The Galileo case is often seen starkly as science’s first decisive blow against not only faith but also the power of the Roman Catholic Church. It has never been quite that simple, though. Galileo was a believer, devastated at being convicted, in 1633, of heresy for upending the biblical view of the universe.

Now a particularly enduring Catholic practice is on prominent display in, of all places, Florence’s history of science museum, recently renovated and renamed to honor Galileo: Modern-day supporters of the famous heretic are exhibiting newly recovered bits of his body ”” three fingers and a gnarly molar sliced from his corpse nearly a century after he died ”” as if they were the relics of an actual saint.

“He’s a secular saint, and relics are an important symbol of his fight for freedom of thought,” said Paolo Galluzzi, the director of the Galileo Museum, which put the tooth, thumb and index finger on view last month, uniting them with another of the scientist’s digits already in its collection.

Read it all.

When budget experts take our debt’s temperature, the statistic they rely on is the debt to GDP ratio. Like banks or families, richer countries can borrow more, safely.

Now take a look at the graph of debt-to-GDP throughout American history below. If you draw a straight line across the picture at 30 percent, you touch some of the most wrenching periods in American history: 1) The American Revolution; 2) The Civil War; 3) WWI; 4) The Great Depression and WWII; 5) The early 1980s recession and the end of the Cold War…

Read it all.

The Vatican has finally issued a long-anticipated revision of its 2001 norms for dealing with priests who sexually abuse youngsters, but they fail to address the issues that surround the cover-up of abuse by senior clergy.

Critics have been quick to point out that the revised norms lack mechanisms to hold accountable those bishops or other church officials who have covered up abuse, refused to act on complaints or knowingly reassigned serial abusers. Instead of adopting new and stricter guidelines, the up-dated rules ”“ published on 15 July ”“ are effectively a consolidation of already existing legal measures that have been adopted successively over the course of the past nine years.

There are only two significant new developments. A priest accused of possessing or distributing child pornography (i.e. of children under the age of 14) or of sexually abusing a “developmentally disabled” adult over the age of 18 is to be dealt with just as if he were accused of sexually abusing a minor.

Read it all.

From here:

Abp Rowan Williams (President)
Bp James Tengatenga (Chair)
Canon Elizabeth Paver (Vice-Chair)
Mrs Philippa Amable
Abp Phillip Aspinall
Bp Ian Douglas
Dr Anthony Fitchett
Dato Stanley Isaacs
Bp Kumara Illangasinghe
Abp Barry Morgan
Bp Paul Sarker
Bp Katharine Jefferts Schori
Canon Janet Trisk

There was an opportunity for members of the Committee to express their views and ask questions about the decision to remove or alter the status of members from one province serving on the Anglican Communion’s ecumenical dialogues and IASCUFO. The Archbishop of Canterbury and Secretary General Kenneth Kearon explained the rationale behind this decision. In particular the Committee was assured that the Archbishop had not acted unilaterally but with the support of the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion; that they had acted within their powers; and that the action had not been punitive in intention. Rather it had been taken””following the breaking of the agreed moratoria””in response to the needs of the Communion in respect to ecumenical dialogues and faith and order bodies. Committee members were told that other Provinces were under consideration.

Please take the time to read it all.

Read it through carefully.

David Cameron’s “big society” speech on Monday called for more “people power” and “a new culture of voluntarism, philanthropy, social action”. The trouble is that this requires not only an end to top-down, command-and-control state sovereignty but also civic limits on free-market capitalism. By viewing human associations and intermediary institutions as more fundamental than either state or market, religious traditions are indispensable to a vibrant civil society.

Much of secular politics still views the voluntary sector either as extension of the state or a sub-section of the market. This subordinates social bonds either to uniform state law or to proprietary market relations or both. Indeed, state and market collude by subjecting the whole of society to formal standards that abstract from real, embodied relations of family, friendship, community, habit, ritual and celebration ”“ as Archbishop Rowan recently argued.

Moreover, the purpose and scope of voluntary, civic activity is severely constrained: it merely compensates for state and market failures, rather than supporting the autonomy of the communities, groups and associations that compose civil society.

Read it all.

Iran said today it planned to build an experimental nuclear fusion reactor, state television reported, at a time when the West is demanding that Tehran suspend sensitive nuclear work.

