The July Synod has the potential to be one of the most demanding meetings of the Synod for many years. It will, in the view of the House, be an occasion when all concerned will need to listen with particular care to those with views that differ from their own and to acknowledge the passion and sincerity with which those views are held.

The House is aware that there are those who believe that the present legislative process does not have the potential to lead to a satisfactory conclusion and that a better outcome is more likely to be achieved in some years’ time. Most members of the House consider, however, that it is crucial to keep faith with the present process. They see no grounds for believing that the issues with which the Church is grappling will become significantly easier to resolve with the passage of time.

The July debates will provide the chance for the full Synod to decide whether it wishes to make significant changes to the draft legislation, including whether to retain an approach based on a statutory code of practice or to support amendments giving effect to some other approach. What happens thereafter will depend on what Synod decides. On any basis it will be at least another two years before the mind of the Church of England can be determined at the final approval stage.

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The U.S. is giving $1.3 billion in military and judicial aid to Mexico to help Calderon’s battle against the drug mafias. Mexico’s drug cartels are the major foreign supplier of marijuana and methamphetamines to the United States, and Mexico is a main conduit for cocaine coming mainly from Colombia.

An NPR News investigation in Ciudad Juarez ”” ground zero of Calderon’s cartel war ”” finds strong evidence that Mexico’s drug fight is rigged, according to court testimony, current and former law enforcement officials, and an NPR analysis of cartel arrests.

In that border city, federal forces appear to be favoring one cartel, the Sinaloa (named after the coastal state in northwestern Mexico), which the U.S. Justice Department calls one of the largest organized crime syndicates in the world.

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In the work that bears his name, Gilbert and Sullivan’s wonderfully imagined Mikado purports “To let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime.” In their guest opinion column in the Anglican Journal (May 2010, p. 5), Catherine Sider-Hamilton and Dean Mercer have, on the other hand, already decided the punishment”“ “a second-tier status in the larger Anglican Communion.” It remains only to conjure up the requisite crime….

…the writers imply that the current conflict pits those who love and faithfully receive scripture against those who despise it, who find its teaching “oppressive and outdated.” But we know that those who support the blessing of committed monogamous same-sex relationships include many who know and love the Bible as living witness to the living God. And we know that as we receive and interpret scripture, the truth that emerges is often contested truth”“as for example, we come to divergent conclusions about the response that the God revealed in scripture invites to a question of sexual ethics and Kingdom ethos in the 21st century. Conflict and contested truth are not unfamiliar to Jesus’ disciples, and need not tear apart the foundational covenant of our common baptism into one body. We could renew a healthier and more faithful discourse by acknowledging contested truth and engaging in honest and charitable conversation about the practices, values and contextual realities that shape our reception and interpretation of scripture.

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Dorchester District 2’s well-regarded schools are in danger in the wake of severe budget cuts, school leaders and residents told County Council at a public hearing Monday night.

Allyson Duke, district chief financial officer, made a presentation to council’s Finance Committee on the 2010-2011 schools budget. She said the district faces a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall next year.

Her presentation was followed by a public hearing, which drew a standing-room-only crowd. At the hearing, district leaders and residents voiced their concerns about the impact of budget cuts on the schools.

Superintendent Joe Pye said, “the biggest issue is class size.” There will be more children, on average, in classrooms next year, which will impact students, he said.

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Cynics might argue that the hymn’s words are little more than Hallmark card banalities. Newman himself worried that his fellow Victorians sentimentalised them and he strongly discouraged their use at funerals. But if the hymn was simply a bromide how did it nourish Gandhi as he suffered imprisonment, assault and near-death fasts? The Indian leader thought the phrase “one step enough for me” contained an entire political philosophy. It reminded him, as he faced one crisis after another, to act in the present and not to worry about the future.

Gandhi’s interpretation of the hymn might have surprised Newman, but it wouldn’t have scandalised him. Although he is portrayed as a ghostly intellectual Newman had a strong social conscience. As a cardinal he was entitled to live in Rome but he insisted on remaining a parish priest in blighted Birmingham.

When Benedict XVI beatifies Newman on 19 September he is not simply proclaiming that the cardinal was a holy man. He is saying that Newman’s life and teaching are of universal significance. Gandhi’s love of “Lead, kindly Light” proves that Newman is not just for Catholics. With its primordial imagery of dark and light the hymn speaks to anyone who is struggling, amid the gloom, to take the next step towards truth.

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Anglicans in the Yukon have elected the Right Rev. Larry Robertson as their new bishop over the weekend.

