(Not yet fully but only provisionally approved–KSH).

Almighty God, beautiful in majesty and majestic in holiness, who dost teach us in Holy Scripture to sing thy praises and who gavest thy musicians Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel and Henry Purcell grace to show forth thy glory in their music: Be with all those who write or make music for thy people, that we on earth may glimpse thy beauty and know the inexhaustible riches of thy new creation in Jesus Christ our Savior; who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.

–Acts 1:14

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Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Communications Subcommittee, said Tuesday that he will introduce an online privacy bill that will create standards for how consumer data is collected and used for marketing. It will also give users more control over how their Internet activity and profiles are accessed by advertisers and Web sites.

Kerry’s bill, announced in a news release during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on consumer online privacy, comes after two privacy bills were introduced in the House in recent months that would protect sensitive information such as health and financial data unless expressly volunteered to be collected by users. Kerry said he hopes his bill will be passed at the beginning of the next Congress.

The legislative proposals add momentum to a push by consumer groups to create stronger federal rules for how companies such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google can track user activity and place ads based on that information. Facebook faced criticism for creating complex changes to its privacy polices late last year that made some information more available to the public. Apple and AT&T were criticized for a data breach that revealed the network identities of its iPad users. Google said it accidentally snooped on residential Wi-Fi networks around the world as it collected technical information for location-based applications.

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St. Luke hands down the Our Father to us in a briefer form than we find in the Gospel of St. Matthew, which has entered into common use. We are before the first words of sacred Scripture that we have known since childhood. They fix themselves in the memory, they form our lives, they accompany us until our last breaths. They reveal that “we are in no way already complete as sons of God, but we must more and more become so and be so through our ever deeper communion with Jesus. Being sons becomes equivalent to following Christ” (Benedetto XVI, “Gesù di Nazaret,” Milano 2007, p. 168).

This prayer also incorporates and expresses human material and spiritual needs: “Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins” (Luke 11:3-4). It is precisely because of everyday needs and difficulties that Jesus forcefully exhorts: “I say to you: Ask and you shall be given, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you. Because whoever asks receives and whoever seeks finds and for whoever knocks it is opened” (Luke 11:9-10). It is not an asking to satisfy one’s own wants but rather to keep alive one’s friendship with God, who — the Gospel always says — “shall give the Holy Spirit to those who ask for him!” (Luke 11:13).

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The rector of a Grosse Pointe Farms church has resigned after being removed because of allegations about an inappropriate sexual relationship with a woman who was a not a church member.

Church leaders are to call an interim rector in the coming weeks and begin the search process for a new rector.

The Rev. Bradford Whitaker resigned from Christ Church Grosse Pointe effective July 17 after a complaint was made to the church, according to the office of the Rt. Rev. Wendell N. Gibbs, Jr., bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan, which gave no further comment.

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In his Pentecost Letterii the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, while recognizing the serious nature of our divisions, sees them simply as conflicting truth claims held by equally sincere groups within the Communion. He makes no appeal to the revealed truth of Scripture, the historic teaching of the Church or the recognized views of the vast majority of Christians throughout the world and throughout all the ages. Instead he writes, “We have not fully received the Pentecostal gift of mutual understanding for common mission!” and proposes more and more meetings for mutual exploration. This prescription seems doomed to failure.

He did, however, suggest modest sanctions towards those Provinces that have formally violated the Windsor moratoria. These sanctions are that their representatives should not be participants in the ecumenical dialogues in which the Communion is formally engaged or serve as full members of the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order. In truth, depending upon how one interprets the phrase “formally violated”, this actually affects only a handful of people.

The reaction of TEC leadership, however, has been one of outrage, disbelief and much hand wringing on the Internet! But more insidious they have redoubled their efforts to look for support and spread their revisionist views around the Communion. They are using a variety of means including their considerable financial clout to seduce and divide the orthodox Provinces. Some African bishops have been offered hundreds of thousands of dollars for much needed projects if they will deny their convictions and embrace the TEC viewpoint. Most stand firm but some give way. It is an agonizing time for so many of our sisters and brothers and yet the leadership of the Communion seems unable or unwilling to act in any substantive way.

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Anglican leaders meeting in London have rejected a move to “separate” the Episcopal Church from the wider Anglican Communion, a proposal that officials called premature and “unhelpful.”

The proposal was offered Saturday (July 24) by Dato Stanley Isaacs, a member of the Anglican Communion’s Standing Committee from the Province of South East Asia, according to a statement issued Monday.

The Episcopal Church has come under fire from sister Anglican churches for its decision to consecrate an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire in 2003, as well as a lesbian assistant bishop in Los Angeles earlier this year.

