See what you make of the list (15 names total).

Lord God, in whose providence Jackson Kemper was chosen first missionary bishop in this land, that by his arduous labor and travel congregations might be established in scattered settlements of the West: Grant that the Church may always be faithful to its mission, and have the vision, courage, and perseverance to make known to all peoples the Good News of Jesus Christ; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever.

Make me to know thy ways, O LORD; teach me thy paths. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me, for thou art the God of my salvation; for thee I wait all the day long.

–Psalm 25:4,5

O God, who in the exaltation of thy Son Jesus Christ dost sanctify thy universal Church: Shed abroad in every race and nation the gift of the Holy Spirit; that the work wrought by his power at the first preaching of the gospel may now be extended throughout the whole world; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Gelasian Sacramentary

The US military has appointed its first senior general to direct cyber warfare ”“ despite fears that the move marks another stage in the militarisation of cyberspace.

The newly promoted four-star general, Keith Alexander, takes charge of the Pentagon’s ambitious and controversial new Cyber Command, designed to conduct virtual combat across the world’s computer networks. He was appointed on Friday afternoon in a low-key ceremony at Fort Meade, in Maryland.

The creation of America’s most senior cyber warrior comes just days after the US air force disclosed that some 30,000 of its troops had been re-assigned from technical support “to the frontlines of cyber warfare”.

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Tom Wright sees his new book as a sequel to two previous works of apologetics, Simply Christian and Surprised by Hope. In the US this book has been given the title After You Believe with the idea that it will appeal to readers who have become followers of Christ in conversion but are not sure what happens next. For those who have read Wright’s recent book on Justification this book is important in developing his understanding of Christian ethics. The same people who objected to Wright’s views on Justification will also object to this new account of Christian morality.

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Fifty days after Easter we celebrate the solemnity of Pentecost, in which we recall the manifestation of the power of the Holy Spirit, who ”“ as wind and as fire ”“ descended upon the Apostles gathered together in the Cenacle, and made them able to preach the Gospel to all nations with courage (cf. Acts 2:1-13).

The mystery of Pentecost, which we rightly identify with the event of the Church’s true “baptism,” is not, however, exhausted by this. The Church in fact lives constantly from the effusion of the Holy Spirit, without which she would exhaust her own powers, like a ship with sails and no wind. Pentecost is renewed in a special way in certain powerful moments, whether this be at the local or the universal level, whether it be in small assemblies or in great convocations.

The councils, for example, had sessions gratified by special outpourings of the Holy Spirit, and among these is certainly the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. We might also recall that celebrated meeting of the ecclesial movements with Venerable John Paul II, here in St. Peter’s Square, precisely on Pentecost in 1998. But the Church knows countless “pentecosts” that vivify the local communities: We think of the liturgies, particularly those experienced in special moments of the community’s life, in which the power of God is perceived in an evident way, infusing joy and enthusiasm in souls. We think of many other gatherings of prayer in which young people clearly feel the call of God to root their lives in his love, even consecrating themselves entirely to him.

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Far be it for me to make a dicey situation dicier but you can’t smell the sulphur in the air right now and not think we might be on the threshold of an age of rage….

Whether in 1789 or now, an incoming regime riding the storm gets a fleeting moment to try to contain calamity. If it is seen to be straining every muscle to put things right it can, for a while, generate provisional legitimacy.

Act two is trickier. Objectively, economic conditions might be improving, but perceptions are everything and a breathing space gives room for a dangerously alienated public to take stock of the brutal interruption of their rising expectations. What happened to the march of income, the acquisition of property, the truism that the next generation will live better than the last? The full impact of the overthrow of these assumptions sinks in and engenders a sense of grievance that “Someone Else” must have engineered the common misfortune. The stock epithet the French Revolution gave to the financiers who were blamed for disaster was “rich egoists”. Our own plutocrats may not be headed for the tumbrils but the fact that financial catastrophe, with its effect on the “real” economy, came about through obscure transactions designed to do nothing except produce short-term profit aggravates a sense of social betrayal. At this point, damage-control means pillorying the perpetrators: bringing them to book and extracting statements of contrition. This is why the psychological impact of financial regulation is almost as critical as its institutional prophylactics. Those who lobby against it risk jeopardising their own long-term interests. Should governments fail to reassert the integrity of public stewardship, suspicions will emerge that, for all the talk of new beginnings, the perps and new regime are cut from common cloth. Both risk being shredded by popular ire or outbid by more dangerous tribunes of indignation.

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Raúl Castro, Cuba’s president, has given a nod to the Roman Catholic Church’s desire to play a larger role in solving the communist-run island’s problems, possibly opening the way for the release of political prisoners, leading prelates said, in what experts and diplomats termed his most significant political move since replacing his brother Fidel in early 2008.

