I am fried from preaching and teaching this morning and Nathaniel, Elizabeth and I are off to see Inception. You can find the official trailer here–KSH.

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as “poor man’s pavement.” Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

The moves have angered some residents because of the choking dust and windshield-cracking stones that gravel roads can kick up, not to mention the jarring “washboard” effect of driving on rutted gravel.

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It is clear that the fundamental principle of freedom of belief and of the right to manifest one’s own belief must continue to be upheld in a free society, whether for Christians, Muslims or anyone else.

Such a principle does not, however, exist in isolation and has to be balanced against other considerations of the common good and of public order.

As far as the wearing of the Burka is concerned, there are, first of all, questions of safety.

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What’s happened since the San Joaquin Diocese, under the leadership of Bishop John-David Schofield, became the first diocese in the country to leave the Episcopal Church in December 2007?

Four dioceses and more than 600 individual congregations in the United States have left the church over the interpretation of Scripture, including whether Jesus is the only way to salvation and the ordination of gay clergy.

The Episcopal Church has filed lawsuits against all parishes that left, claiming that the properties were set up as Episcopal and therefore belong to that denomination. The departing parishes and dioceses say they are still part of the international church — the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part — and, as such, should be able to retain their property.

The conflict has escalated internationally.

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It’s been a year since more than 90 percent of St. Paul’s congregation walked away from its $2.3 million property in northeast Modesto to begin Wellspring Anglican Church downtown. The move forestalled a lawsuit by Episcopal Bishop Jerry Lamb to claim the property in the ongoing national dispute between the theologically liberal Episcopal Church and the conservative Anglicans.

Members and leaders of each congregation said they are happy — Wellspring with its stable congregation and ministries, despite not owning a physical structure, and the small but slowly growing congregation at St. Paul’s.

Recent visits to both churches found the congregations using the identical liturgy, from prayers to reponses, and even the same order of worship.

The differences are in the numbers — about 30 adults attended the main service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, while nearly five times that number gathered at Wellsping — and in the Scriptural passages and sermons.

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Bishop Allison is a mesmerizing speaker. To add emphasis to his sermon at Trinity 28 years ago, he utilized the distant roll of thunder, which gradually got louder as he eased into the Sermon on the Mount.
I listened intently, especially to his interpretation of the part that says “Anyone who even looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So if your eye ”” even if it is your best eye ”” causes you to lust, gouge it out and throw it away. Better for part of you to be destroyed than for all of you to be cast into hell”¦”
The bishop in essence said that most men who had ever been to the beach in the summer would probably going around without eyes if the law was strictly obeyed.
He said we shouldn’t give the Pharisees such a hard time because it’s virtually impossible to obey the spirit of the law. He noted this was the gist of what Jesus was trying to say.

Read the whole thing.

In the frantic last hours of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan, when the world wondered what was racing through the general’s mind, he reached out to an unlikely corner of his life: the author of the book “Three Cups of Tea,” Greg Mortenson.

“Will move through this and if I’m not involved in the years ahead, will take tremendous comfort in knowing people like you are helping Afghans build a future,” General McChrystal wrote to Mr. Mortenson in an e-mail message, as he traveled from Kabul to Washington. The note landed in Mr. Mortenson’s inbox shortly after 1 a.m. Eastern time on June 23. Nine hours later, the general walked into the Oval Office to be fired by President Obama.

The e-mail message was in response to a note of support from Mr. Mortenson. It reflected his broad and deepening relationship with the United States military, whose leaders have increasingly turned to Mr. Mortenson, once a shaggy mountaineer, to help translate the theory of counterinsurgency into tribal realities on the ground.

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The Rev. Joseph Darby had been losing some weight according to his doctor’s advice, but when the dieting stopped and the weight loss didn’t, he grew concerned.

The diagnosis of cancer came as a shock, and the senior pastor of Charleston’s Morris Brown AME Church momentarily forgot about such things as grace and love and awe and forgiveness.

