Since the first Protestants rowed to shore in Jamestown, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, they’ve been in charge. As recently as the 1950s, the president as well as seven of the nine members of the Supreme Court were Protestant Christians. Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal and other so-called mainline Protestant leaders called many of the shots on civil rights, school prayer, immigration, education and other key issues of the day. Then, in the late ’60s, their numbers began to dwindle.

Today, only one member of the high court is Protestant (John Paul Stevens), and President Obama appears to have stopped attending church altogether at least outside of Camp David. Instead of dominating public debate, mainline Protestants find themselves struggling to reach a quorum. Half of their churches have fewer than a hundred members, and in nearly six of 10 congregations, it’s the Church of the Blue Hair. Or No Hair. A quarter or more of their congregants are 65 or older. That’s three times the number for their more conservative Evangelical cousins.

So what happened? How did America’s most influential religious group become so marginal?

The conventional wisdom has been that the more conservative Catholic and Evangelical churches simply won over the hearts and minds of the American people. And, if there is a culture war, these more liberal Protestant groups surely must have lost.

But not so fast.

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In order to generate a pictorial chart of this parish, please go [url=http://www.episcopalchurch.org/growth_60791_ENG_HTM.htm?menupage=50929]here[/url] and enter “Iowa” in the second line down under “Diocese.” Next please wait a moment and then click on “Church” and choose “Trinity (Davenport, Iowa).” Then wait another moment and choose “View Church chart” under that line (the middle of the three choices).

You may find the parish website here.

WE may scoff at the idea that the Olympic Games have anything to do with the “endeavor to place sport at the service of humanity and thereby to promote peace,” as the Olympic charter enshrines as its ideal. But at least nations across the world were able to put aside differences for two weeks of friendly competition in Vancouver.

A mundane achievement, perhaps, but it’s one that’s beyond the grasp of the Islamic world. The Islamic Solidarity Games, the Olympics of the Muslim world, which were to be held in Iran in April, have been called off by the Arab states because Tehran inscribed “Persian Gulf” on the tournament’s official logo and medals.

It’s a small but telling controversy. It puts the lie to the idea of the Islamic world as a bloc united by religious values that are hostile to the West. It also gives clues as to how the United States and its allies should handle two of their most urgent foreign policy matters: the Iranian nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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This is a good description of the lovely piece that aired Saturday and which I happened to catch by accident. It moved me to tears. I am stunned that NBC does not have it on their webiste. Did any other blog readers happen to catch it–KSH?

(ACNS) Thousands of women from around the world, including more than 90 representing the Anglican Communion, will gather in New York March 1-12 for the 54th session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women to undertake a 15-year review of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

The CSW is the oldest U.N. standing commission. It meets annually to examine a different theme as it relates to gender equity — global poverty, economics, peacekeeping, human rights, etc. — from the lens of the most vulnerable and exploited communities, mostly women and children, said Alessandra Peña, a consultant for the Anglican United Nations Thematic Working Group on Women’s Right and Empowerment.

“This year is a review year ”¦ there was a five-year review in 2000 and a 10-year review in 2005,” she said. “Beijing (is important) because it is still considered the most comprehensive platform on issues of gender equity ”¦ the MDGs were informed by the Beijing platform.”

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The Right Rev David Chillingworth accused the Scottish Secretary of doing a “grave disservice” to religion by suggesting it could be “shrink-wrapped” to fit the manifesto of a political party.

His comments came after the leader of Scotland’s Roman Catholics accused Labour of an “unrelenting attack on family values” and warned the Pope could give the party “hell” on his state visit later this year.

They were both responding to a speech last week in which Mr Murphy tried to woo religious voters by promising their concerns would be reflected in Labour’s policy agenda.

The Scottish Secretary argued Labour was founded on the principles of Christian socialism and had led the trade union struggle for working class rights.

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A growing Hispanic congregation in south Oklahoma City recently moved from cramped quarters to a larger church building.

Iglesia Episcopal Santa Maria Virgen, led by the Rev. Leonel Blanco Monterroso, held its first worship service in its new home Feb. 7. The building at 5500 S Western formerly housed Grace Lutheran Church.

Monterroso said the sanctuary at the church’s previous building at 2141 SW 25 could house no more than 200 people, while the new building’s worship area easily accommodates about 500.

The larger complex came at just the right time, he said.

Monterroso said the church’s first service in the new building drew about 585 people.

