The Anglican Archbishop, Dr Peter Jensen, wrote an article entitled ”Ten reasons the ethics trial is not a good idea” in the Anglican publication, Southern Cross.

“The non-religious St James Ethics Centre has already received wide exposure ”¦ boosted by those who see this as a chance to break SRE and remove all trace of religion from public life,” Jensen wrote.

He argues that there is an implication that teachers are not doing their job teaching mainstream ethical behaviour and that the course is presented as new, exciting and more useful than SRE, which may lead to fewer children choosing it.

The study of religion is vital to an understanding of our culture, art, faith and human history, Jensen writes.

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Fresh developments in the continuing storm over clerical sex abuse illustrate a chronic Vatican problem as well as some reasons for guarded optimism about the future.

The problem, acknowledged by many inside the Roman Curia, has been recent missteps in communication that have undercut the Vatican’s own patient efforts to provide accurate and detailed information about sex abuse policies.

The latest came when Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, told reporters in Chile April 12 that many psychologists believe there is a connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.

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For Goldman Sachs, it was a relatively small transaction. But for the bank ”” and the rest of Wall Street ”” the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Accusations that Goldman defrauded customers who bought investments tied to risky subprime mortgages have only just begun to reverberate through the financial world.

The civil lawsuit that the Securities and Exchange Commission filed against Goldman on Friday seemed to confirm many Americans’ worst suspicions about Wall Street: that the game is rigged, the odds stacked in the banks’ favor. It is the first big case ”” but probably not the last, legal experts said ”” to delve into a Wall Street firm’s role in the mortgage fiasco.

It is a particularly sensitive time for Wall Street. Washington policy makers are hotly debating a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations, and the news could embolden those seeking to rein in the banks. President Obama on Saturday stepped up pressure for financial reform by accusing Republicans of “cynical and deceptive” attacks on the measure.

The S.E.C.’s action could also hit Wall Street where it really hurts: the wallet. It could prompt dozens of investor claims against Goldman and other Wall Street titans that devised and sold toxic mortgage investments.

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This is a follow up on the NPR story posted yesterday–watch it all.

This is a guaranteed day brightener–watch it all (Hat tip: Selimah).

Check it out.

Members of the Bishop Seabury church, including the man who led them away from the Episcopal Diocese in 2007, are taking it Sunday by Sunday.

About 25 parishioners from the Groton church attended a court hearing in Waterbury Thursday to learn whether they would be able to remain during an appeal of a judge’s ruling that the church and all of its property must be turned over to the diocese.

The group will be allowed to stay, at least for the near future.

“It’s better than nothing,” said the Rev. Ronald Gauss, who traveled by bus to the hearing along with about two dozen others.

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There was no red carpet, no fanfare for Friday’s visit to Bridgeport by the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States and 15 other nations.

And the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori preferred it that way.

Jefferts Schori, the first woman to hold the post of U.S. presiding bishop, said she doesn’t even like to be called “Excellency,” as some high-ranking religious officials sometimes are. Nonetheless, her responsibilities are lofty as she is considered the leader of the Episcopal Church’s 2.4 million members, who comprise one of 38 provinces, or churches, of the Anglican Communion. Elected to the post in 2006, she previously served as bishop of Nevada.

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Ven. Thomas A. Corston was chosen as the bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Moosonee at an electoral synod held April 10.

Corston, who ministered in Fredericton in the 1980s, was elected on the fifth ballot from amongst seven candidates. He succeeds Most Rev. Caleb Lawrence, who had served as Bishop of Moosonee for the past 30 years before retiring in January.

The Diocese of Moosonee encompasses 350,000 square miles in northern Ontario and western Quebec and is home to about 8,700 Anglicans. The diocese is a member of the Council of the North.

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The state will be the shining star of the Anglican Communion today when the Rev. Ian T. Douglas is consecrated the 15th bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut.

Douglas sits on the Anglican Consultative Council, which represents Anglicans worldwide, so he is well known outside the Episcopal Church. He asked a friend, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, to be the preacher today.

Douglas, formerly professor of world mission at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., said his connections will benefit the diocese, and vice versa.

“I’m not afraid to call in favors around the world to help us in Connecticut,” he said recently. “I have a pretty good Rolodex that I would hope to utilize.”

