Now the Archbishop of Canterbury is being hammered from both liberal revisionist and orthodox conservative quarters. At the bottom of all this is a lack of previous leadership effort on his part, so that both revisionist and orthodox Anglicans see much of the present Anglican mess as his fault. Scripture says something about letting your yes be yes and your no be no, and really, when you do that, it is so much easier to remember what you said, and to act on what you said.

Dr. Williams has danced around the issues and we can think of only two reasons for that, and whatever the real reason is in a sense doesn’t matter, since the bottom line is, he has no track record of really leading. He favors the Hegelian approach of letting both sides battle it out, and then the result will be a compromise that represents a best way forward. That could be the reason for what looks like no leadership skills.

Alternatively, he could actually have no leadership skills, and an internal inability to stand up and deliver.

Other than satisfying those of us who always want to know why things work out the way they do, it is really a distinction without a difference; no leadership is no leadership.

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The Broward school district on Monday delivered pink slips to 1,305 teachers, secretaries and maintenance workers as the school district struggles to close a $130 million budget shortfall.

Two days before the school year ends, the district notified 568 teachers and 737 noninstructional employees that they will not have jobs when classes resume in the fall.

“This is the worst possible scenario coming true,” School Board Chairwoman Jennifer Gottlieb said.

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The next time you read an account of an abuse scandal affecting priests, note the time frame in which the acts allegedly occurred. Almost certainly, it will date from long ago, probably 30 years or more. Why is that? Typically, an individual sues a church over abuse that he suffered in his childhood, and in the Catholic context, he might well find written evidence to confirm his charges of misconduct long ago. He is, after all, dealing with an institution that prizes its collective memory and preserves records dating back centuries. The victim can not only find embarrassing information about Father John Doe, but his lawyers also then can force a diocese to disclose ever more information about ancient charges against other priests, which can lead into other jurisdictions. One case thus becomes the basis for a whole network of interlocking investigations. Perhaps it’s good that such older abuse cases are still coming to light, but the long passage of time makes it very unlikely that the charges can be investigated in a fair or reliable way.

Nor does the plaintiff in a civil case have to meet the high standards of a criminal case, of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. He just has to convince a jury that his allegations are more probably true than not. Most civil cases involving priestly abuse go forward on the basis of evidence that would not stand up in a criminal court. Often, dioceses settle dubious cases to avoid expensive legal proceedings, but such closure can be a mixed blessing. Whatever the merits of the particular case, critics take the fact of settling to suggest that the church is paying blood money to conceal its crimes. That’s not just a church problem. Celebrities and corporations face the same problem, that the public does not understand the workings of litigation.

As the resulting Catholic horror stories accumulate, so many media organizations develop a ready-made format for reporting them, a familiar mythology of specifically Catholic malpractice. Saying that does not mean charging any particular news outlet with deliberate religious prejudice: Some go to great lengths to be fair to accused clergy. But when we approach the issue as a specifically Catholic one, we inevitably cast the church as villain, to the exclusion ofother interpretations. The more firmly the public accepts the image of the sinister priest, the harder it becomes to find juries who will disbelieve abuse allegations. The more cases are reported, the more people come forward to publicize their own complaints. Most plaintiffs are reporting genuine victimization, but some are not.

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Not wanting to avoid the tension that exists within the Anglican Communion, [Kenneth] Kearon stressed the importance that, “mission is damaged when Christians disagree and fight.”

Time on the agenda of General Synod 2010 for dialogue on the Anglican Communion Covenant has been allocated for later in the week, to which Kearon noted, “expresses our common heritage of faith in terms of our mission commitments.”

“We live in a complex world which challenges faith to demonstrate its relevance in transformed lives and changed communities,” he concluded. “In close co-operation with our ecumenical partners, the Anglican Communion has put the mission of God a part of all that we do, and I know that the same mission is at the heart of this Anglican Church of Canada.”

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Here is one:

Re “Chosen, but Not Special” (Op-Ed, June 6):

Michael Chabon writes eloquently about his desire for Jews and Israel to shed the idea of exceptionalism. But exceptionalism is intrinsic to almost any group, and it is a fantasy to expect a nation or a religion to shed the idea, however irrational and ridiculous, that somehow it is special.

Rather than view Jewish exceptionalism as an albatross, we should view it as a way to inspire Jews and Israel to do better and to be openly critical of events and actions that fall far short of the ideal.