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There are many Catholic-minded Anglicans like me who have wondered, more than once whether we should become Roman Catholics. Rome is clearly the senior church of the Western tradition and I find so much to admire about it.

I rejoice in its internationalism, its capacity to produce saints in even the most unpropitious times and its ability to inspire poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, novelists such as Evelyn Waugh, and a number of distinguished modern composers.

I am deeply moved by the ministry of priests working in the shantytowns of Latin America and elsewhere. Then, of course, for those with an orderly mind, there is the ability of the Vatican to present a clear message for the outside world.

So why remain an Anglican? And why would it not be good for the country to become Roman Catholic again? For me the answer is summed up in a remark that a well-known Anglo-Catholic priest made to the mother superior of an Anglican religious order shortly before he died: “Mother, you know, the Church of England is now the only part of the Catholic Church which is open to the future.”

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With U.S. forces scheduled to begin withdrawal from Iraq this summer, Iraq must now take the lead in rebuilding itself. Iraqi scientists and engineers will hold the key to the future, and Iraqi women hope to be a part of that. Liane Hansen speaks to Dr. Alkazragy and Dr. Mustafa, two female Iraqi scientists who are visiting scholars at American universities. The doctors have asked that their first names be withheld for security concerns.

Listen to it all (just over 8 minutes).

The talks manage to avoid the sin of navel-gazing: rather than focusing on Anglican peculiarities, the purpose of each is to see and to show how the Anglican tradition opens up onto a world much larger than itself, making them not just a good primer on Anglicanism but on Catholic Christianity as such.

The series begins with N.T. Wright, who with characteristic clarity and depth of learning gives not only an overview of the New Testament but also of how Anglicans have classically read and been formed by the Bible in their common life. Scripture, as reformers such as Wycliffe, Tyndale, and Cranmer held, is to be placed in the hands of the people and read in common, so as to knit together a people through deep immersion in the Scriptural story. This, Bishop Wright holds, is in fact at the heart of Anglican worship and life: the simple, daily, communal reading of the Bible, through which the Spirit forms us as a church and equips us for mission in the world.

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As always with the Obama compromise offers, this offer seemed to be both sincere and insincere. Embodying the core contradiction of the Obama presidency, the president seemed both to want to craft a new package and also to defend the strictly Democratic approach. I think he’s a bipartisan man stuck in a partisan town, but maybe he’s an iron partisan fist in a velvet postpartisan glove.

Fourth, you got to see how confident Republicans are. Obama’s compromise offer is one the Republicans can happily refuse. In their eyes, he is saying: If you don’t make some concessions now, I’m going to punch myself in the face. If you don’t embrace parts of my bill, I will waste the next three months trying to push an unpopular measure through an ugly reconciliation process that will probably lead to failure anyway.

Fifth, you got to see at least one area of bipartisan agreement. Neither side was willing to be specific about how to cut costs and raise revenue. The Republicans continued to demagogue efforts to restrain Medicare spending. The Democrats (and the Republicans) conveniently neglected to mention the fact that they had just gutted the long-term revenue source for their entire package, the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans. That tax was diluted and postponed until 2018. There is no way that members of a Congress eight years from now are going to accede to a $1 trillion tax increase to pay for a measure that the 2010 Congress wasn’t brave enough to pay for itself.

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The future of President Obama’s health care overhaul now rests largely with two blocs of swing Democrats in the House of Representatives ”” abortion opponents and fiscal conservatives ”” whose indecision signals the difficulties Speaker Nancy Pelosi faces in securing the votes necessary to pass the bill.

With Republicans unified in their opposition, Democrats are drafting plans to try on their own to pass a bill based on one Mr. Obama unveiled before his bipartisan health forum last week. His measure hews closely to the one passed by the Senate in December, but differs markedly from the one passed by the House.

That leaves Ms. Pelosi in the tough spot of trying to keep wavering members of her caucus on board, while persuading some who voted no to switch their votes to yes ”” all at a time when Democrats are worried about their prospects for re-election.

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When Sunshine Sign Co. went to renew its health insurance plan for workers this year, the small business faced a daunting figure ”” 21 percent.

That’s how much the Grafton company’s premiums for coverage under the Fallon Community Health Plan are going up, and it translates to a price hike of about $1,000 per person a year. For Sunshine Sign, which employs about 30, the result will be slimmer profit margins, according to President and Chief Executive David R. Glispin.