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The pain coursing through American families is all too real and no one seems to know what to do about it. A rigorous new analysis for the Rockefeller Foundation shows that Americans are more economically insecure now than they have been in a quarter of a century, and the trend lines suggest that things will only get worse.

Rampant joblessness and skyrocketing medical costs are among the biggest factors tearing at the very fabric of American economic life so painstakingly put together in the early post-World War II decades.

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In Congress, House leaders were rushing to hold a vote on a critical war-financing bill as early as Tuesday, fearing that the disclosures could stoke Democratic opposition to the measure. A Senate panel is also set to hold a hearing on Tuesday on Mr. Obama’s choice to head the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, who would oversee military operations in Afghanistan.

Administration officials acknowledged that the documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, will make it harder for Mr. Obama as he tries to hang on to public and Congressional support until the end of the year, when he has scheduled a review of the war effort.

“We don’t know how to react,” one frustrated administration official said on Monday. “This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood.”

Mr. Obama is facing a tough choice: he must either figure out a way to convince Congress and the American people that his war strategy remains on track and is seeing fruit ”” a harder sell given that the war is lagging ”” or move more quickly to a far more limited American presence.

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A global Lutheran assembly in Germany has asked for forgiveness for the 16th-century persecution of Anabaptists, the religious reformers whose modern-day descendants include Mennonites.

“We remember how Anabaptist Christians knew suffering and persecution, and we remember how some of our most honored Reformation leaders defended this persecution in the name of faithfulness,” said Bishop Mark Hanson, president of the Lutheran World Federation, at a joint service of repentance with Mennonites on Thursday (July 22).

Anabaptists, whose originally pejorative name means “re-baptizers,” stressed the need to baptize Christian believers, including those who had been baptized as infants. Both Protestants and Catholics persecuted Anabaptists as heretics, and many fled to America.

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Four decades of experience suggests the only way to wean the nation off its ruinous oil addiction is prices that go up and stay up. And, although it’s a political non-starter for now, the simplest and best way to achieve that is to gradually raise the federal gasoline tax, now 18.4 cents a gallon, where it has been since 1993.

The arguments for a gas-tax increase are no less compelling for their familiarity. Higher taxes would produce substantial revenues ”” roughly $1 billion a year for every extra penny in tax ”” that could be used to fix roads and reduce the budget deficit. They would make fuel-efficient cars more attractive.

Ultimately, higher taxes could help drive alternative technologies that would slow the flow of money to finance some of the world’s worst regimes and multinational oil companies, such as BP.

Whether increasing the gas tax would reduce the need for drilling in environmentally sensitive areas such as the Gulf depends on worldwide demand for oil, which is being driven upward by the rising economies of China and India. But those countries have their own efforts to curb gasoline use, and reducing consumption in the USA, the world’s top oil consumer, is essential.

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Intelligence officials, past and present, are raising concerns that the WikiLeaks.org revelations could endanger U.S. counterterror networks in the Afghan region, and damage information sharing with U.S. allies.

People in Afghanistan or Pakistan who have worked with American intelligence agents or the military against the Taliban or al-Qaida may be at risk following the disclosure of thousands of once-secret U.S. military documents, former and current officials said.

Meanwhile, U.S. allies are asking whether they can trust America to keep secrets. And the Obama administration is scrambling to repair any political damage to the war effort back home.

The material could reinforce the view put forth by the war’s opponents in Congress that one of the nation’s longest conflicts is hopelessly stalemated. Congress has so far backed the war, and an early test of that continued support will come Tuesday when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., holds a hearing on the Afghan war.

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A proposal from Dato’ Stanley Isaacs that The Episcopal Church be separated from the Communion led to a discussion in which Committee members acknowledged the anxieties felt in parts of the Communion about sexuality issues. Nevertheless, the overwhelming opinion was that separation would inhibit dialogue on this and other issues among Communion Provinces, dioceses and individuals and would therefore be unhelpful. The proposal was not passed, and the group agreed to defer further discussion until progress on Continuing Indaba project had been considered….

…[{The} Revd Canon Kenneth Kearon]’s report highlighted three Communion initiatives: the Evangelism and Church Growth Initiative, the Anglican Relief, Development and Advocacy Alliance; and the Healthcare Network’s pilot micro health insurance project in Tanzania. He also celebrated the ecumenical work of the Communion and the annual Canterbury Bishops and Seminarians courses. Canon Kearon also commented on his time at the Anglican Church of Canada’s General Synod and noted the way six sessions had been given over to Indaba-style conversations to consider responses to same-sex issues. The resulting document was, he said, well received and welcomed by all perspectives as representing accurately the mind of the Church at this time.