Mr Castro met for more than four hours with Cardinal Jaime Ortega and Bishop Dionisio Garcia of Santiago de Cuba, the head of the Conference of Bishops. The last such meeting took place five years ago when Fidel Castro was still in power.

By the weekend the government had informed the church that the prisoners would be moved from far-off locations to jails in their home provinces, and any ill inmates to hospital, according to dissidents and church sources.

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[Scott] Hayashi, rector at Ogden’s Good Shepherd church from 1989 to 1998 before leaving to become a diocesan administrator in Chicago, emerged as the choice to lead an estimated 5,200 Episcopalians in the state after only two rounds of balloting at a special convention attended by priests, deacons and lay members.

Hayashi received 73 of 138 lay delegate votes and 20 of 38 clergy votes, a simple majority and all that was needed to be elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese, which covers all of Utah and includes Page, Ariz. It took five ballots to reach that threshold during Irish’s election in 1996, according to the diocese.

“I was very honored and surprised in many ways that it happened on the second ballot,” Hayashi said in a telephone interview from Chicago. “One doesn’t believe it until it happens. I’m still trying to take it all in.”

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Howard Wallace of Camden, who was one of the delegates who chose [Andrew] Waldo, said he seemed to be the most moderate of the candidates and is a good listener.

“I just think he was uniquely called. He seemed the most spiritual, the most relaxed,” Wallace said. “He seemed like he was called more than that he really wanted it.”

Tina Lockhart, also from Camden, said Waldo seems “very prayerful” and that he had told her he was going on a three-day silent retreat at a monastery prior to his consecration.

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A graduate student at DePaul University, atheist activist Hemant Mehta avoided being a church hater by becoming a church rater.

Enlisted four years ago on a lark to attend about a dozen Chicago-area churches and honestly rate his experience, Mehta’s beliefs did not change, but his attitude toward organized religion did.

His journey inspired an interreligious group of entrepreneurs to recently launch ChurchRater, a new approach to church shopping modeled after Yelp, a popular website where users rate local businesses. By inviting ordinary worshipers to post reviews from the pews, the website aims to help Christians navigate the more than 330,000 churches across the U.S. to find where they fit on Sunday morning.

The Rev. Jim Henderson, an evangelical pastor from Seattle and one of the site’s founders, insists that Sunday morning worship is when most churches choose to open their doors to the public, and hence invite critique. Churches should welcome the evaluations at churchrater.com, he added. While Henderson and his staff work to filter unnecessarily vile material to keep reviews useful, he said hard truths can hurt and help.

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ERIN ROY: One day I came home from class, walked in my house, and my housemates were huddled around the computer, and they said that they had heard of and found this Web site. So I went over, checked it out and just saw terrible, terrible things written. Initially it definitely affected a lot of girls I know. I think they were just devastated, embarrassed, upset. Marist is a very small school, so one person hears something, and it spreads like wildfire even if it holds no truth.

[BETTY] ROLLIN: The Web site that was spreading the malicious gossip at Marist and 500 other colleges and universities was called JuicyCampus. Incredibly, the students had no way to stop it since the messages were all anonymously written, and the Web site was under no legal obligation to remove it.

ROY: Some of them definitely, probably were written by men who maybe left off on the wrong foot with a girl. Maybe something happened, and you know he didn’t think of her in the highest regards, and for girls””jealousy. They know this site is anonymous, so they are just so willing to jump on their computer and write comments about people, because they know they will never be caught….

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Follow up: There is more on this important subject there.

Without the Holy Spirit, Christian discipleship would be inconceivable, even impossible. There can be no life without the life-giver, no understanding without the Spirit of truth, no fellowship without the unity of the Spirit, no Christ-likeness of character apart from his fruit, and no effective witness without his power. As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.

–The Acts of the Apostles, A Commentary by John Stott

[At Pentecost Peter] intendeth to prove…that the Church can be repaired by no other means, saving only by the giving of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, forasmuch as they did all hope that the restoring drew near, he accuseth them of sluggishness, because they do not once think upon the way and means thereof. And when the prophet saith, “I will pour out,” it is, without all question, that he meant by this word to note the great abundance of the Spirit….when God will briefly promise salvation to his people, he affirmeth that he will give them his Spirit. Hereupon it followeth that we can obtain no good things until we have the Spirit given us.

–Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles

Luke portrays Peter standing before Cornelius and his friends and declaring that he has learned that “that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (10:34b-35). This was good Judaism and good Christianity. Peter does not stop there. It inspires him to go on to talk about Jesus, a healthy sequence. Similarly in Acts 17:28 Luke pictures Paul citing Aratus a pagan poet, that all human beings are God’s children, recognising thereby that God has been speaking also through Greek culture. Paul then goes on to speak about Jesus, including that Jesus will be the judge of all people in the end. So the inclusivity and recognition goes with an exclusive claim, an exclusive criterion.

What can we do with this in our very different situation? Until I am persuaded otherwise I make Jesus the “criterion” for assessing what goes on both in Christianity and in other religions. What I mean by “Jesus” needs a separate paper. It includes values related to love which affirm all people as of worth and that this love is at the heart of God, and Jesus embodied it. I may see the light I recognise in Jesus in other parts of Christianity, in other religions and beyond them, labelled or not. Light does not wear labels! Negatively, it means that I recognise injustice, violence, abuse, etc. as not light. If John 14:6 meant: only through faith in Jesus do we have the way to God, I would say: only the way of Jesus, labelled as such or not, is the way to God or the manifestation of God in the world. So I can be honest about my Christian claims, but generous about where else the spirit might move.

As Christians I think our role is to lay our table as richly and accessibly as possible, to tell the Jesus story. It is not to overturn the tables of others. My ignorance about others requires my constant openness while I own the riches I know in Christ. It helps me recognise salvation (= transformed people/communities living goodness and love; not individuals ticketed for heaven) wherever “good news” happens.

Read the whole thing.

A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation’s first robotic spaceplane, finding clues that suggest the military craft is engaged in the development of spy satellites rather than space weapons, which some experts have suspected but the Pentagon strongly denies.

Last month, the unmanned successor to the space shuttle blasted off from Florida on its debut mission but attracted little public notice because no one knew where it was going or what it was doing. The spaceship, known as the X-37B, was shrouded in operational secrecy, even as civilian specialists reported that it might go on mysterious errands for as long as nine months before zooming back to earth and touching down on a California runway.

In interviews and statements, Pentagon leaders strongly denied that the winged plane had anything to do with space weapons, even while conceding that its ultimate goal was to aid terrestrial war fighters with a variety of ancillary missions.

The secretive effort seeks “no offensive capabilities,” Gary E. Payton, under secretary of the Air Force for space programs, emphasized on Friday. “The program supports technology risk reduction, experimentation and operational concept development.”

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The more specific you can be the more enjoyable it will be for the rest of us.

O Thou whose eye is over all the children of men, and who hast called them into a kingdom not of this world: Send forth thy Holy Spirit into all the dark places of life. Let him still the noise of our strife and the tumult of the people, carry faith to the doubting, hope to the fearful, strength to the weak, light to the mourners, and more and more increase the pure in heart who see their God; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

–John 4:21-24

O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who after his ascension didst send upon the first disciples thy promised gift of the Holy Spirit: Regard, we pray thee, the present need of thy Church, and grant us by the same Spirit to be endued with power from on high, that we may bear effectual witness to the truth of thy holy gospel; so that they who serve thee may be strengthened and encouraged, and they who serve thee not may be convicted and converted; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

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Reacting to questions raised recently in the media, the bishops said the Church loved such couples in the same way as it loved all its members. It would continue to offer them spiritual help and it encouraged them to go to Mass and participate in the life of the Church.

“However, the Catholic Church insists that couples who live together without being married should not receive Holy Communion.

“The Church does not impose this as a punishment, but because the way of life of such people goes against the sacrament of marriage,” the bishops said.

Furthermore, the bishops said, such behaviour went against Church teaching that those who received the Eucharist had to be one in unity with Christ and the Church.

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The news today that Mr [Stephen] Green is planning his departure as chairman of HSBC gives us an opportunity to pause and consider the record of the man who, after meeting his wife while working as a volunteer at a hostel for alcoholics, has carved out a career where he has tried to match morals and Mammon.

Mr Green is a devout Christian and an ordained Anglican priest. Last year he wrote Good Value – Reflections On Money, Morality And An Uncertain World, about how shareholder value should mean more than simple monetary reward. The dividend and the bottom line was only one way to judge the performance of a company – what about its social role or environmental impact?

Mr Green said at the time that the system had suffered “a massive breakdown of trust: trust in the financial system, trust in bankers, trust in business, trust in business leaders, trust in politicians, trust in the whole process of globalisation”. The author Giles Foden, reviewing the book, described him as “the sage banker”.

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Birthdays are fun; a birth itself is not. There’s a lot of screaming and groaning, and even in the easiest deliveries, there’s always the fear that something will go wrong.