“You try to aggressively control what you can within your business and you try to be somewhat understanding of what you can’t,” Mr. Glispin said. “Health care has become exorbitant, but I guess we just accept it as a normal course of business.”

Many other small businesses in Massachusetts are confronting Sunshine Sign’s dilemma: The economy remains weak, but health insurance costs are going up, sometimes by 30 percent or more.

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Almighty God, who didst call thy servant David to be a faithful and wise steward of thy mysteries for the people of Wales: Mercifully grant that, following his purity of life and zeal for the gospel of Christ, we may with him receive the crown of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and ever.

For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power.

–1 Corinthians 4:20

Write deeply upon our minds, O Lord God, the lesson of thy holy Word, that only the pure in heart can see thee. Leave us not in the bondage of any sinful inclination. May we neither deceive ourselves with the thought that we have no sin, nor acquiesce idly in aught of which our conscience accuses us. Strengthen us by thy Holy Spirit to fight the good fight of faith, and grant that no day may pass without its victory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

With the Winter Games set to close Sunday night, you can almost hear the voices of Canadian officials saying, “We told you everything would work out.”

The Canadian team finished with the most gold medals, a result that didn’t seem possible after the Games’ first week. And to cap it with a gold medal in men’s hockey was a dream result for the host nation.

The overtime victory, 3-2, over the United States was a fitting culmination of these Games, in which Canada stood atop the podium more often that any other nation in Winter Olympics history and in which the United States ruled the overall medal count with a record total.

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They outplayed the Americans and deserved to win.

We go to overtime. What a great game.

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On the final day of the recent Church of England General Synod meeting there was a rather worthy debate about how the claims of science are affecting belief in God. At no point did any of the speakers remark on the surely important fact that the public square these days is crowded with religions. Clearly, religious belief is not incompatible with science. However, people in a multicultural society, who respect the beliefs of all, must inevitably observe that all religions are similarly non-scientific in the way they furnish different, often incompatible explanations about the meaning of life, whereas science is systemically consistent. And this must account for the different ways that people treat scientific truths and what are claimed as religious truths.

Science is a method applied to whatever can be tested and observed. It makes no claims save in those terms. Human knowledge, and the science that extends it, is finite. But the boundaries of what is known continue to expand. As the Bible says ”“ “No man has seen God” in a scientific sense. So God seems, in a way, to be diminishing in significance, becoming more remote and much less persuasive. Unavoidably, science now suggests to some ”“ as it always has ”“ that God is not an objective necessity. Wisdom is no church monopoly. Lucretius in De Rerum Natura doubted whether anything humans could do would have any effect on the gods, rather in the same way that one may be at a loss when one seeks a present for somebody much richer who has everything already. A being who cannot be seen or known cannot be tested scientifically.

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In this fast-paced and noisy world, we all need to slow down a-t times for our physical, emo tional and spiritual health.

For centuries, Christian meditation has been used by people to draw closer to God and for many today it is also a way to step back from that busy world.

Phil Barnett of Winnipeg, the national coordinator of the Ca n-adian Christian Meditation So ciety, will be in Calgary next week to talk about Christian meditation for a Lenten focus called Hearing the Voice of God Within Us.

He will be at Christ Church (Anglican) to teach and talk about the ancient spiritual practice.

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n 1946, a Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Canadians attended church at least once a week. By 1998, the number had fallen to 22 percent, by 2001 to 20 percent.

By contrast, 35 percent of Americans call themselves regular churchgoers.

“Canada looks more like the thoroughly secular countries of Europe than it does its closest neighbor,” said Mark Noll, a Notre Dame religion professor who taught at the University of British Columbia.

In a 2001 Canadian census, 42 percent of Vancouver residents said they had no religion.

“B.C. is Canada’s California, a resource-rich, mild-climate place to get away from the rest of Canada and enjoy yourself,” said John Stackhouse, a professor of religion and culture at Regent College here. “Vancouver is its heart and has one of the lowest church-attendance figures in North America – rivaling San Francisco’s.”

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The church’s essential mission is to “proclaim the Kingdom of God”, the Right Rev Dr Kelvin Wright, the newly ordained Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Dunedin, says.

Dr Wright, who previously spent 11 years as vicar of St John’s, Rosyn, was ordained the ninth bishop of the diocese in a ceremony attended by more than 400 people who almost filled St Paul’s Cathedral on Saturday afternoon.