He cursed.

Then he considered his faith and family, his congregation, his community.

“We’ll deal with it,” he told himself. “Your life is not just in your hands. There is a higher power that is infinitely powerful and knows best.”

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Bishop Stephen Platten of Wakefield and Dean Colin Slee of Southwark debate appropriate choices for music at weddings. The segment begins at about 20 minutes and 50 seconds in and lasts about 5 minutes.

Go here to find the audio link (only available 6 more days).

The Church of England has always prided itself on its inclusiveness and its ability to accommodate a wide range of often conflicting views under one big tent. But for four days last weekend, the age-old policy failed when the General Synod met in the bleak concrete bowl of the University of York’s Central Hall to decide upon the ordination of women bishops.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York wanted to make special provision for those members opposed to women bishops but were narrowly defeated. The failure of the measure suggests that Synod will only stretch so far and no further to accommodate minority groups.

Drs Rowan Williams and John Sentamu gambled that mainstream synod members would be reluctant to vote against them and that their intervention would help prevent the split in the Church they so desperately hoped to avoid. But this time things were different.

Huddled around tables after enjoying a generous dinner, or walking deep in conversation around the university grounds, these mainstream Anglicans, it was clear, were in defiant mood.

“The vast majority of us are in favour of women priests. You either have them or you don’t,” said one elderly lay member, adding, “We’re fed up with making allowances for the minority. The Church must move forward.”

Read the whole thing.

The largest Anglo-Catholic group in the Church of England is expecting an exodus of thousands of Anglicans to Catholicism after a decision to ordain women as bishops without sufficient concessions to traditionalists.

Stephen Parkinson, director of Forward in Faith ”“ a group that has about 10,000 members, including more than 1,000 clergy ”“ said that a large number of Anglo-Catholics are considering conversion to the Catholic faith.

His comments came after the General Synod, the national assembly of the Church of England, voted at a meeting in York to approve the creation of women bishops by 2014 without meeting the demands of objectors.

A statement from Forward in Faith advised members against hasty action, saying now was “not the time for precipitate action”.

Read it all.

First the good news. All three of the banks reporting this week (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup) beat analysts’ expectations, for what that is worth. And all saw a clear improvement in their loan books, with non-performing loans and charge-offs (of loans viewed as no-hopers) both falling””at JPMorgan, for instance, by 3% and 28% respectively compared with the previous quarter. This has allowed the banks to release some of their loan-loss provisions, the reserves they set aside to cover soured credit.

This looks like more than just a flash in the pan. Citigroup’s net loan losses have now fallen for four straight quarters. That said on a conference call with journalists its chief financial officer, John Gerspach, was considerably more optimistic about emerging markets than America, where mortgage losses could remain stubbornly high. Brian Moynihan, BofA’s chief executive, said loan quality is improving faster than he had expected.

And the bad news? Demand for loans remains slack. Bankers are becoming “very worried” about asset growth in the medium to long term, says one consultant.

Worse, their securities and investment-banking businesses are no longer making money hand over fist, as they did in the first quarter and for much of last year…

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VALENTE: Many Americans are getting back to the garden. These students in Cedar Grove, North Carolina brave intense summer heat as they learn to grow fruits and vegetables in a community garden.

STUDENT: You can just pull it right out, and just rinse ”˜em off and you can eat ”˜em.

KATE FORER: Right here we have sweet potatoes, that are doing fabulously, as you can tell.

VALENTE: Kate Forer, who manages the garden, is also an ordained minister.

FORER: Having the experience of planting a seed and having the faith that it’ll grow into a plant that will eventually sustain me is a spiritual experience. And ultimately I really, really feel like food is a sacred gift from God and that’s something that we tend to forget about in our culture.

Read or watch it all.

In many countries, including the United States, there are calls for the government to spend more to jump-start the economy, and to avoid the temptation to cut back as debts mount.