The birth of a state is no less difficult. Indeed, what pessimists ”” including many here in Germany ”” see as an existential crisis for the continent is really just the latest stage in the birth pangs of a new country. While we should of course worry about Greek debt, we should also have hope that we are witnessing the end of the euro zone as an abstraction and the birth of the United States of Europe.

Europe’s movement toward unification has always been the product of crises.

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Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have made a bacterium that has an artificial genome””creating a living creature with no ancestor… Pedants may quibble that only the DNA of the new beast was actually manufactured in a laboratory; the researchers had to use the shell of an existing bug to get that DNA to do its stuff. Nevertheless, a Rubicon has been crossed. It is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria (and eventually, new animals and plants) are designed on a computer and then grown to order.

That ability would prove mankind’s mastery over nature in a way more profound than even the detonation of the first atomic bomb. The bomb, however justified in the context of the second world war, was purely destructive. Biology is about nurturing and growth. Synthetic biology, as the technology that this and myriad less eye-catching advances are ushering in has been dubbed, promises much. In the short term it promises better drugs, less thirsty crops (see article), greener fuels and even a rejuvenated chemical industry. In the longer term who knows what marvels could be designed and grown?

On the face of it, then, artificial life looks like a wonderful thing. Yet that is not how many will view the announcement. For them, a better word than “creation” is “tampering”. Have scientists got too big for their boots? Will their hubris bring Nemesis in due course? What horrors will come creeping out of the flask on the laboratory bench?

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Stricken with schizophrenia 30 years ago, [Mr Harris] Ng recovered from the illness and overcame its stigma by a combination of medication and faith.

“Medication alone can only help us to stabilise,” he said. “We need the strength to carry on to be financially independent and to reintegrate back into society, to lift up our face, smile at people, and not to feel the stigma that we are a mental case.”

For Ng, believing in a God of love gives him strength, confidence and purpose.

It was his Christian faith that helped him come to terms with his mental illness.

Feeling very shameful about his condition, Ng would once deny that he was mentally ill and reject medication.

The turning point came when he went for counselling over 20 years ago with the Singapore Anglican Community Services, then known as the Anglican Welfare Services.

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Across Western Europe, the “lifestyle superpower,” the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II.

Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism.

Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella. They have also translated higher taxes into a cradle-to-grave safety net. “The Europe that protects” is a slogan of the European Union.

But all over Europe governments with big budgets, falling tax revenues and aging populations are experiencing rising deficits, with more bad news ahead.

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Now we are tested again.

Such is the election within the Diocese of Los Angeles, and consented to by a majority of jurisdictional bishops (those who are actually in charge of a diocese) and diocesan Standing Committees (69 out of 110), of the Rev Mary Glasspool to be a Suffragan Bishop (an assistant bishop for the diocese). The problem is that Mary openly admitted at the time of her nomination to an existing “committed” relationship with another woman, clearly implying including a sexual relationship.

Why is that a problem? Very simply, the bible is consistent throughout the Old and New Testament that God has deemed marriage to be between a man and a woman, and God has commanded that no physical sexual acts are to take place between people outside of marriage. No if’s, and’s or but’s.

Of course, this is not a new development. Seven years ago, in 2003, there was the election, consent and consecration of the Rev Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. That event became the tipping point for many in our Church, and which has caused you and I and the parish such grief from our friends and neighbors and former parishioners for still being a parish in The Episcopal Church USA. That your vestry and I have not condoned this rejection of clear biblical standards, in fact actively condemned it, has not lessened the confrontations we have experienced. And it is this very rejection of biblical authority that pushed the diocese of San Joaquin to vote in convention to associate with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone (South America).

This is also not a new development for Los Angeles. The Rt Rev Jon Bruno, an old acquaintance of mine, is obviously openly supportive of such an election (or he could have kept her from being nominated), as well as back-door methods of allowing same-sex unions to be “blessed” by members of the clergy when they request it. As well, he hired an already ordained bishop to assist in Los Angeles (who is now retired and thus the need for new assisting bishops) who has also been in a same-sex relationship. +Los Angeles is in great confusion regarding the authority of Holy Scripture.

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The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the national leader of the Episcopal Church in 16 countries, including its 2.4 million members in the U.S., is in Greenville for the consecration today of a new bishop for the Diocese of Upper South Carolina, the Rev. Andrew Waldo.

She said fallout from the 2003 decision to consecrate Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire appears to have settled out for the most part.

“The reactivity right now is much, much less than it was seven years ago,” she said during an interview at Christ Church, where Waldo’s consecration will take place.

“I think the church, and certainly the part of the church in the United States, is reasonably clear about where we’re going, even though everybody doesn’t agree. And those in the church, I think, are willing to live with that tension.”

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