Robertson, who is currently an assistant bishop of the Anglican Diocese of the Arctic in Yellowknife, was chosen over three other candidates at the Yukon diocese’s synod Saturday in Whitehorse.

“Somebody came and asked me if I would run, and we prayed about it for a long time,” Robertson told CBC News after his election.

“I have a lot of connections with the diocese already, and so we felt it was good to let our names stand.”

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A suicide car bomb that targeted a Nato convoy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, has killed at least 19 people, including six foreign troops.

The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the rush hour attack in the west of the city, where parliament and other government buildings are located.

More than 50 people – mostly Afghan civilians – were hurt in the explosion.

It is the deadliest attack on foreign forces in the heavily-guarded capital since a Taliban assault last September.

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Religious leaders from Arizona took their cause to Capitol Hill on Thursday (May 13), saying they can no longer ignore the “human cost” of illegal immigration in their state.

“I’m here representing evangelicals,” said Gary Kinnaman, an evangelical pastor from Phoenix after a morning meeting with Sen. John McCain. R-Ariz. “We are increasingly concerned.”

The interfaith group of Jewish, Methodist, evangelical, Catholic and Episcopal leaders said they oppose their state’s new law that allows police to question Arizonans about their legal immigration status. The group said the federal government, not the state, should take the lead on immigration reform.

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I hope today’s report will help to reassure everyone that while important challenges remain, the Catholic Church in Ireland has come a long way in addressing the failings of the past. I welcome in particular the report’s two clear conclusions: “Firstly, that children should be safer today within the church than they once were. Secondly, those that seek to harm children should feel much less secure.”

I also welcome the news that 2,356 individuals have been trained and are now acting as child safeguarding representatives in parishes across the country, with coverage of all parishes to be achieved in the coming months. This represents an extraordinary achievement by any standard and is a remarkable example of lay participation in the life and ministry of the church. I want to thank all those who give of their time, talent and expertise in safeguarding children. Building whole communities that actively keep children safe, together with effective structures of accountability and transparency, is the key to the future of child safeguarding within the church and, indeed, within society as a whole. Each one of us has to take responsibility for keeping children safe and for addressing the attitudes and practices which had such tragic consequences for so many children in the past.

There is no room for complacency. The tragic experience of the past reminds us that constant vigilance is needed as well as full adherence to robust, comprehensive and ongoing systems of accountability. As Pope Benedict XVI said to the bishops in his pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland: “Only decisive action carried out with complete honesty and transparency will restore the respect and goodwill of the Irish people towards the church to which we have consecrated our lives. This must arise, first and foremost, from your own self-examination, inner purification and spiritual renewal.”

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The White House on Monday showed deep skepticism about Iran’s new deal to ship low-enriched uranium off its soil, saying it has the chance to be “positive step” but warning that the deal still allows Iran to keep enriching uranium toward the pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

“Given Iran’s repeated failure to live up to its own commitments, and the need to address fundamental issues related to Iran’s nuclear program, the United States and international community continue to have serious concerns,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a written statement to the media.

In a deal struck with Turkey and Brazil, Iran said it would export much of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey. In return, Iran would get fuel rods of medium-enriched uranium to use in a Tehran medical research reactor. The move was seen as an attempt by Iran to prevent a looming round of United Nations sanctions.

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You know, Charlie, for 60 years you could really say being in politics, being a political leader, was, on balance, about giving things away to people. That’s what you did most of your time.

I think we’re entering an era — how long it will last, I dare not predict — where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people. And that shift from leaders giving things away to leaders taking things away, I don’t think we know what that looks like over time. It’s going to be very, very interesting.

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The new Arizona law prompted a memory. My wife and I once lived in a town in Texas. It was common practice for the police there to pull over people passing through — often just for “driving while being Hispanic.” We are both ministers. We asked, “Is that how we would want to be treated, if we were Hispanic?” We protested then against racial profiling. We do so now.

My wife was the first woman ordained an Episcopal priest in Texas. I’m a Unitarian. Despite some people considering us to be “the odd couple” among clergy, we have been married since 1972. We apply the same Golden Rule logic to the issue of marriage equality for loving couples of the same gender. In my present Massachusetts congregation I have five such couples, all raising children together. They can marry in this state but still cannot file their federal income taxes as married couples. So we also protest the federal “Defense of Marriage” Act. It doesn’t help to defend our marriage, or any marriage. It gets in the way of applying the Golden Rule.

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Of more than 900 men in my battalion, I was one of only two Jewish soldiers. While serving in this predominately Muslim country, Lieutenant Schwartz had opted to translate his last name from the German and go instead by Lieutenant Black. My last name, Brewster, did not pose the same problem, but I had my own difficult choice to make.

