…so, Jesus exposes that this man in the crowd, and in fact all of us with him, are not simply covetous, but idolatrous, seeking from things or situations of our own making the soul-level satisfaction that only God can provide. For the man in the parable, the idol he was seeking to give him rest for his soul was financial security. For me that day in college, as just one example among thousands I could give you, it was a relationship (which, in retrospect, thankfully didn’t work out).

In a recent article, NY Times columnist David Brooks spoke candidly about his own unquenched desire for success, saying, “The thirst for public admiration is like the thirst for money””it’s never-ending; you never get to the point where you say, I’ve had enough.”

My guess is that for most of us here this morning, not only can we name the idols we hope will bring peace to our souls, but, like Mr. Brooks, we can also admit that those things never actually bring the peace and satisfaction we think they promise ”“ only more anxiety and more searching for peace.

And yet there is a simple reason for the fact that our souls search for rest and peace under every rock like hungry hyenas on the prowl; and the reason is that our souls were made by God for rest and peace in God….

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New Jersey’s most impoverished city will close all three branches of its public library at year’s end unless a rescue can be pulled off.

Camden’s library board says the libraries won’t be able to afford to stay open past Dec. 31 because of budget cuts from the city government. The city had its subsidy from the state cut.

The library board president says the library system, which opened in 1904, is preparing to donate, sell or destroy its collections, including 187,000 books.

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Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further ”” it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation and sending working parents scrambling to find care for them.

Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.

Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.

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As public anger rises over the government’s slow and chaotic response to Pakistan’s worst flooding in 80 years, hard-line Islamic charities have stepped into the breach with a grass-roots efficiency that is earning them new support among Pakistan’s beleaguered masses.

Victims of the floods and political observers say the disaster has provided yet another deeply painful reminder of the anemic health of the civilian government as it teeters between the ineffectual and neglectful.

The floods have opened a fresh opportunity for the Islamic charities to demonstrate that they can provide what the government cannot, much as the Islamists did during the earthquake in Kashmir in 2005, which helped them lure new recruits to banned militant groups through the charity wings that front for them.

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From satirical site Lark News:

After spending $2,000 to upgrade his church’s sign, and fighting the board for the money, pastor Chad Thomas was chagrined to see the word “church” spelled incorrectly.

“My secretary was gone that day and I’m not much of a speller ”” it’s my fault,” he says. “I signed off on the final copy.”

Read the whole piece.

It is a fascinating read with a lot of focus on “Islamism.”

Update: Brian Whitaker thinks it is wide of the mark.

I have a suggestion for an area of public life where cuts in spending are in urgent need and would, I believe, be widely welcomed: weddings. Over the last several years the cost of the average wedding has ballooned to about £20,000. And as a recent survey showed: with the expectation of ever more expensive presents, the need for new clothes, hotel bills and the like, the cost of simply attending a wedding is now well over £500.

But it isn’t just about the money. For the problem with the modern wedding is that it’s too often a glitzy stage-set overly concerned with the shoes, the flowers, the napkin rings and performing to the cameras. I’m delighted for Chelsea Clinton and her new husband Mark. But judging by some press reports, the most important thing about the wedding was her two Vera Wang dresses. And yes, I blame the media here, not the happy couple. For the pervasive influence of the media on the look and feel of weddings – not least those weddings that are featured in celebrity magazines – has encouraged an atmosphere of narcissism and self-promotion to work its way into the very fabric of the modern wedding celebration….

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The Labor Department numbers released Friday also showed that the private sector hired only 31,000 workers in June, revised down from 83,000. May’s numbers were raised slightly to show 51,000 net new jobs, up from 33,000.

“We’ve definitely seen a one, two month ”” in some cases three month ”” drop in the economic data,” Brian Wesbury, chief economist at First Trust in Chicago, told NPR.

Wesbury said that while the numbers are disappointing, he doesn’t think the nation is heading toward a double-dip recession. “There are other pieces [of data] that have begun to turn,” he said.

Standard & Poor’s chief economist David Wyss agreed. “I think we’re seeing a half-speed recovery,” he told NPR.

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Twenty religious organizations are calling for Congress and President Obama to ensure a fair and thorough investigation into allegations of forced human experimentation by the CIA on detainees after 9/11.

