The euro was a glorious fudge. The Latin countries plus Greece could enjoy the benefits of German discipline and virtue while carrying on with traditionally unsustainable public and private sector policies. In the old, pre-euro days, the southern economies had to pay high interest rates on their debt; wary investors knew that inflation and devaluation were likely and so demanded interest rates that would compensate them for the risk. The lira, the drachma: everyone knew they would lose value over time against the Deutsche mark and even the dollar, and interest rates reflected this understanding. But as the southern countries moved into the euro, calculations changed. For the last twenty years, countries like Greece and Italy were able to borrow money at essentially the same rate that Germany could.

Typically, they decided to spend rather than save this windfall. Greece in particular decided that since the costs of servicing its debt were so low, it made sense to run up more debt. Lousy leaders gave greedy civil servants fat raises; promises were cheap and the government scattered them far and wide. In Italy as well, once the national debt was less painful to carry, there was less pressure to reduce the national debt.

Low interest rates led to economic booms as both private and public sector borrowers rushed to take advantage of this once in a lifetime change. Home mortgage rates fell dramatically; construction boomed, unemployment fell and wages rose. It was party time in the Mediterranean.

Central banks exist precisely to puncture this sort of bubble, but the European Central Bank wasn’t focused on the peripheral European economies….

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“[My wife Maryann and I] thought we could bow our heads, work very hard, and do all that we had set our hearts to do. But we were mistaken.”

–Raymond Carver (1938-1988)

The Rev. Morris Thompson already has begun his first major undertaking as incoming bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana: listening.

Thompson, 54, moved to New Orleans from Lexington, Ky., in March to take the place of Bishop Charles Jenkins. He will be ordained May 8 as the diocese’s 11th bishop at Christ Church Cathedral.

What Thompson is especially good at, his resume and acquaintances say, is pastoral care, the kind of psychological and spiritual therapy he made a specialty as a hospital chaplain in Kentucky and his native Mississippi.

So far, Thompson has toured some of the 55 congregations in his diocese, which covers most of Southeast Louisiana. He said his listening tour is likely to go on for a year or more, until he begins to distill a sense of where his diocese of 18,000 Episcopalians is, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and what he thinks it needs.

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Most young adults today don’t pray, don’t worship and don’t read the Bible, a major survey by a Christian research firm shows.

If the trends continue, “the Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships,” says Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources. In the group’s survey of 1,200 18- to 29-year-olds, 72% say they’re “really more spiritual than religious.”

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MARGARET WARNER: We’ve had people say to us that this is the worst crisis the church has faced in a couple hundred years. Do you see it that way?

CARDINAL LEVADA: It’s a big crisis. I think no one should try to diminish that. I think the crisis is particularly grave because priests are ordained to be good shepherds. We had Good Shepherd Sunday this last Sunday, and this is anything but being a good shepherd when you abuse children and you violate their innocence and their persons and they are too young to be able to respond on their own. So this is a crisis if you will that I think caught most of us by surprise. One bishop told me “this isn’t the cruise I signed up for,” but that’s in fact what has happened. I think the pope, that was not his training and background, but I think he is the right man to be guiding the church at this time.

MARGARET WARNER: Now many people we’ve spoken to certainly in the States, in the church, are surprised that you all here seem surprised by this new wave. That after all the American church went through this eight years ago, painfully, had gone to a new way of operating, after many revelations. Why was the Vatican not more prepared? Why is this a surprise?

CARDINAL LEVADA: Well I think that there are two things involved in the current media attention. I think one is the situation in Ireland, where the report on the Archdiocese of Dublin triggered a lot of attention, not only in Ireland, but in Europe and then I think throughout the world. And the second, frankly I think, is if I will say a certain media bias. I shouldn’t, I don’t want to scapegoat anybody or have a conspiracy theory, but I do think that the American media in particular has the question has been driven by information given by the plaintiffs’ attorneys who are looking for ways to involve the pope somehow in a court process or something like that, which are I think bound to be futile but nevertheless I think that has driven a fair amount of the media coverage if I may say so.