He concluded by noting that the credibility of the Primates’ Meeting and the ACC was being openly questioned by some and this criticism was increasingly focused on the Standing Committee itself. Chair Bp James Tengatenga stressed it was important for everyone to remember that ACC members were elected and sent by their own Provinces and Synods and represented a very wide spectrum of views across the world. Vice Chair Canon Elizabeth Paver said the Committee needed to respond to criticisms “positively and robustly”, welcomed the appointment of the ACO’s new Director for Communications and said that improved communication and openness would promote trust and better understanding of the work of the Instruments.

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The resignation of the Rev. Bradford Whitaker, senior pastor at Christ Church Grosse Pointe, was read to the Episcopal congregation members at a parish meeting Tuesday night.

Whitaker, a popular leader of the church for the past eight years, had been on suspension since April. The congregation was stunned by news the Michigan Episcopal diocese was investigating “a serious allegation” that was not immediately specified. Whitaker was banned from the church or from communicating with church leaders during the inquiry. It was later revealed that the diocese was looking into claims that Whitaker had an affair while serving in a previous church. Whitaker and his wife Harriet, a teacher, and three children live in a home on the church grounds on Grosse Pointe Boulevard in the Farms.

Whitaker apparently will retain his ordination status, but will not be allowed to preach in an Episcopal Church for at least three years, according to church members.

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Oregon government stands at the edge of a financial chasm as precarious as any in its 151-year history, hemmed in by the global recession, questionable spending decisions and a budget-draining combo of skyrocketing expenses and sluggish growth.

Consider this sobering fact: State expenses, including payroll, health and retirement benefits, and debt payments, are slated to rise by nearly $4 billion over the next two years — a 26 percent jump. During the same period, however, revenues to pay those expenses are expected to increase by a little less than $2 billion, or about 14 percent — and that assumes a return to a robust economy.

Oregon simply can’t keep up.

Lacking a substantial tax increase, which appears unlikely, the state won’t have the money to offer the same level of services, pay and benefits to the same number of people.

The state has faced tough times before, but this crisis is a game changer, economists and political leaders agree. Past budgetary tricks, such as borrowing or sweeping money from other state funds, won’t cut it.

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“Because of high unemployment, management is using its leverage to get more hours out of workers,” said Robert C. Pozen, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the former president of Fidelity Investments. “What’s worrisome is that American business has gotten used to being a lot leaner, and it could take a while before they start hiring again.”

And some of those businesses, including Harley-Davidson, are preparing for a future where they can prosper even if sales do not recover. Harley’s goal is to permanently be in a position to generate strong profits on a lower revenue base.

In some ways, the ability to raise profits in the face of declining sales is a triumph of productivity that makes the United States more globally competitive. The problem is that companies are not investing those earnings, instead letting cash pile up to levels not reached in nearly half a century.

“As long as corporations are reinvesting, the economy can grow,” said Ethan Harris, chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “But if they’re taking those profits and saving them, rather than buying new equipment, it hurts overall growth. The longer this goes on, the more you worry about income being diverted to a sector that’s not spending.”

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O Lord our God, we thank thee for instilling in the heart of thy servant William Reed Huntington a fervent love for thy Church and its mission in the world; and we pray that, with unflagging faith in thy promises, we may make known to all peoples thy blessed gift of eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Now the angel of the LORD went up from Gilgal to Bochim. And he said, “I brought you up from Egypt, and brought you into the land which I swore to give to your fathers. I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall break down their altars.’ But you have not obeyed my command. What is this you have done?

–Judges 2:1-2

With a laying on of hands, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on Sunday welcomed into its fold seven openly gay pastors who had until recently been barred from the church’s ministry.

The ceremony at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco was the first of several planned since the denomination took a watershed vote at its convention last year to allow noncelibate gay ministers in committed relationships to serve the church.

“Today the church is speaking with a clear voice,” the Rev. Jeff R. Johnson, one of the seven gay pastors participating in the ceremony, said at a news conference just before it began. “All people are welcome here, all people are invited to help lead this church, and all people are loved unconditionally by God.”

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, known as the E.L.C.A., with 4.6 million members, is now the largest Protestant church in the United States to permit noncelibate gay ministers to serve in the ranks of its clergy ”” an issue that has caused wrenching divisions for it as well as for many other denominations.

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We’ve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Nature’s operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign ”” even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so. Fasten your seat belts. As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, and “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000,” says Watson. Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we’re doing.

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Did you know?

Under an underreported set of new provisions of the new financial reform law, whistleblowers who notify the SEC about alleged fraud will be entitled to collect 10%-30% of money actually recovered by the government.

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Barely visible among the high-rise apartment buildings and cocktail lounges, a battered steel door in Manhattan’s trendy Tribeca neighborhood leads to a basement jammed with barefoot men praying on their lunch break.