In June, the group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) released “Experiments in Torture” which detailed health professionals’ involvement in CIA interrogation programs.

The report alleged that the CIA used forced human experimentation for several purposes, including calibrating “the level of pain experienced … ostensibly to keep it from crossing the administration’s legal threshold of what it claimed constituted torture.”

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“The sexual abuse exception to the statute of limitations, if improperly applied, can wrongfully label a Respondent a sexual abuser,” eight bishops of the court wrote in their unanimous ruling. A ninth member of the court, the Rt. Rev. Wayne P. Wright, Bishop of Delaware, recused himself for personal reasons.

“Title IV courts must guard against allowing that exception to be used without proof of actual sexual abuse,” the ruling added. “This is especially true under circumstances where the exception is invoked not so much to deal with sexual abuse but, rather, as an effort to use events in the distant past when the Respondent was a priest to remove a bishop during current times of strife within the diocese. To allow Title IV and the sexual abuse exception to the statute of limitations to be used in this manner diminishes the monumental efforts of the Church to address, punish and remove incidents of actual clergy sexual abuse.”

Pabarue said in a conference call Thursday that he was disappointed the review court considered his client guilty of conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy, but he was thankful for its ultimate decision.

Bishop Bennison joined his attorney in discussing the case.

“I’m very gratified by the decision of the court. I’ve always believed that the charges were without merit,” he said.

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[Springfield Bishop Peter] Beckwith, disappointed by [Katharine] Jefferts Schori’s election, threatened to seek alternative oversight for the Springfield Diocese ”” possibly from a bishop in Africa, as other dioceses had done ”” rather than submit to her authority. He wrote in a pastoral letter that the Episcopal Church was “in meltdown,” and called the moment “the lowest ebb of our beloved but beleaguered Church since perhaps the Civil War if not the American Revolution.”

At the same time, some liberals in the diocese complained about Beckwith’s pastoral leadership and threatened to defect themselves from his authority to a more friendly bishop in another diocese.

In the end, no one in Springfield decamped for foreign shores, but in 2008, some conservatives in other parts of the country left the Episcopal Church and founded their own province, called the Anglican Church in North America.

“Not only our diocese but the whole Episcopal Church has been rocky and unsettling,” Holder said. “The diocese needs someone who can be a reconciler and a healer; someone who will be open to hearing the views of all people.”

Chuck Evans, moderator of the 50-member Concerned Laity of the Springfield Diocese, said the church in Springfield “is pretty fractured at this point.”

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There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions.

The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.

The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their 401(k)s or individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and are not guaranteed. And soon, many of those people will be paying higher taxes or getting fewer state services as their states put more money aside to cover those pension checks.

At stake is at least $1 trillion. That’s trillion, with a “t,” as in titanic and terrifying.

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Qasim Rashid squinted through his sunglasses and pointed toward the Kamikaze ride and the Curly Fries stand, shimmering under the August sun at the Wisconsin State Fair. “Team of two,” he said to several of the eight young men gathered around him. “That way.”

After the rest of the volunteers had departed in pairs, each one carrying a bundle of exactly 210 brochures, Mr. Rashid and his partners, Maanaan Sabir and Ryan Archut, headed down the midway past the Fun Slide and the World’s Smallest Horse. There, at one compass point in the middle of Middle America, they went about attesting that there were Muslims for peace.

It said so, in those exact words, right next to the image of a dove, on the cover of the pamphlets they had come to distribute. Inside the flier, a headline announced “Love For All ”” Hatred For None,” and a slash mark cut through the word “Terrorism.”

“Sir, can I offer you a free ”˜Muslims for Peace’ brochure?” Mr. Rashid, 28, a law school student at the University of Richmond, asked the first passer-by.

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Newsweek just published a list, “The 50 Most Influential Rabbis in America,” and placed you at No. 1. As a Hasidic rabbi and a leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, do you think you can rank rabbis or any other religious leaders as if they were athletes?
I am of the opinion that you can’t rank human beings. Every person has something to contribute to the welfare of the next human being. No two people think alike or look alike, and everyone has something that another person does not have. Who’s to say who is higher and who’s lower? In terms of the essence of human beings, I don’t feel it’s proper to rank them because we don’t really know what their mission in life is.