Some travelled from various parts of the North Island to attend and one person came from the Middle East.

“We have to proclaim the Kingdom of God,” Dr Wright said after being formally ordained as bishop.

“All of us are loved by God and accepted by God.”

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Four theologians began discussions in Geneva, Switzerland this week to define the guidelines of a new project promoted from within the Conference of European Churches. The initiative hopes to study how the different Churches understand unity.

According to a statement released by the Conference of European Churches (CEC), the project is investigating church unity as it relates to church identity at the theological, theoretical level as well as in church practices.

The four theologians taking part in the discussion are British Anglican Dr. Paul M. Collins from the University of Chichester, German Catholic Dr. Myriam Wijlens from University of Erfurt, Finnish Dr. Minna Hietamaki from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland and Orthodox Dr. Viorel Ionita from the CEC’s Churches in Dialogue Commission.

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…Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is not ready to sign off on a rescue, officials said, before Greece has pushed through further cuts.

One European official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said that Greek officials appeared to be briefing journalists on the prospect for an big rescue package in the hope of pushing the European Union into a quick solution, or of convincing the markets that help is at hand.

“The Germans will not put a euro on the table until there is a credible austerity package,” the official said.

Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform, said that France and Germany recognize that some form of bailout is inevitable, but that, to enable a bailout to be sold to a skeptical German public, the Greeks first “have to be seen to be suffering.”

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If turning around a declining church were easy, more declining churches would be reversing course.

And if Christians in the United States think turning around a church is difficult, think of trying it in the Church of England, where tradition reaches back hundreds of years and hierarchical structure often hamstrings changes local congregations want to make.

But Bob and Mary Hopkins believe fresh expressions””a term they prefer over “revitalizing a congregation”””can come even to Anglican churches in the United Kingdom.

Although they began””and continue””as church planters in urban settings with Anglican Church Planting Initiatives, from 1998 to 2005, the Hopkins served on the leadership team of St. Thomas’ Church in Sheffield, which grew to 1,500 in attendance, primarily reaching young adults with emerging culture interests.

They acknowledge cultural differences between the United Kingdom and the United States, but they emphasize that differences favor American churches. According to the Hopkins, culture in the United Kingdom is more influenced by secular atheism and is further into an era being called post-Christendom. The Brits have fewer megachurches and a greater percentage of smaller congregations. In addition, their congregations are attended by older people””average age 61””with fewer financial resources.

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Eighteen months ago, Li & Fung, a firm that manages supply chains for retailers, saw 100 gigabytes of information flow through its network each day. Now the amount has increased tenfold. During 2009, American drone aircraft flying over Iraq and Afghanistan sent back around 24 years’ worth of video footage. New models being deployed this year will produce ten times as many data streams as their predecessors, and those in 2011 will produce 30 times as many.

Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring. According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still. Even so, the data deluge is already starting to transform business, government, science and everyday life (see our special report in this issue). It has great potential for good””as long as consumers, companies and governments make the right choices about when to restrict the flow of data, and when to encourage it.

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Chile is on a hotspot of sorts for earthquake activity. And so the 8.8-magnitude temblor that shook the region overnight was not a surprise, historically speaking. Nor was it outside the realm of normal, scientists say, even though it comes on the heels of other major earthquakes.

One scientist, however, says that relative to the time period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Earth has been more active over the past 15 years or so.

The Chilean earthquake, and the tsunami it spawned, originated on a hot spot known as a subduction zone, where one plate of Earth’s crust dives under another. It’s part of the active “Ring of Fire,” a zone of major crustal plate clashes that surround the Pacific Ocean.

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What you don’t see in the news reports is the deep commitment of people who offer love and compassion in an unimaginable variety of ways.

And this is true in communities of faith that gather all over this city. Until my 15 minutes of fame, I always thought we were completely invisible. I thought no one noticed. But now that rumours of Anglican extinction are being spread, everyone seems to be paying attention.

Institutional religion has run into hard times in our comfortable and privileged culture. We have been hurt by scandals, rocked by controversy and justly condemned for our often arrogant and exclusive attitude toward people whose views differ from ours.

But we in the church are not entirely the authors of our own decline.

The church’s once sacrosanct Sunday spot for sacred worship is now crowded with sports, charity runs, shopping malls and coffee shops. Even I am preparing to join the throng who absent themselves from church when I heed the seductive lure of the Times Colonist 10K run on a Sunday morning.

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