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One reason why it fails to create a strong reaction is that it simply confirms the obvious. The crisis moment has now passed. Many of the Global South provinces have given up on the official North American Anglicans (TEC and the Canadian Church) and regard themselves as being out of communion with them. They renew the call for repentance but can see that, failing something like the Great Awakening, it will not occur. The positive side to this is that they are committed to achieving self-sufficiency so that they will cease to rely on the Western churches for aid. That is something the Global South has been working on for some time, with success.

In my judgment, the assembly was unresponsive to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s video greetings. I don’t think that what he said was obscure. It just seemed to be from another age, another world. His plea for patience misjudged the situation by several years and his talk of the Anglican covenant was not where the actual conference was at. He seemed to suggest that the consecration of a partnered lesbian Bishop will create a crisis. In fact the crisis itself has passed. We are now on the further side of the critical moment; the decisions have all been made; we are already living with the consequences. And it was in working out the consequences that the communiqué may eventually be seen to be historic.

The Global South Encounter could not in itself recognize the authenticity of churches. But the communiqué goes as far as is possible to recognizing the authenticity of the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) and declaring this body to be the true heirs of the Anglican tradition on that continent. This is precisely what the GAFCON/FCA Primates Council did in 2009, and it really means that the leadership of the vast majority of the Anglican Communion regards itself as being in communion with ACNA and out of fellowship with the other North Americans. This was symbolized by the part played by Archbishop Bob Duncan at the conference, especially when he presided at Holy Communion. Furthermore the welcome accorded to the two bishops from the Communion Partners demonstrated the Global South commitment to Biblical standards as a test of fellowship.

In the meantime, of course, there are those, notably in the West, who want to play by the old institutional rules. They would argue that ACNA cannot be part of the Anglican Communion because it has not passed the tests of admission via the Anglican Consultative Council. This is so artificial as to be risible….

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The Anglican Church has entered the debate over Queensland’s controversial wild rivers laws, calling for them to be overhauled.

The Archer, Stewart and Lockhart rivers were declared wild rivers in April last year, adding to the six already declared in Cape York and the Gulf of Carpentaria.

The declarations place limits on development along the rivers and their tributaries.

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The Anglican Bishop of Auckland, The Right Reverend Ross Bay, has welcomed the Law Commission’s Report “Alcohol in our Lives, Curbing the Harm” presented to Parliament this week.

Bishop Bay has long carried a concern about the negative trends in drinking behaviour among some New Zealanders. He considers that the shift to a lower legal age in 1999 has been a big factor in the growing youth alcohol problem. He is supportive of the legal drinking age returning to 20 years.

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Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

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

Greece will default on its national debt. That default will be due in large part to its membership in the European Monetary Union. If it were not part of the euro system, Greece might not have gotten into its current predicament and, even if it had gotten into its current predicament, it could have avoided the need to default.

Greece’s default on its national debt need not mean an explicit refusal to make principal and interest payments when they come due. More likely would be an IMF-organized restructuring of the existing debt, swapping new bonds with lower principal and interest for existing bonds. Or it could be a “soft default” in which Greece unilaterally services its existing debt with new debt rather than paying in cash. But, whatever form the default takes, the current owners of Greek debt will get less than the full amount that they are now owed.

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With Greece inching closer to the brink of financial collapse, fear that the debt crisis will spread rattled markets for a second day Wednesday, while an extraordinary collection of global financial leaders gathered in Berlin to seek a solution.

Shares fell 2 percent or more across Europe and parts of Asia as investors increasingly wonder if Portugal, Spain and even Ireland may not be able to borrow the billions of dollars they need to finance their government spending.

“It’s like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns,” said Philip Lane, a professor of international economics at Trinity College in Ireland, referring to the Wall Street failures that propelled the financial crisis of 2008. “It is not so much the fundamentals as it is the unwillingness of the market to fund you.”