Germany, however, has decided to cast its lot with fiscal prudence. It has managed rising growth and falling unemployment, while putting together a plan for a nearly balanced budget within six years. On fiscal policy and economic recovery, Americans could learn something from the German example.

Twentieth-century history may help explain German behavior today. After all, the Germans lost two World Wars, experienced the Weimar hyperinflation and saw their country divided and partly ruined by Communism. What an American considers as bad economic times, a German might see as relative prosperity. That perspective helps support a greater concern with long-run fiscal caution, because it is not assumed that a brighter future will pay all the bills.

Even if this pessimism proves wrong more often than not, it is like buying earthquake or fire insurance: sometimes it comes in handy. You can’t judge the policy by asking whether your house catches on fire every single year.

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Courtney Purvin got a shock when she visited Facebook last month. The site was suggesting that she get back in touch with an old family friend who played piano at her wedding four years ago.

The friend had died in April.

“It kind of freaked me out a bit,” she said. “It was like he was coming back from the dead.”

Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, knows a lot about its roughly 500 million members. Its software is quick to offer helpful nudges about things like imminent birthdays and friends you have not contacted in a while. But the company has had trouble automating the task of figuring out when one of its users has died.

That can lead to some disturbing or just plain weird moments for Facebook users as the site keeps on shuffling a dead friend through its social algorithms.

Facebook says it has been grappling with how to handle the ghosts in its machine but acknowledges that it has not found a good solution.

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The Reformation cut the English church away from Rome, and in doing so it destroyed any credibility so far as the apostolic succession was concerned. Despite the removal, sometimes by murder, of England’s Catholic bishops, it was still important to pretend that it could be ecclesiastical business as usual. The Virgin Mary had disappeared, but the Tudor monarchs were prayed for in the Prayer Book and they could replace the Queen of Heaven. Even today, the Anglican hierarchy remains one of the last places of refuge for those who take the royal family at all seriously.

Bishops really came into their own from the 16th century onwards in England because they were supposed to show that the CofE, though it had no pope, was still respectably antique ”“ and therefore worthy of obedience ”“ despite the loss of that Roman link. Fussiness about episcopacy is in fact Anglicanism’s implicit acknowledgment that it does not actually have the kind of historic authority it would like to have.

Greater honesty about itself should lead the Church of England to get rid of bishops altogether and rejoice in the freedom that comes with being a sect. But that would involve the abandonment not just of pretension but also of a career structure that means too much to too many Anglican minds.

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The bursting of the U.S. housing bubble has left homeowners buried under about $4 trillion of excess mortgage debt, according to Dhaval Joshi, the chief strategist at RAB Capital.

Read it all and take the time to read the longer analysis here.

Earlier this month, the full version of Inspire, a new English language journal, surfaced on the Internet. It’s publisher? The Yemen-based terrorist organization, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

Although al Qaeda has long employed the Web, DVDs and video games to reach mass audiences, the sophistication and provocative nature of this publication suggests it is intended to “go viral”””or spread rapidly among many Internet users””in the English speaking world, especially in the United States.

Many in the West will ridicule Inspire’s boring sermons and awkwardly written stories, such as one that tries to portray joining “jihad” as a summer camp, or another with Osama bin Laden’s views on global warming. Commentators will undoubtedly condemn the journal’s reprehensible article “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” They’ll also say that the publication’s naming of certain Americans as targets is a public relations gaffe.

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A letter from the Bishop of Upper South Carolina may be found here and a resolution from the parish vestry may be found there. Read them both.

The top leaders of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral were preparing to oust their now-suspended dean, the Very Rev. Philip C. Linder, triggering a chain of events that led to the dramatic intervention by the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina, the bishop said in a statement Friday.

“Those of you who are puzzled or angered by my decision to suspend the Dean are asking many questions, some of which can only be answered with replies we are unable to give you for privacy reasons,” Bishop W. Andrew Waldo said in the letter posted on Trinity’s website.

