In 1857, explaining his decision to send the army to put down a “rebellion” in Utah, President James Buchanan complained that Brigham Young’s fanatical followers “obey his commands as if these were direct revelations from heaven.” One hundred and fifty years later, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints again stands accused of fanaticism, in this instance by a documentary that seeks to indict the church for its recent foray into the politics of marriage.

“8: The Mormon Proposition” chronicles the role the church played in enshrining a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in California by supporting the 2008 passage of Proposition 8. As a spotlight on the suffering of same-sex couples and individuals who are rejected by family and church leaders, the film succeeds. Its critique of the church’s recent political activism, however, is as ham-fisted as many of the mid-19th century allegations against the church.

Read it all.

Leaders of the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted Thursday to remove the barrier keeping non-celibate gays out of the ministry but stopped short of redefining marriage to include same-sex couples.

Currently the denomination requires clergy and other ordained leaders to either be married or remain celibate. That rule remains in effect until the denomination’s 173 regional presbyteries ratify the assembly’s decision.

At least one local critic of the clergy decision says that’s unlikely to happen.

“It has gone to the presbyteries three other times,” said the Rev. Harry Hassall, a retired minister from Brentwood. “Every time it has been defeated.”

Read the whole article.

Yes, I am still on vacation, I have been up in New York State visiting my Dad and IT HAS BEEN MUCH HOTTER HERE THAN IN SOUTH CAROLINA (go figure)–KSH.

Dr John Sentamu warned “enough is enough” in view of the “general disregard for truth” regarding Dr Williams, a Christian leader he described as “remarkable” and “gifted”.

“It deeply saddens me that there is not only a general disregard for the truth, but a rapacious appetite for ‘carelessness’ compounded by spin, propaganda and the resort to misleading opinions paraded as fact, regarding a remarkable, gifted and much-maligned Christian leader I call a dear friend and trusted colleague ”“ one Rowan Williams,” he told the Synod.

Read it all.

The state’s Court of Appeals issued a ruling Thursday in favor of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia and the national church in their two-and-a-half year property dispute with a breakaway congregation.

A three-judge panel upheld Chatham County Superior Court Judge Michael Karpf’s 2009 decision naming the Episcopal Church the rightful owners of Christ Church in Savannah.

Church members and leaders have continued occupying the historic Johnson Square house of worship since voting to leave the denomination in September 2007, when they accused the national church of straying from the Bible.

Read it all.

Two local Presbyterian ministers took the view that the debate over human sexuality and church polity obscured larger, more pressing issues.

What’s more, they said, by voting either for or against a policy change, the church makes a complicated subject that requires thoughtful discussion into a black-and-white matter that’s got a winning side and a losing side.

The Rev. Spike Coleman, of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in West Ashley, said many members of his church don’t follow General Assembly proceedings, or the debate of gay marriage and ordination, very closely.

“Not that it’s not an important issue,” he said. “For some people it’s very important, I realize that, but for most members they’re worried about their jobs and families and children.”

Read it all.

A split decision from Presbyterian leaders on two gay-friendly measures guarantees even more debate among the U.S. church’s members on an issue they’ve been divided over for years.

Delegates to the Presbyterian church’s convention in Minneapolis voted Thursday for a more liberal policy on gay clergy but decided not to redefine marriage in their church constitution to include same-sex couples. Approval of both measures could have made the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) one of the most gay-friendly major Christian churches in the U.S.

Even the more liberal stance on gay clergy faces more debate before it can become church policy. A majority of the church’s 173 U.S. presbyteries must approve it. Two years ago ”” after years of efforts by supporters ”” a similar measure was sent out to presbyteries but died when 94 of them voted against it.

Both of Thursday’s votes were close. Fifty-one percent of delegates voted to shelve the proposal to redefine marriage as being between “two people” instead of between “a man and a woman,” just hours after 53 percent of them voted to allow non-celibate gays in committed relationships to serve as clergy.

Read it all.

Frederick Loos was cussing like a sailor the other night, which was surprising given that he is a Roman Catholic priest and his foul-mouthed discourse was delivered from the pulpit to hundreds of faithful gathered before him.