What’s bothersome about the best-rabbi list is that it seems to exemplify a culture in which religious leaders of all stripes are fixated on power and politics, rather than philosophical questions.
Politics and religion are not soluble. They don’t mix. I learned from the rebbe, my teacher, my mentor. The rebbe in his tenure received Bobby Kennedy and many other politicians. He gave them all the time they needed and discussed whatever they needed to discuss. But he never chose, never gave any indication of who he favored.

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Although [Charles] Bennison badly mishandled his brother’s prolonged sexual abuse of a teenager in his California parish during the 1970s, the appeals court concluded, the church’s statute of limitations on such wrongdoing had expired after 10 years.

“We find that [Bennison] committed conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy,” the eight-member panel of bishops wrote. But “because the statute of limitations has run out . . . we have no choice under the canons of the church but to reverse the judgment of the trial court that [he] is guilty.”

Bennison, 66, described himself as “very gratified” in a teleconference call from Michigan, where he is vacationing. He plans to return to his duties as bishop Aug. 16.

“I hope I am a changed person,” he said, adding that his immediate goal was to listen to the men and women who have led the diocese since his suspension in October 2007. He said he would likely devote more attention to the spiritual affairs of the diocese than to its finances or administration.

Read it all.

Grant unto us, O God, that in all time of our testing we may know thy presence and obey thy will; that, following the example of thy servant John Mason Neale, we may with integrity and courage accomplish what thou givest us to do, and endure what thou givest us to bear; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

On the holy mount stands the city he founded; the LORD loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. Glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God.

–Psalm 87:1-3

Earlier this week, a crucial index of manufacturing showed that growth had slipped slightly in July, chain stores reported anemic increases in sales and unemployment claims rose above the level usual for this stage of a recovery. On the more positive side, auto sales increased 5.1 percent in July compared with a year earlier, although from a very low base.

For now, companies appear nervous about expanding their payrolls. “Businesses just don’t want to hire,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics. “Workers are too costly and it’s very easy to substitute technology for labor.”

He added that with corporate earnings rising partly on the back of cost-cutting, employers are reluctant to give up profits. “So while corporate earnings were spectacular,” Mr. Sinai said, “the job market just stinks.”

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One episode has always stuck in my mind ”“ which illustrates the mentality of the City. I once travelled to Zug in Switzerland, to interview a metals trader who had been at the centre of a suspected £150 million fraud. As ever, the companies concerned had preferred not to press criminal charges (they don’t because the burden of proof is higher and they don’t want any negative publicity falling on them). But there had been a civil case and the judge’s findings had been pretty conclusive and highly critical. The metal concerned was aluminium. Instead of finding a dealer full of remorse for what he’d done, I met a person who expressed bafflement ”“ he could not understand why I’d gone all that way and why I was so concerned about events that had occurred some years previously.

“Why don’t you ask me about copper?” he said. “Make a note of where the copper price is six months from now.” Mostly for theatrical effect and to please him, I produced a diary and wrote down “copper” in six months’ time. Exactly six months to the day, copper was reported to have risen to an all-time high ”“ on the back of rumoured buying from my interviewee and his associates.

That’s what the City is like. One of the abiding terms in the market is “eat what you kill” ”“ you hear it trotted out regularly as a justification for the bonus system. It’s a “me, me” culture in which everyone is out for themselves.

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Kerala’s communist Chief Minister, V.S. Achuthanandan, accused an Islamist opposition party of conspiring to turn Kerala into a Muslim-dominated state.

“Youngsters are being given money and are being lured to convert to Islam,” he told reporters at a news conference. Opposition parties accused the government of playing the “Hindu card” ahead of local elections.

Muslims and Christian minorities in India generally enjoy good relations and see each other as fellow victims of alleged persecution by right-wing Hindu groups. Kerala’s population of 31.8 million is 56 percent Hindu, 24 percent Muslim and 19 percent Christian.