“What must firmly be said, however, is that your wardens and chancellor came to me with a call for a special vestry meeting, signed by themselves and 16 vestry members, to consider the dissolution of the pastoral relationship between the Cathedral and Philip Linder.”

Waldo said he ordered Linder, 50, not to speak to parishioners of the historic downtown congregation while the dispute was under mediation, an order Linder violated, Waldo said. The root causes of the conflict between the vestry and Linder have not been made public and remain unclear.

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Tests on BP’s newly capped Gulf of Mexico oil well show pressure has been building up slightly as hoped with no signs of leakage, BP says.

BP vice-president Kent Wells said rising pressure “is giving us more and more confidence”. Tests, however, could be extended beyond Saturday.

The new cap has managed to stop the flow of oil for the first time since a 20 April explosion killed 11 people.

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Two more South Carolina banks ”” First National Bank of the South of Spartanburg and Woodlands Bank of Bluffton ”” were seized Friday by federal regulators.

Now three state-based banks have failed this year. In April, Beach First of Myrtle Beach became the first South Carolina bank shut down since the 1999 closure of Columbia’s Victory State Bank.

So far this year, 96 banks nationwide have failed ”” nearly the double the pace from 2009.

Meanwhile, regulators’ list of problem banks keeps rising. In South Carolina, 14 banks ”” roughly 15 percent of the state’s total ”” have been ordered by regulators to bolster their balance sheets since 2008, according to records.

Read the whole thing.

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins….

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A new Time poll reveals just how hard the task is: Two-thirds of respondents say they oppose a second government stimulus package. And 53% say the country would have been better off without the first one.

The result is a White House pulled in three directions at once as it tries to repair the economy ”” and ensure that Obama and the Democrats can survive a rising tide of public anger. First, the Obama team is improvising ways to pass piecemeal spending items through a Congress where stimulus has become a toxic word. At the same time, the White House is signaling its concern about that budget deficit that has Tea Partyers raging ”” both through token gestures, like a White House contest that lets the public vote on cost-cutting ideas submitted by federal employees (the winner gets to meet Obama and see his or her idea go in the President’s next budget), and through Obama’s support for the work of a bipartisan deficit commission. And finally, the White House is trying to explain to angry liberals that it’s doing everything possible to keep the economy moving and fight Republican resistance to new spending.

It’s a delicate balancing act, on a par with Obama’s effort to pass health care reform without appearing to get too involved in the details. And just as it did in the health care battle, the future of Obama’s presidency ”” as well as the fate of the American economy ”” may hang on the outcome.

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A Michigan-based gay rights foundation has given more than $400,000 to a California seminary to help craft formal liturgies for the Episcopal Church to bless gay and lesbian relationships.

The Episcopal Church still officially considers marriage between a man and a woman, reflected in the marriage rite of its Book of Common Prayer. Many dioceses, however, unofficially allow priests to bless same-sex relationships and even marriages.

Because the church puts a high value on scripted liturgies, many same-sex couples want their own marriage/blessing rite since many bishops are reluctant to use the traditional husband-wife marriage liturgy for same-sex unions.

The church’s 2009 General Convention gave the green light to collecting “theological and liturgical resources” that would form the basis of an official same-sex rite that could be added to the list of approved ceremonies.

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In Anglican Archbishop Nicholas Okoh’s first press conference on July 14, he addressed the controversy that is sweeping the global Anglican communion and condemned homosexual behavior as well as other Anglican provinces that have adopted an unbiblical acceptance of it.

“In this matter silence can be detrimental to public well-being,” he said. “The issue at stake of human sexuality is not an Anglican prerogative and it is by no means limited to the Anglican circle as … is clearly shown all over the world.”

“Same sex marriage, paedophilia and all sexual perversions should be roundly condemned by all who accept the authority of Scripture over human life.”