This ability to be self-critical is, like the belief in exceptionalism, an intrinsic part of Jewish and Israeli culture. It is precisely what is happening right now with the widespread acknowledgment that the raid on the Mavi Marmara was a tragic blunder.

Stuart Rojstaczer
Palo Alto, Calif.

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We construct the history of our wisdom only by burying our foolishness in the endnotes. To imagine a Chelm ”” the town inhabited, according to Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, entirely by fools ”” requires a presumption of general wisdom elsewhere, as the proper imagining of Heaven requires an earthly realm of sorrow.

As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over ”” God love them ”” any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.

This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of “Goodbye, Columbus” from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before ”” Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people ”” but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. A stupid Jew is like a hole in the pocket of your pants, there every time you put them on, always forgotten until the instant your quarters run clattering across the floor.

It was this endlessly repeated yet never remembered shock of encountering our own stupidity as a people ”” stupidity now enacted by the elite military arm of a nation whose history we have long written, in our accustomed way, by pushing to the endnotes all counterexamples to the myth of seichel ”” that one heard filtering through so much of the initial response among Jews to the raid on the Mavi Marmara.

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The crowds are thinner, the people older and the routes shorter, but the procession is an important cultural event that reaffirms not just faith, but ties to the old neighborhood and the old country.

“There really has been no Italian immigrant narrative written about Williamsburg,” said Joseph Sciorra, a folklorist who has long studied Italian-American traditions. “They have been invisible. But a lot of the history can be tracked by its religious expression.

“Processions map out networks of affiliations,” he added, “people who are devoted to a saint, or are from the same town. It maps out the connections in the community. As people move out and get replaced by new residents, the route gets truncated.”

Devotees of St. Cono, who hail from Teggiano, Italy, first settled the area in the 1880s, establishing one of the many saint societies that exist to this day. After World War II, another society for St. Cono was formed by more recent immigrants; it sponsored this week’s feast.

St. Cono was born in Teggiano in the late 12th century and ran away to a monastery. He died when he was only 18, but his intercession was credited with saving the town from an earthquake and a siege.

So there you have it. In 1981 the Anglicans opened the door and by 2010 the slope has become so slippery that now Bishops are sliding.

So I ask my Anglican friends to do us all a favor and to cut to the chase and approve divorced and re-married lesbian Bishops. C’mon, you know you want to. Just do it now so all the so called traditionalists in the Anglican Church can either swim the Tiber or admit that they aren’t really ”˜traditionalists’ after all.

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* As always, there are hints that the fight is about more than sex. In the case of this showdown, it is clear that Williams is frantically trying to hold the communion together on a wide range of doctrinal issues, with sex as the issue that, alas, always grabs the headlines. Jefferts Schori, meanwhile, sees this through the lens of Romeaphobia and claims that Canterbury is trying to enforce an anti-Anglican form of creedal orthodoxy, with Williams playing the role of pope.

The irony, of course, is that Williams has already established himself as a progressive on sexuality. Williams knows, however, that there are other doctrinal issues at play that matter far more to traditionalists around the world. What might those issues be?

* So, if this ongoing spirit of Pentecost is leading the Episcopal Church to edit and update centuries of Christian doctrine on sex and marriage, what other doctrines are being affected by these Winds Of Change? That’s the big question.

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Having counted on Washington for money that may not be delivered, at least 30 states will have to close larger-than-anticipated shortfalls in the coming fiscal year unless Congress passes a six-month extension of increased federal spending on Medicaid.

Governors and state lawmakers, already facing some of the toughest budgets since the Great Depression, said the repercussions would extend far beyond health care, forcing them to make deep cuts to education, social services and public safety.

Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, for instance, penciled $850 million in federal Medicaid assistance into the revenue side of his state’s ledger, reducing its projected shortfall to $1.2 billion. The only way to compensate for the loss, he said in an interview, would be to lay off at least 20,000 government workers, including teachers and police officers, at a time when the state is starting to add jobs.

“It would actually kill everything the stimulus has done,” said Mr. Rendell, a Democrat. “It would be enormously destructive.”

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The lethal mishandling of Israel’s attack on a ship carrying humanitarian supplies that was trying to break the blockade of Gaza was bound to provoke outrage””and rightly so. The circumstances of the raid are murky and may well remain that way despite an inquiry…But the impression received yet again by the watching world is that Israel resorts to violence too readily. More worryingly for Israel, the episode is accelerating a slide towards its own isolation. Once admired as a plucky David facing down an array of Arab Goliaths, Israel is now seen as the clumsy bully on the block.