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: At a summit meeting in Washington convened by President Obama, leaders of 47 countries promised to take steps to stop the spread of nuclear materials and weapons. This followed agreement earlier by the US and Russia to cut back their deployed nuclear weapons by a third. Many religious groups are active in support of nuclear arms reduction and eventual elimination, and we want to talk about that with Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. Richard, welcome. There are lots of new organizations around that are trying to call attention to the problem of nuclear weapons. Why now?

RICHARD CIZIK (President, New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good): Among other reasons, Bob, not simply the outrage that this could happen, that is, detonation of a nuclear device in an American city. That would be enough to motivate anybody, it would seem. But the younger evangelicals and others their age, they grew up post-Cold War, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and frankly after 9/11. They know terrorism, but they don’t know nukes. But they are optimistic this can be done, the Global Zero movement, but it’s educating a whole new generation that has to be done, who didn’t grow up with it, hasn’t acquiesced to it.

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When Jennifer Nicholas sees television shows or movies where characters “hook up” or have sex with “friends with benefits,” she cringes, because that’s how she got herpes.

“Getting an STD wasn’t even something that crossed my mind,” said Nicholas, 39, who learned that she had herpes at age 22. “One day I’m at the doctor’s office and it was, ‘Surprise! You’ve got herpes.’ ”

Experts in sexually transmitted diseases say they’ve become increasingly concerned about the trend toward having what they call “sexual involvement in nonromantic contexts” — the technical term for hookups or “friends with benefits” — because they’re especially likely to spread sexually transmitted diseases.

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I was particularly interested in the news yesterday that scientists at Newcastle University have been able to replace the nucleus of one women’s egg with the nucleus from another egg to stop a child being born with mitochondrial disease. This is a disease affecting one child in 6,500, which can result in blindness, heart failure and other serious conditions. For six years, until the beginning of this year, I had the privilege of being on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and this was one of the many difficult issues that we had to decide about. Indeed, our decision to allow research in this area was challenged right up to the highest court in the land.

These are indeed contentious issues, but I think it is important first to be clear about what we mean by the much used word “natural”. It is not natural to us simply to let nature take its course. What is natural for us as human beings is to use our God given brains to interact with nature for human wellbeing….

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Over the course of the election campaign, the Today programme will be investigating the big trends in British society over the past 13 years, and how the trends have influenced the choices that politicians have made on our behalf.

In the first in a series of reports, John Humphrys visited Cardiff on a Saturday night, to see how the government has attempted to tackle the rise in binge-drinking.

Listen to it all (almost 8 1/2 minutes).

[Kai] Ryssdal: All right, so explain it to me. How does Unvarnished work?

[Peter] Kazanjy: So, essentially what Unvarnished is trying to do is take how professional reputation works in the off-line world and bring it online. Right now, professional reputation information, it exists in the minds of all of our colleagues, and that information is kind of very fractured and not accessible. And what we’re seeking to do is surface that information in such a way that it makes it much more accessible and much more valuable — much the same way that Web sites like Trip Advisor has done for hotels and Yelp has done for restaurants and dentists and doctors and plumbers and individuals as well.

Ryssdal: And all of those things, I get, right — hotels and travel experiences and even dentists. But somehow, this idea of professional reputation being open to such interpretation, it’s a tricky thing, isn’t it?

Kazanjy: Well, I think it is, but I think that a lot of times people say, they immediately go to thinking about themselves being reviewed, as opposed to “Wow, it would be great for a forum where I can express my opinion and give great credit where credit is due, and also feedback where needed.” And also, great to have a resource where I could actually get the inside scoop and figure out who’s great to work with, who’s good to work with and who maybe I want to avoid.

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In the immediate aftermath, the conventional wisdom was that Wall Street had simply lost its head. It was terrible, to be sure, but on some level understandable: Dutch tulips, the South Sea bubble, that sort of thing.

In recent months, though, something more troubling has begun to emerge. In December, Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story of The New York Times exposed the role that some firms, including Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, played in putting together investment structures ”” synthetic C.D.O.’s, they were called ”” that were primed to blow up. They did so, reportedly, because some savvy investors wanted to go short the subprime market.

On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped the hammer, charging Goldman Sachs with securities fraud for its purported failure to disclose that the bonds that were the basis for one particular synthetic C.D.O. had been chosen by none other than John Paulson, the billionaire hedge fund investor, who was shorting them.

Oh, and one other thing is starting to become clear: synthetic C.D.O.’s made the crisis worse than it would otherwise have been.

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A picture that is worth thousands and thousands of travellers stranded in Europe. Ugh.