Archbishop Okoh succeeded Archbishop Pete Akinola as primate, or head archbishop, of the Anglican Church of Nigeria on March 25. With roughly 18 million members, the Church of Nigeria is the largest province in the Anglican Communion.

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To become new men means losing what we now call “ourselves.” Out of ourselves, into Christ, we must go. His will is to become ours and we are to think His thoughts, to “have the mind of Christ” as the Bible says. And if Christ is one, and if He is thus to be “in” us all, shall we not be exactly the same? It certainly sounds like it; but in fact it is not so.

It is difficult here to get a good illustration; because, of course, no other two things are related to each other just as the Creator is related to one of His creatures. But I will try two very imperfect illustrations which may give a hint of the truth. Imagine a lot of people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into the light that same light would fall on them all and they would all reflect it and thus become what we call visible. Is it not quite possible that they would imagine that, since they were all receiving the same light, and all reacting to it in the same way (i.e., all reflecting it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know that the light will in fact bring out, or show up, how different they are. Or again, suppose a person who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch to taste and he experiences a particular strong, sharp taste. You then tell him that in your country people use salt in all their cookery. Might he not reply “In that case I suppose all your dishes taste exactly the same: because the taste of that stuff you have just given me is so strong that it will kill the taste of everything else.” But you and I know that the real effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from killing the taste of the egg and the tripe and the cabbage, it actually brings it out. They do not show their real taste till you have added the salt. (Of course, as I warned you, this is not really a very good illustration, because you can, after all, kill the other tastes by putting in too much salt, whereas you cannot kill the taste of a human personality by putting in too much Christ. I am doing the best I can.)

–C.S. Lewis
It is something like that with Christ and us. The more we get what we now call “ourselves” out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of “little Christs,” all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented-as an author invents characters in a novel-all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to “be myself” without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call “Myself” becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call “My wishes” become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals, I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call “me” can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own. At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most “natural” men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away “blindly” so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality
is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His)
will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.

–C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Mere Christianity

“Mark Tully tells the remarkable story of the first Martyrs of the English Reformation. He visits the centuries-old Priory near London’s Smithfield meat market and, in the company of the current Master of Charterhouse, uncovers a hidden history with a contemporary relevance.”

Listen to it all.

I yield to no one in my respect and affection for Benedict XVI. His issuing of Summorum Pontificum three years ago was sufficient to guarantee the significance of his pontificate, even if the de facto schism of many bishops around the world has impeded its implementation. In his pronouncements and instincts he has displayed a Catholic sensibility lacking in his predecessors since 1958. That said, I am not enthused by his concession of an Ordinariate to traditionally-minded Anglicans converting to Rome en bloc.

So, forgive me if I cannot join my fellow traditional Catholics in dancing in the streets in celebration of this supposed coup. Of course, at a purely human level, it was hilarious to see Rowan Williams wake up one morning to find the papal tanks on his lawn, followed by the appearance of the same, visibly unhappy, Rowan Cantuar, looking like a shot-down U2 spy plane pilot paraded before the media in Moscow 50 years ago, at a joint news conference to announce this joyous event. The broader picture, however, raises considerable concerns. Not everything that provokes consternation in Eccleston Square ”“ enjoyable though that spectacle is ”“ is ipso facto good for the Church.

Why is it necessary to make such elaborate concessions to Anglicans, as distinct from converts of every other description? Why do they have to convert collectively, when personal faith can only be dictated by individual conscience?

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Thirty-two soldiers took their own lives last month, the most Army suicides in a single month since the Vietnam era. Eleven of the soldiers were not on active duty. Of the 21 who were, seven were serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Department of Defense said.

Army officials say they don’t have any answers to why more and more soldiers are resorting to suicide.

“There were no trends to any one unit, camp, post or station,” Col. Chris Philbrick, head of the Army’s suicide prevention task force, told CNN. “I have no silver bullet to answer the question why.”

Makes the heart sad–read it all.

Update: An NBC News segment on this may be viewed here:

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