He spoke of God, the need to serve him and how he can transform lives. But interspersed in his sermon was the most colorful of street Spanish, which brought smiles to the faces of many of the gang members, addicts and other young people pressed in tight to listen.

“When you go to China you have to speak Chinese,” the priest explained afterward, slipping out of his vestments. “If you’re speaking to kids you use their idioms. I don’t think God is offended if it brings them closer to him.”

Those enmeshed in Mexico’s thriving drug culture ”” users and traffickers alike ”” have an unusual relationship with the church. Sniffing glue and making the sign of the cross might not appear to go together any more than killing and the catechism. But for many believers in modern-day Mexico they do.

Read it all.

June’s employment report was disappointing. Though the national unemployment rate fell slightly””it’s now at 9.5% from 9.7% in May””the report reveals deep structural problems that go beyond the number of those who remain without jobs.

Almost half of unemployed Americans have been without a job for over six months. The average duration of unemployment, which hit a post-World War II record many months ago, continues to go up. Last month it clocked in at 35 weeks. Unemployment is particularly severe among the young: A quarter of Americans between 16 and 19 years old in the labor market are without a job.

The longer it takes to understand and address these issues, the more likely the U.S. will get stuck in a protracted low growth/high unemployment trap. In addition to considering the welfare cost of substantial joblessness, policy makers should keep in mind the following four facts….

Read it all.

Facebook, the social network service that started in a Harvard dorm room just six years ago, is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago.

It is pulling even with Orkut in India, where only a year ago, Orkut was more than twice as large as Facebook. In the last year, Facebook has grown eightfold, to eight million users, in Brazil, where Orkut has 28 million.

In country after country, Facebook is cementing itself as the leader and often displacing other social networks, much as it outflanked MySpace in the United States. In Britain, for example, Facebook made the formerly popular Bebo all but irrelevant, forcing AOL to sell the site at a huge loss two years after it bought it for $850 million. In Germany, Facebook surpassed StudiVZ, which until February was the dominant social network there.

With his typical self-confidence, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 26-year-old chief executive, recently said it was “almost guaranteed” that the company would reach a billion users.

Read it all.

Already, genetic analysis is a commodity sold on the Internet for as little as $500. Each day, more people submit DNA for analysis ”” just as the students did for their class ”” and confront perplexed doctors with profound and frequently unanswerable questions about what the results mean.

That’s because most genomic information is awash in uncertainty, Kim says. Few diseases are caused by a single, readily identifiable gene; most result from the interplay of genes and a host of other factors, from lifestyle to the environment.

That researchers still have so far to go in their effort to understand the workings of the genome may come as a surprise to many who perceived Clinton’s White House announcement, followed three years later by news that the final genome sequence was virtually complete, as the climax of the quest.

In fact, the completion of the Human Genome Project was more of a milestone along the road to understanding than it was a mission accomplished. Most scientists regard the achievement as a launching pad for revolutions in biology and related technologies that are just now getting underway.

Read it all.

Where would Jesus drill?

Religious leaders who consider environmental protection a godly mission are making the Gulf of Mexico oil spill a rallying cry, hoping it inspires people of faith to support cleaner energy while changing their personal lives to consume less and contemplate more.

“This is one of those rare moments when you can really focus people’s attention on what’s happening to God’s creation,” said Walt Grazer, head of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment.

Read it all.

In this debate we need to keep in mind that we are looking at providing for the Church of England in 50 years time, not just in five years time.

Many orthodox evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics are agreed that there must be transferred jurisdiction to alternative bishops, which includes ordination, appointment and licensing. It is not clear whether these are included in the Archbishops’ proposals.

The difficulty in the way of securing this without creating two classes of bishops, in that people could appeal against the jurisdiction of a woman bishop, is the tradition of mono-episcopacy.

This is the irreducible minimum to which the Revision Committee have hung on. Yet it gives rise to the oddity that an innovation (women bishops) is resulting in objectors being excluded because of appeal to a tradition (mono- episcopacy). This theologically threadbare understanding of sole jurisdiction has no biblical or theological warrant that I have seen deployed in these discussions. This tradition is an accretion to the church ”“ arguably through exercise of male power. A male pattern of ministry was developed over centuries without asking what pattern of ministry women should exercise in different situations.