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At 59, Grafton was consecrated as second Bishop of Fond du Lac on April 25, 1889, with the Bishops of Milwaukee, Chicago, Minnesota, Indiana and Springfield assisting ”” and marking out geographically the general boundaries of what was subsequently known as the “Biretta Belt.” As diocesan bishop for nearly a quarter of a century, Grafton encouraged and led a campaign of substantial church-building and clergy-recruitment that still shows its mark on the ecclesiastical map of northeastern Wisconsin. His private wealth funded various initiatives, including the founding of a Benedictine monastery, architectural work in parish churches and at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Fond du Lac, and charitable activities throughout the diocese. While diocesan bishop, Grafton served as superior general of the American branch of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament from 1890 to 1912.

In 1900, Grafton’s actions caused a furor in parts of the Episcopal Church when he invited a number of non-Anglican bishops to participate in the consecration of Reginald Heber Weller as coadjutor Bishop of Fond du Lac. The bishop’s friendships with Russian Orthodox and Polish National Catholic clergy led to their accepting his invitation, but declining to participate in the actual consecration of Grafton’s own eventual successor. A photograph of the assembled clergy after the service circulated widely and earned it the disparaging title of “the Fond du Lac Circus,” still remembered as a watershed event in American Anglo-Catholic history. Although the presence (and even participation) of vested non-Episcopal clergy at ordinations is commonplace today, Grafton was decades ahead of his time in encouraging mutual recognition of the unity of the Church through its sacramental life.

Grafton’s physical strength declined in the later years of his episcopate, and he delegated some duties in his large diocese to his coadjutor. But he was well enough to travel to Russia in 1903, where he renewed and formed friendships with many Orthodox bishops and theologians. At his death on Aug. 30, 1912, Grafton was at 82 the oldest serving bishop of the Episcopal Church (though not the most senior in years of consecration).

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Rather than issue a plain-vanilla bond with a fixed interest rate, Denver followed its bankers’ suggestions and issued so-called pension certificates with a derivative attached; the debt carried a lower rate but it could also fluctuate if economic conditions changed.

The Denver schools essentially made the same choice some homeowners make: opting for a variable-rate mortgage that offered lower monthly payments, with the risk that they could rise, instead of a conventional, fixed-rate mortgage that offered larger, but unchanging, monthly payments.

The Denver school board unanimously approved the JPMorgan deal and it closed in April 2008, just weeks after a major investment bank, Bear Stearns, failed. In short order, the transaction went awry because of stress in the credit markets, problems with the bond insurer and plummeting interest rates.

Since it struck the deal, the school system has paid $115 million in interest and other fees, at least $25 million more than it originally anticipated.

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Last month, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) unveiled a new brand strategy to address America’s needs, as well as a name change to “the Y.” After surveying “a cross section of Americans to learn more about the most pressing issues and challenges facing their communities today,” the Y had found that only 51% of Americans were optimistic about the future while 49% were not.

“This is a very important, exciting time for the Y,” said Neil Nicoll, president and CEO of YMCA of the USA. “For 160 years, we’ve focused on changing lives for the better”¦ . People are concerned about the problems facing their communities. Like the Y, they understand that lasting change will only come about if we work together to improve our health, strengthen our families and support our neighbors. Our hope is that more people will choose to engage with the Y.”

Problems? Change? Hope? This “new brand strategy” is a puzzle. While the Y’s written mission still declares putting, “Christian principles into practice through programs,” the newly rolled-out strategy does not mention the change and hope found in Christ.

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With the American economic recovery hanging in the balance, private employers added 71,000 jobs in July, up from a downwardly revised 31,000 in June but below the consensus forecast of 90,000. The unemployment rate stayed steady at 9.5 percent.

Over all, the nation lost 131,000 jobs in July, but those losses came as 143,000 Census Bureau workers left their temporary posts, the Labor Department said. June’s number was revised dramatically downward to a total loss of 221,000 jobs. The Department of Labor originally reported that the nation lost 125,000 jobs in June.

Figures released last week confirmed that the United States economy slowed down in the spring, and the Department of Labor’s monthly statistical snapshot of hiring pointed toward a stall in hiring this summer, as employers failed to add jobs at the rate they were earlier this year.

It is a very disappointing report–but alas one that is not surprising. Read it all–KSH.

The Anglican Consultative Council failed to follow its rules in soliciting approval for its new constitution, critics of the London-based ”˜instrument of communion’ tell The Church of England Newspaper.