In 2006, Iran said it was pressing ahead with research tests on nuclear fusion, a type of atomic reaction which has yet to be developed for commercial power generation, but this was the first mention in years that the work was continuing.

Read it all.

At a press conference Tuesday, God Almighty, our Lord and Heavenly Father, gave his strongest indication yet that he might soon step down from his post as the supreme ruler of all things.

Don’t miss the rest.

Instead of debating the covenant, then, I believe we would better spend our time rebuilding the foundation — laying aside our rigid positions and stereotypes of the “other side” in favor of authentic dialogue. Then, when we have made significant progress in that direction, we can reconsider the covenant, this time as an affirmation of our restored bonds of affection.

Could not yet have any traction? I hear a lot of impatience in the communion these days: a desire to “get over it and move on.” Yet short of outright division, how exactly do we “move on” without rebuilding the foundation of trust?

Rebuilding, in turn, calls for another word that generates impatience: listening. The whole idea of a listening process — particularly its failure to take place on a wide scale — has generated cynicism, and justifiably so. But there’s no other way to build trust. As we listen, we discover that our adversaries are not precisely who we thought. Subtle variations of belief and character come to the fore. Common ground emerges. We start to revise, and often discard, our preconceptions. In the process, we wonder what else we’ve misperceived, what else we have in common, and that drives up deeper into dialogue.

Read it all.

An alarm aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that could have alerted workers to fire and explosive gas had been silenced before the 20 April explosion, a senior rig technician has said.

Mike Williams told a hearing that managers wanted warning sirens and lights silenced because they did want workers disturbed by false alarms.

He said the alarm had been partially shut off months before the blast.

Read it all.

With same-sex marriage legislation defeated in the state Senate, Gov. Chris Christie on record opposing it, and a proposal to put the question to voters going nowhere fast, hundreds of supporters and opponents of gay marriage squared off Tuesday (July 20) to prepare for the next expected front in the battle: the state Supreme Court.

What originally was supposed to be a small rally by the National Organization for Marriage turned into competing protests after Garden State Equality, the state’s largest gay rights organization, brought in a larger crowd to counter it.

National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown said his group stopped in New Jersey as part of its 19-state bus tour because he was afraid the state would legalize gay marriage by judicial fiat.

Read it all.

The federal budget deficit, which hit a record $1.4 trillion last year, will exceed that figure this year and again in 2011, according to a White House forecast released Friday.

The $1.47 trillion budget gap predicted for 2010 represents a slight improvement over the administration’s February forecast. But the outlook for 2011 has darkened considerably, primarily due to a drop in expected tax receipts from capital gains.

White House budget director Peter Orszag noted in a conference call with reporters that the president’s budget is still on track to cut the deficit in half, as a percent of annual economic output, by the end of his first term. As the economy improves, the White House forecasts that the deficit will be just over $700 billion in 2013.

Read it all.

UnitedHealth Group Inc. and insurers in Florida and Oklahoma stopped offering children-only health coverage because of the potential added costs of sick youngsters under the new U.S. health-care law, state officials said.

UnitedHealth won’t sell new policies that cover only children, foreclosing an option used by parents seeing cheaper care, Kevin McCarty, Florida’s insurance commissioner, said today at a meeting of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners in Washington, D.C. Tyler Mason, a UnitedHealth spokesman, disputed McCarty’s statement in a telephone interview, saying the company is still issuing such coverage.

The law championed by President Barack Obama bans insurers from denying coverage to children based on their health. That makes it more difficult for health plans to predict costs because families can wait until a child is sick to buy coverage, according to Kim Holland, Oklahoma’s commissioner. She and Sandy Praeger, Kansas’ commissioner, said insurers in their states have dropped child-only plans as well, or discussed the idea.

Read it all.

For members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, confirming Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is not just a matter of law or politics. It is a spiritual imperative for the disillusioned Obama acolytes suffering from post-election politician syndrome.

They need a replacement for the “deep cynicism” decimating the hope Barack Obama generated in supporters prior to the 2008 presidential election, according to one of Berkeley-based NSP’s three leaders, Rabbi Michael Lerner.