Read it all.

That’s why the best booster shot for this recovery and the next would be to allow states to borrow from the Treasury during recessions. We did this for Wall Street and Detroit, fending off disaster. It’s even more important for states.

Here’s how this would work. States already receive regular federal matching grants to help pay for Medicaid, welfare, highway construction programs and more. For instance, the federal government pays a share of state Medicaid costs, from 50 percent to more than 75 percent, depending on a state’s wealth. The matching rates were temporarily sweetened by last year’s stimulus.

But Congress should pass legislation that would allow a state to simply get an “advance” on these future federal dollars expected from entitlement programs. The advance could then be used for regional stimulus, to continue state services and to hasten our recovery.

Read it all

Without legal safeguards many traditional Anglo-Catholics claim that they will in conscience have no recourse but to convert to Rome, a decision recently made easier by Anglicanorum coetibus, which creates an “ordinary” within Roman Catholicism for Anglican converts. Whether this will amount to the great exodus some traditionalists have predicted remains to be seen, but even the loss of a few Forward in Faith congregations will have a potentially serious effect on the income of some dioceses in an already ailing church.

So far, however, Anglicans have again demonstrated an inability to proceed toward difficult decisions in a way that is constructive and charitable. With similarly divisive issues on the horizon, such as the approval of the Anglican Covenant and questions surrounding human sexuality, it seems likely that the church will remain polarized, inwardly focused, and combative.

The great irony of our age may be that the avowedly more tolerant Church of England of today is in practice less compromising than the supposedly less tolerant Church of England of yesterday. As in the Episcopal Church the divide between “liberals” and “conservatives” may therefore prove to be far more unbridgeable than the historical divide between evangelicals and Catholics.

Read it all.

The Church of England is reviewing its investment in a company building Jerusalem’s light railway amid concern that the tramline “will help to cement Israel’s hold on occupied east Jerusalem”.

But the Church has stopped short of endorsing a campaign urged by Palestinian churches to boycott “everything produced” by Israel’s West
Bank occupation.

The boycott call was made in a document known as ‘Kairos Palestine’, issued by Palestinian Christians last December. It denounces “Israeli occupation of Palestinian land” as “a sin against God and humanity”.

Read it all.

Federal Reserve officials, increasingly concerned over signs the economic recovery is faltering, are considering new steps to bolster growth.

With Congress tied in political knots over whether to take further action to boost the economy, Fed leaders are weighing modest steps that could offer more support for economic activity at a time when their target for short-term interest rates is already near zero. They are still resistant to calls to pull out their big guns — massive infusions of cash, such as those undertaken during the depths of the financial crisis — but would reconsider if conditions worsen.

Top Fed officials still say that the economic recovery is likely to continue into next year and that the policy moves being discussed are not imminent. But weak economic reports, the debt crisis in Europe and faltering financial markets have led them to conclude that the risks of the recovery losing steam have increased. After months of focusing on how to exit from extreme efforts to support the economy, they are looking at tools that might strengthen growth.

Read it all.

The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

–Psalm 18:2

Members of the Crown Nominations Commission, which includes Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, rejected calls for Dr Jeffrey John to be made the next Bishop of Southwark.

The Dean of St Albans, who is in a civil partnership with another priest, was on the shortlist for the post and was considered to be a front-runner for the job.

Read it all.

The sun beat down on Uphams Corner yesterday; by midmorning it was more than 90 degrees. But a few blocks away, in cool shade beneath tall trees, children frolicked on a brand-new playground. St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, which sits in the heart of a neighborhood often torn by shootings and stabbings, offered its backyard yesterday as a safe space for children to play.

“I think, honestly, it’s a sanctuary,’’ said Liz Meffen, 23, who serves as teen staff coordinator for the B-SAFE summer program, run by St. Stephen’s in the South End, a mission church of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.

For years the church’s backyard was littered with dirt, broken glass, and matted patches of grass. The playground equipment was so old and broken that the children in the preschool housed in the church basement could not use it, said the Rev. Cathy H. George, the priest in charge of St. Mary’s.

George, who two years ago left her affluent suburban parish in Lincoln, St. Anne’s in the Fields Episcopal Church, to spend three years in Dorchester, resolved to fix it.