My father is a fourth-generation Episcopal minister from a blue-blooded New England family who fell in love with a Jewish girl. Rather than prescribing a religion to any of their children, my parents raised my brother, sister and me in both religions and allowed us to decide for ourselves. While not rejecting my Christian heritage, I have considered myself Jewish since shortly after my bar mitzvah.

For safety’s sake, I ordered two sets of dog tags before my deployment, one that identified me as Jewish, the other as Episcopalian. In my first three months in Iraq, while I worked in intelligence ”” mostly relegated to a windowless office ”” I wore the dog tags that said Jewish. My switch to platoon leader meant leaving the base daily and facing increased danger. The night before my new duties, I sat for close to an hour staring at each set of dog tags. I thought of the Maccabees ”” choosing death at the hand of the Assyrians rather than renouncing their faith. I also recalled Daniel Pearl ”” the Wall Street Journal reporter who had been beheaded in Pakistan, in part for being Jewish. I knew the chance of my capture was relatively low and that my dog tags would probably remain hidden under my uniform. But the idea of hiding my religious identity weighed on me heavily.

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In this six-part interview Hart talks about the impact of Christianity on the West, some questionable interpretations of history, suffering and the problem of evil and why he remains a believer.

The topics are:

The violence of Christian history

The new atheists and an ugly God

Ethics and the good life

Nostalgia for a pagan past

Gnosticism and alternative gospels

Suffering and the problem of evil

Check them out.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been slower to respond to the consecration of the Rt. Rev. Mary Douglas Glasspool as a bishop suffragan than he was after her Dec. 5, 2009, election.

When the Diocese of Los Angeles elected Glasspool the Archbishop of Canterbury responded the next day.

“The election of Mary Glasspool by the Diocese of Los Angeles as suffragan bishop elect raises very serious questions not just for the Episcopal Church and its place in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole,” Archbishop Rowan Williams said then.

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Father John Saward, a scholar and author who converted from the Anglican clergy to the Catholic priesthood, has called Venerable John Henry Newman “the supreme writer of English in the Victorian age.”

Father Saward is not the only one with a lofty opinion of the great man of letters. Pope Benedict plans to beatify Newman ”” the erstwhile Anglican intellectual and clergyman who became one of the most influential Catholic bishops in history ”” when he visits England in September.

On the anniversary of Newman’s ordination to the Catholic priesthood (on May 30, 1847), and with the Holy Father’s upcoming U.K. trip already making headlines, it’s worth pausing to remember the irony and drama of Newman’s conversion….

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With an estimated 12,500 people gathered on Parliament Hill, Canada’s largest ever March for Life May 13 gave a boost to what observers consider to be growing momentum within the country’s pro-life movement.

The crowd celebrated the recent defeat in the Canadian Parliament of legislation that would have legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide. Those gathered also were pleased by a recent parliament vote to exclude abortion in a Canadian-led maternal and child health initiative among the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations.

“These are two tangible, visible steps that we are moving toward a culture of life in Canada,” Carl Anderson, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, told the crowd.

He cited studies that show 64 percent of women were pressured into having abortions and 83 percent regretted having one.

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Hesham Shashaa looked twice at the display on his cellphone, staring at the number. “It’s either a person who needs help or someone who wants to kill me,” he said.

Mr. Shashaa, an imam at the Darul Quran mosque in Munich, follows the strictest form of Islam, Salafi. But the people who want to kill him are Muslims.

“They use the religion for their personal aims and declare war on Jews and Christians, but I want people to follow what Islam really says,” said Mr. Shashaa, who with his beard and traditional clothes has sometimes been likened to Osama bin Laden. But his philosophy is quite different.

A growing number of imams in Europe and the Middle East have denounced suicide missions and terrorist acts. Many of these imams, however, still view Al Qaeda, the Taliban or Hamas as legitimate resistance movements, while Mr. Shashaa openly declares that they are violating the tenets of Islam.

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Where have all the Protestants gone? Apparently not to law school. If Elena Kagan, who is Jewish, is confirmed to replace John Paul Stevens, who is Protestant, America’s highest court will have six Catholics, three Jews and zero Protestants. This would be a historic development ”” a coup nearly as momentous as the 2009 inauguration of America’s first black president, but far less widely understood.