The pacifists for open borders, with a penchant for emitting ‘sacred hollers’ in a group setting, are culled mainly from liberal Protestant and Jewish congregations. Members are not required to have any particular religious beliefs. What adherents are asked to do is “to take time out each day to look at this incredible universe, say: Wow! Fantastic! Amazing!”””and chart their path to heaven through politics.

One of NSP’s most sacred causes is the Global Marshall Plan. Introduced in Congress this year, the resolution is styled as “a commitment to peace, social justice and the ecological sanity of our planet.”

Read it all.

Two completely different conversations about food are taking place around the world. One is among the well-fed, who ask themselves, “What should I eat?” The other is among the underfed, who wonder, “How can I keep from starving?”

Christians influence these two conversations significantly, according to Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, authors of Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty(Public Affairs). They believe Christians should better understand that most cases of malnutrition and chronic hunger and nearly all starvation can be prevented if the right reforms are put into place. Rob Moll, an editor at large for Christianity Today, recently interviewed Thurow, now a senior fellow with the Chicago Council of Global Affairs.

Why use moral and theological language in a mainstream book about world hunger?….

Read it all.

The American Jewish Congress, a national advocacy group that has argued for church-state separation on prayer in public schools, has laid off most employees and suspended operations.

The 92-year-old organization lost $21 million of its $24 million endowment to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, which devastated a range of Jewish groups, including Yeshiva University. As with other nonprofits, the economic downturn has also hobbled fundraising efforts, officials said.

Read the whole thing.

St. Peter’s Anglican Church has long been known as an open and inclusive place.

So open, it seems, they won’t turn anyone away. Not even a dog.

That’s how a blessed canine ended up receiving communion from interim priest Rev. Marguerite Rea during a morning service the last Sunday in June.

According to those in attendance at the historical church at 188 Carlton St. in downtown Toronto, it was a spontaneous gesture, one intended to make both the dog and its owner ”“ a first timer at the church ”” feel welcomed. But at least one parishioner saw the act as an affront to the rules and regulations of the Anglican Church. He filed a complaint with the reverend and with the Anglican Diocese of Toronto about the incident ”“ and has since left the church.

Read it all.

The recent Australian Institute of Family Studies report highlighting the changing nature of family forms should come as no surprise. The rate of children born outside of marriage has reached one in three births and many more children are now likely to have experienced a series of parent-type relationships before they reach the age of 18.

What should surprise us, however, is the continuing lack of desire from government to institute social policies that support family forms that are in the best interests of children. So much of the debate around family forms is founded in what adults and parents primarily want for themselves. It is worrying that there is no collective social resolve to promote and encourage the natural family, given the proven capacity of this family structure to contribute to child wellbeing.

Read it all.

Just as workers in the private sector participate in Social Security in addition to any pension plan at their companies, most states put their workers in the federal program along with providing a state pension.

Maine and a handful of others, however, have long been holdouts, relying solely on their state pension plans. In addition, most states have excluded some workers ”” often teachers, firefighters and police ”” from the national retirement system and its associated costs, 6.2 percent of payroll for the employer and an equal amount for the worker.

Now, Maine legislators have prepared a detailed plan for shifting state employees into Social Security and are considering whether to adopt it. They acknowledge it will not solve their problem in the short term but see long-term advantages.

Read it all.

And how might we pay for such absurd obligations? Here’s Cembalest:

* By 2020, the average EU country would need to raise its tax rate to 55 percent of national income to pay promised benefits
* The U.S. could fund its shortfall by doubling the 15.3 percent payroll tax on employers and employees (forever)
* Alternatively, the U.S. could reduce discretionary spending by 80%, on things like education, defense and environmental protection. Why so high? There’s not enough discretionary spending left (the OMB estimates that mandatory spending will make up 71% of government expenditures by 2016)
* Of course, the other option would be the printing press (inflation), which would be worse given how much would be needed

Read it all and take a careful look at those charts.

There has been further reaction this week to the debate on women bishops at the General Synod in York, which left opponents to women bishops dis­satisfied
The former Bishop of Rich­borough, the Rt Revd Edwin Barnes, speaking on BBC Radio 4, said that there was “nothing left” for tradition­alists in the Church of England, but he hinted that the Pope’s proposal of an Ordinariate could offer a solution.