Some provinces were never asked to approve the ACC’s new constitution, while others were asked to approve “in principle” a draft version that differed from the final document lodged with the Registrar of Companies for England and Wales on July 10, 2010, while a third group reported that the draft it approved was substantially similar to the one adopted.

The resulting uncertainty has likely resulted in two Anglican Consultative Councils under law: a limited corporation created under English law on July 12, 2010, and an English charitable trust registered in 1978.

Read it all (requires subscription).

Update: You may find the full article there.

The Church of England “needs strong Catholic hearts and voices” to defeat the proposed legislation on women bishops, a group of Anglo-Catholic bishops said in an open letter to their constituency last week.

The letter is signed by 15 bishops from Forward in Faith, including the Bishop of Ful­ham, the Rt Revd John Broadhurst, the Bishop of Chichester, Dr John Hind, and the three Provincial Epis­copal Visitors. It urges traditionalists to “engage in the debate and discussion” when the legislation from General Synod goes to the dioceses, which is the next stage in the process.

The Bishops urge their supporters to be “active in the election process for the next quinquennium of the General Synod when the two-thirds majority in each House will be required if the legislation is to pass”.

The Bishops say these are “grave times” for the Church of England. Bringing in women bishops will mean a “disastrous cost to Catholic unity”, and will “not provide room for our tradition to grow and flourish”.

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Just days before I was to celebrate another middle-age birthday, I heard on the news that the mayor of an affluent suburb here had killed her 19-year-old daughter before turning the gun on herself. Authorities believe 55-year-old Jayne Peters ”” mayor of Coppell, Texas”” might have planned the murder-suicide based on notes found at her home.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers are taking a long look at numbers showing that middle-age adults (45-54) ”” like Peters ”” have the highest suicide rate in the nation for the second year in a row.

Why? In general, researchers see a broad range of factors…..

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This year, the U.S. public debt is projected to reach 62 percent of the economy””up from 40 percent in 2008 and nearly double the historical average, according to recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. The financial crisis and recession drove much of this debt swing, yet larger problems loom in the future.

By 2030, the CBO projects that debt will more than double to 146 percent of GDP.[1] The only good news, if it can be called that, is that the U.S. is not alone. Two recent studies by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) highlight the significance of the global debt challenge and stress the need for governments to aim higher than short-term deficit reductions. For the U.S., one of the most poorly positioned countries, addressing the long-term debt challenge must include prompt reform of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

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TEC’s recent history reveals that it now has a standard way of doing business””one that exposes its pleas for dialogue as disingenuous. What is that way? One makes changes in disputed aspects of the life and order of the church by breaking the rules and then calling for conversation rather than “consequences.” This standard way of doing business carries with it its own very idiosyncratic notion of dialogue”“one that, by laying claim to the prophet’s mantle, will not allow the possibility that one could be wrong and one’s opponent right. When TEC acts, TEC acts (according to TEC) in the power of the Holy Spirit; and when TEC speaks, TEC speaks (according to TEC) in the power of the Holy Spirit. To be in opposition, therefore, is to oppose both the Holy Spirit and the justice it is God’s purpose to bring to the world. These are shocking conclusions but, given TEC’s recent history, they are unavoidable conclusions”“conclusions that if ignored by the Instruments of Communion and the member Provinces, will lead to the demise of the Anglican Communion.

TEC’s recent history makes the truth of these charges abundantly plain.

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During his testimony, Mr. [David] Blankenhorn noted that granting gay men and women the right to marry would be a gesture quintessentially in the American spirit of equality. Nevertheless, it was a gesture from which he urged the court to demur for the simple reason that two men or two women could not conceive a child together, and that “a child needs a mother and a father.”

To be fair to Mr. Blankenhorn, though he is no expert on same-sex unions, there is a great deal of social-science evidence connecting marriage and the active engagement of two biological parents with child well-being. And there is simply no other way to view the age-old, universal institution of marriage than as rooted in the biological family.

Marriage, like all cultural institutions, evolves; and it may look very different in different cultures. But the institution’s common denominator across time and cultures has been its dedication to the offices of reproduction. The great 20th century cultural anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowsky stated that while marriage is as old as human life, it has never been primarily a romantic, or even an economic, bond. It has been principally an arrangement for bearing children.

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