Israel’s desire to stop the flotilla reaching Gaza was understandable, given its determination to maintain the blockade. Yet the Israelis also had a responsibility to conduct the operation safely. The campaigners knew that either way they would win. If they had got through, it would have been a triumphant breaching of the blockade. If forcibly stopped, with their cargo of medical equipment and humanitarian aid, they would be portrayed as victims””even if some, as the Israelis contend, brought clubs, knives and poles. As it was, disastrous planning by Israel’s soldiers led to a needless loss of life.

For anyone who cares about Israel, this tragedy should be the starting point for deeper questions””about the blockade, about the Jewish state’s increasing loneliness and the route to peace. A policy of trying to imprison the Palestinians has left their jailer strangely besieged.

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RASHAD HUSSAIN (US Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference): Well, the Cairo speech really set out the framework for””it’s a part of the dialogue that the president started as early as Inauguration Day, when he reached out to Muslim communities. On his second day in office, he appointed Senator [George] Mitchell to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to bring a resolution to the conflict in the Middle East, and it’s something that we have been persistent on, it’s something we’ll continue to be persistent on despite recent events. That event, I think you’ll see, will just redouble our efforts, our attempts to secure a peaceful resolution to the Middle East conflict. Of course, the president early on””one of the first interviews he did was with al-Arabiya. Then he traveled shortly after that to Ankara, where he made clear that the United States is not at war with Islam, and then in Cairo, where he really set forth the broad framework of dealing with Muslim communities in a comprehensive way and in a manner which addresses not just the political conflicts, one of which you mentioned, but also creates partnerships in a number of areas of mutual interest. And that’s really stemmed from the president’s belief that people all around the world, whether Muslim or non-Muslim or whether they live in a Muslim country or non-Muslim country, all share the same fundamental aspirations, and that is that they want to have access to education, they want to have the ability to pursue economic opportunity, to have health care, to raise their family in a secure way. And so part of the president’s message in Cairo was that we need to establish partnerships in a number of areas, including education, entrepreneurship, health, science, and technology, to have dialogue at the interfaith level, and we’ve continued to do that in a number of ways, and also while reaching out to the domestic Muslim community. The president sent one of his top advisers, Valerie Jarrett, to speak at the Islamic Society of North America, which is the largest gathering of American Muslims. [White House national security and counterterrorism advisor] John Brennan spoke at the Islamic Center at NYU and recently spoke to outreach to Muslim communities as a part of our national security strategy. We had recently an entrepreneurship summit. So this is really an ongoing dialogue, not an ad hoc approach, where we have a concerted effort to engage Muslim communities at all levels.

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Discussions on human sexuality have been at the forefront of church deliberations for many years. On the third full day of General Synod 2010, representatives from committees and commissions that have done considerable work in this area, along with Archbishop Fred Hiltz, shared with the members of General Synod an overview of discussions, actions and statements on this topic which have taken place since General Synod 2007.

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Thw Catholic Church has joined the chorus of religious voices opposing the trial of ethics classes in schools.

It has organised a petition arguing that the classes should not be held ”in competition” with scripture because it means religious children miss out on ethics.

This latest protest, which the Baptist and Uniting churches have also joined, takes a different tack to previous objections.

This latest protest, which the Baptist and Uniting churches have also joined, takes a different tack to previous objections.

Whereas the Anglican church has argued children absorb ethics through the school curriculum and do not need the subject to be taught separately, the Catholics say their children should be able to take ethics classes too.

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I’ll reiterate that from our perspective, the essential difficulty of the market here is not Greece, it is not the Euro, it is not Hungary, and it is really not even the slow pace of job growth in the latest report. The fundamental problem is that we have not, as a global economy, accepted the word “restructuring” into our dialogue. Instead, we have allowed our policy makers to borrow and print extraordinarily large band-aids to temporarily cover an open wound that will not heal until we close the gap. That gap is the difference between the face value of debt securities and the actual cash flows available to service them. The way to close the gap is to restructure the debt. This will require those who made the bad loans to accept the associated losses. By failing to do that, we have failed to address the essential problem faced by the world, which is that we have created more debt than we are able to service.

A few observations. First, I remain convinced that the other shoe to drop is not Greece or Spain or Hungary, but rather a second wave of major credit strains here in the U.S. related to fresh delinquencies from exotic adjustable rate mortgages.