“All we have is empty promises, and some of the leaders in the women’s movement have said promises don’t have to be kept, promises are there to be broken; so there’s no trust left at all.

“Coming along with this, of course, has come the Pope’s offer of an Ordinariate, which has been an absolute lifeline, and has given us new hope in a way that nothing else has.”

Read it all.

On any given weekend, _____% of U.S. churchgoers attend a megachurch.

Please note–the answer is now posted in the comments below–KSH.

I myself am satisfied about you, my brethren, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able to instruct one another. But on some points I have written to you very boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. In Christ Jesus, then, I have reason to be proud of my work for God.

–Romans 15: 14-17

Representatives of European theological faculties and church theological institutes have warned against universities dropping the teaching of theology in favour of religious studies that are seen as a more general approach.

“Theology has a major role to play within the university by countering stereotypes, demonstrating ways of dealing with religious conflict, and working out its own unique specificity in dialogue with other disciplines,” said Orthodox Metropolitan Emmanuel of France, the president of the Conference of European Churches.

He was speaking in the Austrian city of Graz at a meeting of theological faculties in Europe.

Read it all.

Read it and ponder it carefully.

Pre-Facebook, the very phrase “social media consultant” would have produced only blank stares from the typical layman.

Now, people like Marcia Conner make their living advising companies on how to use Facebook and other social networking sites.

“The work I do focuses on helping organisations to use social technologies to connect the people in their organisations,” says Ms Conner, a partner in the Altimeter Group and author of the forthcoming book The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media.

“They are complementary technologies that can be used to get that same sort of community feeling.”

Read it all.

When the Americans arrived, Hamid Ahmad, a former air force warrant officer imprisoned under Saddam Hussein, imagined a new life for his family, freed from the burdens of tyranny. In seven hard years, nothing went as planned.

He spoke good English and believed in America. He got a job, his family says, with the United States military. Late last month, he wound up dead at the hands of his 32-year-old son, who had turned into an insurgent who sought money and purpose in fighting the Americans.

“I didn’t say anything to him,” the son, Abdul, said in an interview as he stood barefoot with a bruised left eye in a jailhouse here in the city, not long after he confessed to the killing. “I just pulled the trigger and shot six or seven bullets.”

He said, “Everybody hated him because he worked for the Americans.”

Read it all.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]… asked: “Does the Government’s commitment to gender equality extend to great national institutions such as the Church of England?”

And he asked whether David Cameron intended to “have a word” with the bishops and archbishops currently in the Lords “in order that we may have some female bishops in this House before the end of this decade”?

Read it all (requires subscription).

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York made a brave attempt to amend the legislation and while I did not think it would have been able to achieve what some hoped it would achieve it was defeated in the House of Clergy. It is not often, if ever, that two Archbishops have proposed an amendment to such a contentious piece of legislation concerning the future unity of the Church of England; to have done so and not succeeded says a great deal about the problems of our synodical structures. The Draft Measure will now go to the dioceses for further scrutiny though it is highly unlikely that it will not gain the necessary support. It will return to the Synod in 2012 when it will need to gain the necessary two thirds majorities in all three Houses of Laity, Clergy and Bishops.

If the Measure is passed -if it isn’t the issue will not go away-the landscape in the Church of England for traditional Catholics and Evangelicals will be bleak. There will be no resolutions to be passed, no Episcopal Visitors to petition for, the Act of Synod will be abolished and the episcopal ministry of the Bishops of Beverley, Ebbsfleet and Richborough will not exist. The process of reception so ably explained by Dame Mary Tanner in New Directions a few months ago has been forgotten. All the promises which were made to us in the early 1990’s about having a permanent honoured place in our Church have been ignored. No doubt many of the supporters of women’s ordination will say there has been compromise on both sides. They will point out they preferred a simple piece of legislation without a statutory Code of Practice. However, from our point of view, this legislation offers us little hope. It addresses none of the issues which are of concern to us and about which we have argued for so long. The only provision will be that a parish can request a male incumbent or the sacramental and pastoral care of a male bishop when needed. It is simply not sufficient for those for whom it is supposed to apply. Far from providing for those who have serious theological objections to the ordination of women the legislation allows parishes to discriminate against women.

I cannot overemphasise how serious this situation is for us….

Read it all.