Standard & Poor’s cut Greece’s debt to junk level on Tuesday, warning that bondholders could face losses of up to half of their holdings in a restructuring. The agency also downgraded Portugal’s debt by two notches.

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Two and a half years after the Stage 4 diagnosis, I confessed to my mother that the doctors had said I had two years to live, tops. I’d kept this information to myself because if you say it, it’s true. I told her this laughing, as if we were trading preposterous stories. “Well, I guess you’re going to have to hold your breath if you’re going to make that deadline,” she replied, in her slow Southern drawl when I gave my previously stated expiration date.

I spent the next five years holding my breath, then did the same for another five. I enacted every New Year’s resolution, past and future, all at once. Quit work that had grown stale and became a writer. Wrote a book. Went to India on assignment, fell in love with the language that was swirling around me, went back to live for a year and learn Hindi. Didn’t realize the reason I’d come to dislike that hyperbolically overachieving Lance Armstrong was that his behavior was too familiar. Take a nap, Lance! I’d think to myself, though in truth I couldn’t either.

But if I was verging on radical levels of life consumption, I had a reason: No one had told me I wasn’t going to die soon. About 12 years out, my doctor finally did.

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In the beginning, there was partisanship.

When Daniel Coughlin was chosen to be the first-ever Catholic House chaplain in March 2000, Democrats made clear that he wasn’t their pick. A top Democratic spokeswoman called the decision to appoint him — made unilaterally by then-Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) — “a graceless, tactless, partisan maneuver.”

Ten years later, Coughlin is still in the job, and there is ample evidence that the rancor that accompanied his selection has disappeared: Last week, lawmakers from both parties streamed onto the House floor to honor his decade of service.

“He has seen us through the dark and through the bright,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said of the chaplain. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) confessed to being “a better person for having known Father Coughlin and having been counseled by him.” Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.) called him “an inspiration.”

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Everlasting God, who didst so kindle the flame of holy love in the heart of blessed Catherine of Siena, as she meditated on the passion of thy Son our Savior, that she devoted her life to the poor and the sick, and to the peace and unity of the Church: Grant that we also may share in the mystery of Christ’s death, and rejoice in the revelation of His Glory, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.

–1 Thessalonians 2;13

Gracious Lord, we remember that thou didst accompany thy two disciples as they journeyed to Emmaus. Do thou go with us, O Lord, on our journey through this world. Guide us, uphold us, strengthen us; make our hearts to burn within us; and evermore manifest thyself to our souls in gracious and heavenly power. For thine own name’s sake we ask it.

Nobody would ever dispute that the U.S. economy has managed to see its government spend its way into some sort of statistical recovery ”” though it is more evident in the output and sales data than in the income data. Look at the largesse ”” a 0% policy rate, a $2.3 trillion Fed balance sheet loaded up with mortgages, a $1.4 trillion fiscal deficit loaded with bailouts and freebies and accounting changes that have allowed the banks to mark-to-model their way back towards earnings heaven. If the economy was not recovering without Uncle Sam’s generosity, then that would truly be a big story.

But Mr. Market at some point will have to confront the future. The time gap between recessions is shortening now ”” we went 10 years from 1990 to 2000, then 5 years from 2002 to 2007 and the next recession, following this pattern, is likely going to occur within the next 2-3 years. And, unlike the start of the last recession when the government had so many arrows in its quiver, there are none today to help lift the economy again.

Going into the 2007 downturn, the budget deficit was $160 billion. There was ample room for fiscal stimulus. The funds rate was 5.5% and could be cut 550bps ”” now it is at 0%. The Fed’s balance sheet could be allowed to triple without reviving inflation expectations ”” good luck the next time around.

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…a good number of economists and banking experts are worried. They think the odds of a future bankruptcy-or-bailout dilemma will remain uncomfortably high even if reregulation passes.