The makeshift mosque is a far cry from the 13-story proposed Cordoba House, the so-called planned “Ground Zero mosque” that’s two blocks closer to the busy construction site where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood.

And the leaders of Masjid Manhattan want to keep it that way.

“We are not involved with that other group,” said Imam Mustafa Elazabawy, raising his voice just loud enough to be heard above the din of an air conditioner unit, but not to disturb the Arabic recitations.
“We have been here for 30 years, in this neighborhood. Many Muslims also died over there, on 9/11.”

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Garramone-Rohr, the new rector at St. John’s Episcopal Church, said more women are definitely getting into her profession.

“I think they’re able to and are more accepted,” she said.

Garramone-Rohr, who was raised a Roman Catholic, said one of the reasons there are more female pastors and rectors is that churches have changed and become more open to women. That church change can parallel societal changes, she said. She has had some uncomfortable experiences as the female leader of an Episcopalian church, but she said she understands people’s feelings sometimes.

“The walls are still firmly up in some areas,” Garramone-Rohr said. “I’m not offended by it.”

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She did, however, provide, a few clues. In her opening statement, Kagan said that the court “has the responsibility of ensuring that our government never oversteps its proper bounds or violates the rights of individuals,” but “must also recognize the limits on itself and respect the choices made by the American people.” A justice, she said, must be a vigilant “trustee” of the “blessings of liberty,” but also “properly deferential to the decisions of the American people and their elected representatives.”

Among our most cherished “blessings of liberty” is the freedom of religion, our “first freedom.” In the words of James Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” America’s experiment in religious liberty has brought “lustre to our country.”

What, in Kagan’s view, is the role of the court in this experiment? When it comes to questions of religious liberty and church-state relations, does she think a justice should show vigilance or deference?

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Seven pastors who work in the San Francisco Bay area and were barred from serving in the nation’s largest Lutheran group because of a policy that required gay clergy to be celibate are being welcomed into the denomination.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will add six of the pastors to its clergy roster at a service at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco on Sunday. Another pastor who was expelled from the church, but was later reinstated, will participate in the service.

The group is among the first gay, bisexual or transgender Lutheran pastors to be reinstated or added to the rolls of the ELCA since the organization voted last year to lift the policy requiring celibacy.

Churches can now hire noncelibate gay clergy who are in committed relationships.

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So far, history be damned. The contrast between revived profits and stunted job growth is stunning. From late 2007 to late 2009, payroll employment dropped nearly 8.4 million. Since then, the economy has recovered a scant 11 percent of those lost jobs. Companies are doing much better than workers; that defines today’s economy….

“Businesses can’t cost-cut their way to consistent profit growth,” argues Zandi. “Eventually, they need to generate revenue growth that requires investment and hiring.” There are some favorable signs. Companies seem to have stepped up replacement of aging computers; this could create jobs. General Electric says its 2009 research and development budget of $3.3 billion was up 18 percent since 2006, and it is supporting new products, from batteries to solar films.

But it’s unclear whether corporate elites were so traumatized by the crisis that they’ve adopted a bunker mentality. That, as much as uncertainty over Obama administration policies, could be fearsome. What might appeal to individual firms — paring expenses to maximize profits, hoarding cash to protect against a future financial crisis, waiting to hire until sales improve — could, if adopted by most companies, sabotage a stronger recovery. If labor is cowed and capital is overcautious, the economy must suffer.

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When Aauthor David Halberstam wrote his account of what got this nation into Vietnam, he didn’t find that the architects of the war were obtuse or illogical or commie-obsessed or infatuated with American might. Instead, in Halberstam’s now iconic term that became the title of his best-selling book, they were “the best and the brightest’’ ”” a superior governing class that was the product of America’s best families, its most prestigious prep schools and universities, and most august law firms and investment banks. The irony is that these geniuses turned out to be so dangerously wrong that the very term “best and the brightest’’ became a sarcastic euphemism for a hubris that leads to disaster.

One might have thought, then, that the “best and the brightest’’ would have been eternally discredited like the war they promulgated. But Barack Obama has such a strange, almost reverential faith in the very sorts of folks Halberstam flayed that the president threatens to lead his administration and the country down the same hubristic path….

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The Vatican ran a £3.4 million deficit in 2009, [according to] the consolidated financial statements for the Holy See report.

The financial statements for the Vatican, which are independent of the financial statements of the Catholic Church’s various dioceses, religious orders and charitable entities, were presented to the 45th meeting of the Council of Cardinals for the Study of Organisational and Economic Problems of the Holy See.

A statement released after the close of the July 7-9 meeting, chaired by Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, reported that income in 2009 was €250,182,364 (£209,683,000) and expenditures were €254,284,520 (£213,120,000).

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