If you have traipsed through a hotel lobby lately; tramped on a health-club treadmill; guzzled a beer at a bar; or nervously anticipated your turn in the dentist’s chair, you likely found your eyes wandering to a video screen. The business of “captive TV,” as it is called, is booming. According to Nielsen, the television audience-measurement people, we collectively viewed a quarter-billion video advertisements in the last four months of 2009. Whatever the exact number, we don’t need Nielsen to tell us that it is getting harder and harder to find a public space free from the tireless and tiresome electronic beckonings of “location-based video.”

The business has grown by boasting several advantages for advertisers. A crowd of people with nowhere to go and nothing to do will look at the screens””plus the ads””grateful for anything to “help pass the time,” as one of the services says in its promotional material. Doctors’ offices, airports and the DMV get to turn the inconvenience of their clients into a revenue stream. The place-based systems also promise to deliver narrowly defined audiences that can be given tailored pitches. How better to market to drinkers than with ads in bars? Then there are the screens in bathrooms, which provide ads that one media company crows are, “perfectly gender segmented.” Perhaps most attractive to marketers in the age of digital video recorders: The passive public viewers don’t have access to a remote control. There’s no fast-forwarding through the advertisements.

Unless you have tremendous discipline and willpower, there’s no ignoring them either….

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Once, leaders of the Vatican felt that silence would protect the church. But now anyone who cares about it must come to understand that only speaking, revealing, admitting and changing will save the church.

The old Vatican needs new blood.

They need to let younger generations of priests and nuns rise to positions of authority within a new church. Most especially and most immediately, they need to elevate women. As a nun said to me this week, if a woman had been sitting beside a bishop transferring a priest with a history of abuse, she would have said: “Hey, wait a minute!”

If the media and the victims don’t keep the pressure on, the old ways will continue. As for Cardinal Law, he should not be where he is, nor mitred nor ringed.

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Wonderful stuff–watch it all.

The First Amendment prohibits any “law respecting an establishment of religion,” and in recent years the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause cases have focused on religiously themed public displays. Yet the court has failed to develop clear rules for deciding such cases, ensuring further litigation. There is something picayune about these disputes, over courthouse Ten Commandments displays or school-yard crèches. In this term’s Establishment Clause case, Salazar v. Bruno, for instance, the justices will soon decide whether an eight-foot cruciform war memorial in a park in the Mojave Desert violates the Constitution.

All the while, the court has never come to grips with the existence of a literal established church on a hill just across town””the National Cathedral. Although the Cathedral helps put issues like those in Salazar in proper perspective, it seems the court can’t see the Cathedral for the crosses.

The Cathedral’s parent body, the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation, was “constituted” by an act of Congress in 1893, and the cornerstone was laid in the presence of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. The charter Congress issued on the Feast of the Epiphany called on the Foundation to “establish”¦within the District of Columbia a cathedral . . . for the promotion of religion” and other worthwhile causes.

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In his most direct reference to the sexual abuse crisis that has reached the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI said Thursday that it was necessary for Christians to “repent” in light of “the attacks of the world, which speaks to us of our sins.”

But in an approach typical of the tough-minded yet media-averse theologian, Benedict aimed his message directly at the church, offering his remarks in an off-the-cuff homily at a small, untelevised Mass at the Vatican.

“I have to say that we Christians, even in recent times, have often avoided the word ‘repentance,’ which seems too harsh,” Benedict said at a Mass later broadcast on Vatican Radio.

“Now under the attacks of the world, which speaks to us of our sins, we see that the ability to repent is a grace, and we see how it is necessary to repent, that is, to recognize what is wrong in our life,” he added.

Read the whole article.

It’s been two years since HBO aired the final episode of The Wire. Critics praised the TV show for its realistic portrayal of drug culture and its far-reaching influence.

But now a handful of colleges across the country — including Harvard, Duke and the University of California, Berkeley — offer courses built around the show.

Jason Mittell teaches one of those classes, “Watching The Wire: Urban America in Serial Television,” at Middlebury College in Vermont. He’s an associate American studies professor, and he thinks the show’s creator, David Simon, tapped into a crucial American subculture.

Simon is exploring another subculture, post-Katrina New Orleans, in his latest series, Treme, which just debuted on HBO.

Read or listen to it all. If you do not know about The Wire, ou should, it is one of the very best shows to be on television in recent years–KSH.[/i]