Read it all.

[ELEANOR] BEARDSLEY: In France, 100 percent of three, four and five-year-olds attend preschool. So everyone starts first grade on an equal footing. While the French do recognize problems with many aspects of their education system, ecole maternelle is held in high regard. It is one of the cherished symbols of the French Republic, embodying both equal treatment for all and the emancipation of women.

Chicago-native Barbara Legron(ph) says she has been able to work full-time with no worries since her daughter Natasha began attending ecole maternelle.

Ms. BARBARA LEGRON: I was very skeptical at first, to send her there for basically all day. But eventually as the year went on, I realized that she was learning so much. I mean, she was teaching me rhymes, French nursery rhymes that I should’ve been teaching her. So she’s having a good time, she’s learning and she’s with other kids, so she’s playing. And I can’t really compete with that, even though I’m the mom.

Read or listen to it all.

It was a fine game to watch.

Received this morning:

“I cant believe my 10 yr old grand daughter got a $153 ticket yd for walking her dog, great way to find out state has a law requires a person to be 18 to walk a dog without adult supervision.”

An MP3 file(it begins with the deacon reading the gospel)–listen to it all.

After breakfast, his parents left for their jobs, and Scott Nicholson, alone in the house in this comfortable suburb west of Boston, went to his laptop in the living room. He had placed it on a small table that his mother had used for a vase of flowers until her unemployed son found himself reluctantly stuck at home.

The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a résumé and cover letter ”” four or five a week, week after week.

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder.

Read it all.

The latest ”“ and, arguably, the most important ”“ meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod will start this Friday in York.

I may be speaking too soon on this one, considering the Synod’s history of prevarication and issue-dodging, but it’s looking likely that fireworks are on the agenda ”“ this is one of the more eagerly (or bitterly, depending on your point of view) awaited sessions of recent times.

There is plenty of meat on the agenda, but the biggest issue at stake surely has to be the consecration of women bishops, one of the most divisive subjects ever to face the Anglican Communion, and one that could ultimately end in schism.

Read it all.

As some provisions of this year’s federal health care overhaul go into effect, Fairfax County is planning for how it will handle the changes.

Industry experts have said the cost of health insurance plans such as the one Fairfax County offers to its employees could increase by 4 percent or more in 2011, said Susan Woodruff, the county’s Human Resources director.

“That’s a cost that we, the employer, and the employees will have to find a way to share,” Woodruff said.

Given the county now budgets more than $68 million per year for its employee insurance needs, even a slight increase could add millions to the total.

Read it all.

Days after rumors spread across this industrial city that Christians were conducting a mass baptism, hard-line Islamic leaders called for local mosques to create a youth guard to act as moral police and put a quick stop to forced conversions.

They started training early Saturday morning, around 100 young men turning out in a field in Bekasi wearing martial arts uniforms. Leaders stressed that there was no plan to arm them, but they do not shy away from saying they’ll act essentially as thugs.

“We’re doing this because we want to strike fear in the hearts of Christians who behave in such a way,” said Murhali Barda, who heads the local chapter of the Islamic Defenders Front, which pushes for the implementation of Islamic-based laws in Bekasi and other parts of the archipelagic nation. “If they refuse to stop what they’re doing, we’re ready to fight.”

Read it all.

Investors are worried that the risk of default for US local governments is growing, amid signs that some regions are facing the same type of difficulty in curbing pension and budget deficits as some eurozone countries.

The yield attached to some forms of infrastructure municipal bonds has risen relative to US Treasury bonds because of fears that cash-strapped local governments will struggle to repay these loans.

Absolute borrowing costs for regional governments remain relatively low in historical terms because of the Federal Reserve’s ultra-loose monetary policy. But any swings in municipal yields will be watched closely by investors, since they suggest that the fiscal anxieties about the eurozone could now infect the US.

“The risk in the second half of the year is that investor attention switches from Europe to the US,” said Robert Parker, senior adviser at Credit Suisse Securities, who singled out parts of California, as well as towns and cities in Illinois, Michigan and New York state as among the most vulnerable.

Read it all.

The first goal in particular was quite a strike–read it all.