For starters, there are the cross-border problems; in the midst of a crisis, governments may have trouble cooperating. Then there is the fact that the regulators have never before tried to shut down anything as complex as a multibillion-dollar financial firm. “It’s really hard ”” really hard,” says Robert Steel, who worked on the financial crisis in the Bush Treasury Department and later was chief executive of Wachovia. “Anyone who says they know exactly what we should do is overconfident.”

Another former top government official adds, bluntly, “Don’t kid yourself into thinking that if J. P. Morgan were on the rocks, it would disappear.”

Above all, no one knows what the next crisis will look like. So no one can be sure exactly how to prevent it. In all likelihood, Wall Street will eventually figure out ways around technocratic rules ”” and technocrats ”” and create trouble that today’s proposals don’t anticipate.

The beauty of a bank tax is that it acknowledges as much.

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Representatives from the different Anglican Church congregations in the Diocesan of Polynesia gathered at the Novotel Convention Centre in Lami yesterday to begin the electoral process for a new Diocesan Bishop.

Diocesan secretary and registrar Reverend Sereima Lomaloma said when the late Bishop of the Diocese of Polynesia, Reverend Jabez Leslie Bryce, died in February this year, his seat became vacant. “We usually have our synod, which is the parliament of the church, every three years,” she said.

“But this meeting was already planned by the late Bishop Bryce in 2009 after he announced his retirement in 2008.

“This synod has to take place. It is an electoral synod where the electoral college of the church is going to sit and elect a new bishop of Polynesia. It’s a process that the electoral college goes through and hopefully it will be over by Thursday evening.”

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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executives were grilled by U.S. lawmakers who compared the bank’s mortgage bankers to bookies as Senator Carl Levin asked why they sold securities the company itself called “shitty.”

“How about the fact that you sold hundreds of millions of that deal after your people knew it was a shitty deal?” the Michigan Democrat asked Daniel Sparks, who ran the bank’s mortgage unit at the time. “Does that bother you at all?”

Members of the Levin’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, winding up a probe of Goldman Sachs that has lasted more than a year, used today’s hearing to pepper current and former executives with questions about their duty to clients and the ethics of betting against the housing market as the bank also sold mortgage-linked securities to customers.

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For 2,000 years, Christian missionaries have traveled to foreign lands to spread the Gospel.

Today, there are thousands of missionaries preaching around the world without leaving home. Sometimes even while wearing pajamas.

Global Media Outreach, a branch of Campus Crusade for Christ, held a Webinar, or online seminar, this week to raise awareness and to motivate people to participate in online missions.

With tomorrow being designated Internet Evangelism Day (by the Internet Evangelism Coalition), Michelle Diedrich of GMO said she wants “to change the way we think” about the Internet.

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As Pope Benedict XVI has come under scrutiny for his handling of sexual abuse cases, both his supporters and his critics have paid fresh attention to the way he responded to a sexual abuse scandal in Austria in the 1990s, one of the most damaging to confront the church in Europe.

Defenders of Benedict cite his role in dealing with Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër of Vienna as evidence that he moved assertively, if quietly, against abusers. They point to the fact that Cardinal Groër left office six months after accusations against him of molesting boys first appeared in the Austrian news media in 1995. The future pope, they say, favored a full canonical investigation, only to be blocked by other ranking officials in the Vatican.

A detailed look at the rise and fall of the clergyman, who died in 2003, and the involvement of Benedict, a Bavarian theologian with many connections to German-speaking Austria, paints a more complex picture.

Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had the ear of Pope John Paul II and was able to block a favored candidate for archbishop of Vienna, clearing the way for Father Groër to assume the post in 1986, say senior church officials and priests with knowledge of the process. His critics question how this influence failed him nine years later in seeking a fuller investigation into the case.

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The British Foreign Office has apologized over a leaked memo which suggested Pope Benedict XVI bless a same-sex “marriage” or open an abortion clinic during an “ideal visit.” A Vatican spokesman said the incident would not affect the upcoming papal visit to England and Scotland.

The Sunday Telegraph obtained a copy of the memo, which said it should not be shared externally.