Second, it is a delusion to interpret economic statistics suggesting an economic turnaround over the past year without factoring out the extent to which that has been driven by unsustainable levels of deficit spending.

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Almighty God, by whose Spirit the Scriptures were opened to thy servant Roland Allen, so that he might lead many to know, live and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ: Give us grace to follow his example, that the variety of those to whom we reach out in love may receive thy saving Word and witness in their own languages and cultures to thy glorious Name; through Jesus Christ, thy Word made flesh, who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer; 2 from the end of the earth I call to thee, when my heart is faint. Lead thou me to the rock that is higher than I; 3 for thou art my refuge, a strong tower against the enemy

O Almighty God, who on the day of Pentecost didst send the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, to abide in thy Church unto the end: Bestow upon us, and upon all thy faithful people, his manifold gifts of grace; that with minds enlightened by his truth and hearts purified by his presence, we may day by day be strengthened with power in the inward man; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who, with thee and the same Spirit, liveth and reigneth one God world without end.

BALLARAT’S Anglican Bishop has taken leave and may step down from his post, according to a media report.

The Age reported this week that Bishop Michael Hough had taken sick leave for a month.

While he is away, Bishop Hough has appointed a Melbourne assistant bishop, Philip Huggins, as vicar-general of the diocese.

The development comes less than two weeks before the Anglican diocesan synod in Portland.

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An Anglican church has been set up in a Shropshire town once described as “Godless” for having among the lowest-recorded church attendances in Britain.

For the past 18 months Christians have been worshipping in Lawley School in Telford, a town with fewer than one in 100 regular church-goers in 2005.

The primary school-based church has now been recognised by the Church of England as the River Community Church.

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The Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion, has written to those Episcopalians serving on the communion’s ecumenical dialogues informing them that their memberships have been discontinued.

The decision is likely to affect five Episcopal Church members serving on Anglican dialogues with the Lutheran, Methodist and Orthodox churches, as well as one member of the Inter-Anglican Standing Committee on Unity, Faith and Order, who has been invited to serve as a consultant.

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How often do soldiers returning after seeing combat in Iraq and Afghanistan develop mental disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder and depression?

A new study funded by the U.S. Army finds 8 to 14 percent of infantry soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan return seriously disabled by mental health problems. Between 23 and 31 percent return with some impairment.

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We are drifting. We take comfort in bits of good news, but we are in dangerous waters; the Great Recession is being starkly revealed as a global crisis with the US, the traditional engine of recovery, sputtering on every cylinder. The US government responded with dramatic financial support by transferring money to the household sector. But outside of these transfers the personal income of Americans is still declining; the residential market remains stagnant at best; consumer growth is nominal. The only real energy in the economy has come from the cessation of inventory liquidation, which is now the main factor in rising industrial output and any modest improvement in the economy.

The mood of US households is despondent. In May only 11.3 per cent believed they would see their income rise in the following six months, while 16.6 per cent thought they would see it decline. This is the first time in over four decades that more people believe they will be worse off than better. Any massive fiscal and monetary stimulus that might reverse the trend is likely to be politically unsustainable given the growing concern over the exploding national deficit.

Wherever you look the scene is bleak. Leading economic indicators fell in April ”“ unusual at such an early stage in the up-cycle. Jobless claims were up by 25,000 to 471,000. And up again above expectations in the first three weeks of May ”“ raising the four-week moving average to a level consistent with 100,000, or more, net job losses. For the past several months, claims have been nowhere near the levels of 400,000 and less that in the past were consistent with sustained job creation. We are not enjoying the normal cycle of economic improvement.

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Last Thursday I sent letters to members of the Inter Anglican ecumenical dialogues who are from the Episcopal Church informing them that their membership of these dialogues has been discontinued. In doing so I want to emphasise again as I did in those letters the exceptional service of each and every person to that important work and to acknowledge without exception the enormous contribution each person has made.

I have also written to the person from the Episcopal Church who is a member of the Inter Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order (IASCUFO), withdrawing that person’s membership and inviting her to serve as a Consultant to that body.

I have written to the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada to ask whether its General Synod or House of Bishops has formally adopted policies that breach the second moratorium in the Windsor Report, authorising public rites of same-sex blessing.

At the same time I have written to the Primate of the Southern Cone, whose interventions in other provinces are referred to in the Windsor Continuation Group Report asking him for clarification as to the current state of his interventions into other provinces.

These are the actions which flow immediately from the Archbishop’s Pentecost Letter.

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