When the Supreme Court first convened in 1790 (with six judges as opposed to the current nine) it was an all-Protestant club, with four Episcopalians, a Unitarian and a Presbyterian. During the 19th century, Protestants worked through churches and voluntary associations to make America Protestant. They did this by identifying Catholics as the enemy, scapegoating the pope as the Antichrist and U.S. Catholics as his minions overseas. If, as historian Richard Hofstadter has argued, anti-Catholicism was “the pornography of the Puritan,” it was the Victorian’s fantasy, too.

Protestants still account for about 55% of the 111th Congress, but a recent flurry of Catholic and Jewish appointments has turned them into a minority of one on the Supreme Court. Should Kagan be confirmed, the nation’s highest court would be a Protestant-free zone for the first time since John Jay, the nation’s first chief justice (and an Episcopalian), banged his gavel in 1790.

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Herein lies the challenge: Small businesses, half of the private sector (and the most important part as far as jobs are concerned), have been heavily impacted by this credit crisis. Small businesses created 64% of new jobs over the past 15 years, but they have cut five million jobs since the onset of this credit crisis. Large businesses, by comparison, have shed three million jobs in the past two years.

Small businesses continue to struggle to gain access to credit and cannot hire in this environment. Thus, the full weight of job creation falls upon large businesses. It would take large businesses rehiring 100% of the three million workers laid off over the past two years to make a substantial change in jobless numbers. Given the productivity gains enjoyed recently, it is improbable that anything near this will occur.

Unless real focus is afforded to re-engaging small businesses in this country, we will have a tragic and dangerous unemployment level for an extended period of time. Small businesses fund themselves exactly the way consumers do, with credit cards and home equity lines. Over the past two years, more than $1.5 trillion in credit-card lines have been cut, and those cuts are increasing by the day….

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When Tim Ryan was called to an urgent meeting last year to discuss his duties as children’s minister at West Shore Evangelical Free Church, he knew something was amiss.

“This is really hard. I don’t know how I can do this,” said executive pastor John Nesbitt, who helps lead the 2,500 attendee megachurch in Mechanicsburg, Pa.

The church, part of the Evangelical Free Church of America, had been growing rapidly but giving was down and well below projections as the recession weighed on members. So Mr. Ryan was losing his job, as was another pastor.

While the economy appears to be recovering from the worst downturn in generations, more clergy are facing unemployment as churches continue to struggle with drops in donations. In 2009, the government counted about 5,000 clergy looking for jobs, up from 3,000 in 2007 and 2,000 in 2005.

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Listen to it all (It begins with the reading of the gospel) [It is an MP3 file]. It occurred on the occasion of the Bishop’s confirmation visit yesterday to Saint Paul’s in Summerville, South Carolina.

Here is a quote to whet your appetite:

“What is astonishing to me I suppose is that we in the church make so little of the Ascension of our Lord.”

It was not the Christmas present that Julie Babikan had been hoping for. In December 2008, soon after buying a house, she was abruptly fired from her job as a graphic designer at an accounting firm in Chicago. “I had no clue that my position was about to be eliminated,” she recalls. Desperate to find work as the economy tipped into chaos, Ms Babikan scoured job ads to no avail. Eventually she decided to advertise for work on a service called Elance, which allows freelancers to bid for corporate piecework. She has since built up a healthy stream of online projects and reckons she will soon be earning more than she did in her previous job.

Like Ms Babikan, millions of workers are embracing freelancing as an alternative to full-time employment or because they cannot find salaried jobs. According to IDC, a market-research firm, there were around 12m full-time, home-based freelancers and independent contractors in America alone at the end of last year and there will be 14m by 2015. Experts reckon this number will keep rising for several reasons, including a sluggish jobs market and workers’ growing desire for the flexibility to be able to look after parents or children.

Technology is also driving the trend. Over the past few years a host of fast-growing firms such as Elance, oDesk and LiveOps have begun to take advantage of “the cloud”””tech-speak for the combination of ubiquitous fast internet connections and cheap, plentiful web-based computing power””to deliver sophisticated software that makes it easier to monitor and manage remote workers. Maynard Webb, the boss of LiveOps, which runs virtual call centres with an army of over 20,000 home workers in America, says the company’s revenue exceeded $125m in 2009. He is confidently expecting a sixth year of double-digit growth this year.

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SPIEGEL: So, what was in danger? Just the banks? The euro? The European Union?