“The ‘ideal visit’ paper in particular was the product of a brainstorm session which took into account even the most far-fetched of ideas,” said the memo, which according to the BBC was authored by a junior civil servants.

Other passages of the memo suggested the Pope launch his own brand of condoms, start a helpline for abused children, sack “dodgy” bishops, apologize for the Spanish Armada and sing a song with the Queen.

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The British government was forced to publicly apologize to Pope Benedict XVI over a “foolish” internal memo that suggested, among other things, that the pope launch his own line of condoms during a September visit to Britain.

The document, described as a product of a “blue skies thinking” session at the Foreign Office, suggested among other ideas that the pope might use the tour to launch a line of “Benedict” condoms, bless a gay marriage and sing a duet with Queen Elizabeth II.

The band of government civil servants who authored the paper also suggested Benedict apologize for the 16th-century Spanish armada that fought the English navy, and that he reverse his ban on women priests.

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As a watching world wonders if Anglicanism is falling apart, major players in the Anglican Communion are assured of unity. But it is an assurance that is mingled with a deep sorrow.

These were recurrent themes in conversations The Christian Post had with most of the Global South archbishops and representatives. This paper had met them at a significant summit held last week at St. Andrew’s Cathedral.

For the Global South archbishops, there is no question about whether there will be a split in the largest Protestant communion.

“There is really only one Anglican Communion,” said the Most Revd. Henri Kahwa Isingoma of Congo. “It is the North American Churches that have gone far from the roots of our common faith.”

Read the whole article.

Thanks to the spiritual leadership of Churches in the southern hemisphere and Asia, the Anglican Communion looks set for more change. The next major milestone for the Communion appears to be the Anglican Covenant, a document leaders hope would clearly articulate the Anglican faith, and a real system of authority.

In this exclusive survey of the views of Anglican Global South archbishops and representatives, The Christian Post learns of their concerns and hopes as they eagerly draw the curtains to their collective future.

The following are full-length transcripts of interviews conducted with most of the archbishops and their representatives gathered at a summit held last week at St. Andrew’s Cathedral.

Read it all (15 pages).

With that as the backdrop, it would amount to progress if both parties, via the debt commission, agreed that two big steps can’t be avoided:

”¢ The tax system has to be changed. The U.S. doesn’t have a system that can fund the government the country wants. The Tax Foundation says the levies paid by the top 1% of taxpayers now exceed those paid by all of those in the bottom 95%. And the Tax Policy Institute says almost half of all filers will pay no 2009 income taxes at all, because of various exclusions and credits””up, by some estimates, from a quarter in 1990.

This may be great for those who like soak-the-rich rhetoric, but it’s no way to finance a country. More than that, it’s a bit of a hoax on middle- and lower-middle-class Americans. They certainly pay payroll taxes, and the more they are excused from the income tax-system, the more likely it is that they will be hit with sneakier and less-progressive taxes. Tax reform””a flatter tax system, a value-added tax, something””is needed.

”¢ Americans have to change how they think about retirement. When the economy recovers and costs for recession-related bailouts, stimulus spending and unemployment benefits are resolved, we’ll still be left unable to really afford our Social Security, Medicare and long-term-care commitments. When the easier stuff is done, this is the hard reality, requiring a new and nonpoliticized national discussion.

Read it carefully and read it all.

A major motive for being a Christian and participating in its rituals and disciplines is about to collapse. This is going to make a lot of Christians panic, but I believe the recent development will be all to the good.

The development is the discovery that hallucinogenic drugs can give people an experience seemingly identical to powerful religious experiences. A recent New York Times article by John Tierney describes the experience of retired clinical psychologist Clark Martin. Martin had been treated for depression for years, but counseling and antidepressants did nothing to help. At age 65, he enrolled in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school that gave people psilocybin, a psychoactive ingredient found in some mushrooms.

When Martin was administered the drug, he says, “All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating ”¦ . Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone….”

His experience, writes Tierney, is not all that unusual, and he says, “Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate.”

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