he clarify what critics see as contradictory Vatican rules they fear allow abuse to continue unpunished.

“You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry,” the pope said in a long-awaited, eight-page pastoral letter to Irish Catholics. “Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated.”

The strong letter was written in language at once passionate, personal and sweeping. And the pope did take the relatively rare step of ordering a special apostolic delegation to be sent to unspecified dioceses in Ireland to investigate. But even that action raised questions among critics who wondered what the investigators might unearth beyond what was found in two wide-ranging and scathing Irish government reports released last year. One of those reports said the church and the police in Ireland had systematically colluded in covering up decades of sexual abuse by priests in Dublin.

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As the House Rules Committee labored to set the formal terms of the debate, the dispute over the abortion provisions was shaping up as a bitter stand-off between the abortion opponents, led by Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, and lawmakers who favor abortion rights, led by Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado. At the center was Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as House speaker, who is a champion of abortion rights.

The issue has divided Roman Catholic groups in the United States, with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops opposing the bill and other organizations, including the Catholic Health Association and a coalition of nuns from leading religious orders, favoring it.

In a similar showdown in November, Mr. Stupak succeeded in winning approval of tight limits on insurance coverage of abortions in the House health care bill. But the current package now includes language from the Senate-passed bill, negotiated by Senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Ben Nelson, who have built up solid credentials in their political careers as opponents of abortion.

Mr. Stupak and many of the lawmakers insisting on the tighter restrictions are Catholic, as is Ms. Pelosi, and all have cited their faith in justifying their position on the legislation.

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I’m not saying Christians are more to blame than Muslims for the world’s diverse Christian-Muslim tensions. In Nigeria, for example, the intensity of Christian proselytizing comes partly from past persecution by a Muslim majority; the Christians seek safety in numbers, so the bigger their numbers, the better. (Griswold explained this to me, and confirmed that, yes, assertive Christian proselytizing exacerbates tensions in Nigeria.)

Still, even if proselytizing isn’t the prime mover, my guess is that it pretty consistently falls in the “not helpful” category from the point of view of world peace and, ultimately, American security. And some of it ”” e.g., the “Camel Method” ”” is particularly antagonistic. Which explains why I’m not a big fan of that first headline, “A Christian Overture to Muslims Has Its Critics.” Overtures, when effective, don’t heighten tensions.

I’d like to be able to report that the “critics” in this headline are Christians who worry about heightening tensions and so refrain from offensive proselytizing. Alas, they’re Christians who favor assertive proselytizing but are offended by any suggestion that Muslims and Christians might worship the same god. One of them, Ergun Caner, president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, in Lynchburg, Va., said in a recent podcast, “There’s nothing that the two gods ”” the god of the Koran and the god of scripture ”” have in common. Nothing.”

Well, to look at the bright side: Maybe that’s a basis for interfaith rapport; Caner can sit around with Malaysian Muslims and agree that they worship different gods.

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Campaigners for the victims of sexual abuse in Ireland claimed the Pope’s letter failed to address the “core issue” of why the perpetrators were protected.

Sexual abuse charity One in Four said the Catholic Church was “still in denial”, while a survivor of abuse said the apology did not address the cover-up.

One in Four director Maeve Lewis said: “Victims were hoping for an acknowledgement of the scurrilous ways in which they have been treated as they attempted to bring their experiences of abuse to the attention of the church authorities.

“Pope Benedict has passed up a glorious opportunity to address the core issue in the clerical sexual abuse scandal: the deliberate policy of the Catholic Church at the highest levels to protect sex offenders, thereby endangering children.

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