Trichet: We are now experiencing severe tensions, which are coming after the events of 2007-2008. At that time, private institutions and markets were about to collapse completely. That triggered a very bold and comprehensive financial support by governments. And now we see the signature of some governments put into question. This is a problem for almost all industrialized countries. In the G-7, the major economies have a yearly deficit of around 10 percent of gross domesitc product (GDP). In the euro area as a whole it averages 7 percent of GDP. In this situation with extremely elevated deficits across the globe, the markets have singled out a weak link: Greece. Also taking into account the fact that its statistics were incorrect at one time, market pressure was concentrated there and a drastic adjustment program was necessary.

SPIEGEL: Apparently it was not only Greece that came under attack. Portugal was next …

Trichet: In the market, there is always a danger of contagion — like the contagion we saw among the private institutions in 2008. And it can occur quickly. Sometimes it is a question of half days. This is an issue for the industrialized world as a whole….

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Many of the thousands of young people who never go to church in the UK but who are nominally baptised Anglicans cannot remember a time when sodomy was a criminal offence.

These are the people that Church leaders should be trying to attract. In a world facing the well-documented consequences of consumer and materialist greed the Church’s spiritual message is potentially of benefit to millions. If the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives can do it in Britain, surely the liberals and conservatives in the Christian world can form some sort of coalition to bring new leadership to the Anglican morass. They must put their differences behind them, for the sake of God, themselves and the common good.

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“We rejoice as we enter a whole new era into the 21st century, rethinking, relooking and reforming who we are as Christian people in the world,” said Canon Randy Kimmler, missioner for vocations in the Los Angeles diocese. “This is like a big first step for us so we rejoice in this.”

Many in the 77 million-member communion, however, are grieving. Bishops, mainly from the Global South, say Glasspool’s ordination shows that U.S. Episcopalians are continuing to go against Scripture and defy the wishes of the wider body.

The Anglican Communion had called for gracious restraint in regards to the ordination of partnered gays and the blessing of same-sex unions.

Dr. Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney, said many Anglican provinces have given up on The Episcopal Church ”“ the U.S. arm of Anglicanism ”“ and regard themselves as “out of communion” with them, according to the Church of England newspaper.

“They renew the call for repentance but can see that, failing something like the Great Awakening, it will not occur,” he said.

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Is any other point of view offered on this issue? Of course not. That would be too complicated.

Does the story even mention any other doctrinal issues facing the Anglican Communion, issues that have been given some ink in ”” to cite one prime setting ”” The New York Times? No, that would be too complicated.

The point of the story, after all, is that this woman should not be defined by her sexuality. That is a great and appropriate journalistic goal. So, what is her stance on other crucial issues, doctrinal issues, that are causing cracks in the Anglican Communion? How would she describe her Christology, her view of the Virgin Birth, the historical reality of the Resurrection, the question of whether salvation can only be found through belief in Jesus, the nature of biblical authority? Issues of gender and liturgy? Or is her sexuality all that matters?

Has she written or said anything on these issues? What about during the selection process in Los Angeles? Are there critics in Maryland or California ”” or in other parts of the world, like England ”” who have studied her life and work and might be able to offer insights, as part of a journalistic process in which the views of both sides are quoted accurately and with empathy?

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Growing up the son of an Episcopal priest in Montgomery, Ala., at the height of the civil rights movement, Waldo witnessed a tragically divided society from both sides.

“I saw how some people lived radically differently from the way I lived. I saw the anger and violence directed at other people and knew this was not what God wanted for this world,” he told The Greenville News.

Years later, after rejecting the faith of his father and living through “an unwanted, soul-crushing separation and divorce,” he found solace in contemplative prayer and 16th century music….

As Waldo, 56, takes over leadership of a diocese of 62 congregations stretching from Columbia to the Upstate, he will be drawing on the spirit of reconciliation, self-sacrifice and mutual respect he developed during those formative years.

Those traits may help him guide the Upstate’s 26,000 Episcopalians through a continuing controversy over homosexuality that already has caused one parish in Aiken County to leave the diocese, and some families to leave the denomination.

Read the whole article from the Greenville News.

Some tech pundits think Facebook is in trouble, but the data tells a different story: growth hasn’t slowed a bit.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Facebook has a backlash on its hands. Many news outlets are reporting it, after all. Tech pundit Leo Laporte and Engadget co-founder Peter Rojas killed their profiles. U.S. Senators have sent the company a letter and so have a group of European Union data advisors. And in a flashy poker metaphor, blogger Jason Calcanis accused founder Mark Zuckerberg of overplaying his hand.

The data tells a different story: Facebook has had a net gain of 10 million active users since it announced a series of new features at f8, the company’s April 21st developer conference. A few high profile tech bloggers may have quit the site, but not many other people have. The number of deactivations, according to a Facebook spokesperson, is about the same as it’s been all along.

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