O God, who art Spirit, and wiliest to be worshipped in spirit and in truth: Grant to us that, loving thee in all things and above all things, we may please thee by our prayers and by our lives this day; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
–William Bright (slightly edited)
Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten. When the people saw the sign which he had done, they said, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!” Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.
–John 6:11-15
“It’s a nice job if you can get it” ought to be the official motto of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. Although the gravy train has slowed down since 2005 when public revulsion greeted lawmakers who had given themselves a big pay raise in a late-night vote, the freebies have not dried up.
That is depressingly clear from filings with the state Ethics Commission. As reported by the Post-Gazette’s Tracie Mauriello on Sunday, 38 of the state’s 253 legislators shared in at least $67,000 worth of goodies last year.
Here is one (please note the author):
G. Jeffrey MacDonald ascribes clergy burnout to “congregational pressure to forsake one’s highest calling.” The real problem is the provider versus consumer mentality.
Ministry is not solely the work of professionally trained clergy. Rather it is a shared enterprise in which lay people are equal partners. Clergy burnout occurs because both parties lose sight of this fact. The result is clergy who believe that they must meet everyone’s needs while playing the role of a lone superhero, and members of the laity who are either infantilized or embittered because they cannot make meaningful contributions to their church.
Embracing a circular ministry model that values and uses the gifts of laity and clergy while sharing power and authority engages everyone in the work of reconciliation. The big questions are: Will the clergy be able to give up their ascribed power? And will the laity be able to step up to the challenge of their baptism?
Bonnie Anderson
New York, Aug. 9, 2010
Here is one:
Oliver Thomas naively states that lives must have “meaning.” Does meaning have to come through mythology taught as fact as in the major religions?
Life is, and always has been, the adaptation to the changes and mutations of the universe. Religion is, and always has been, a culturally devised defense mechanism. Each life’s meaning is individual. It seems that with religion, the meaning involves war and terrorism. This I can do without.
R. Sloan Wilson
The new ACC constitution also attempts to impose diversity criteria on the primates in selecting the primates’ standing committee. They are to “have regard to” diversity between regions and sexes in appointing their members. The new constitution also infringes on the traditional prerogative of the Archbishop of Canterbury to appoint members of Anglican commissions by giving the ACC authority to establish these commissions. It is significant that at last December’s meeting of the ACC’s standing committee it considered measures to regulate the governance of the Lambeth Conference and the frequency of Primates’ Meetings.
The fourth concern is that the new constitution reduces the role of the member churches in the ACC. In addition to redefining the ACC for legal purposes so that the members appointed directly by the member churches are no longer part of the legal entity, the new constitution also eliminates the requirement that amendments to the constitution be ratified by the member churches.
The last concern raised by ACI is that the new constitution appears not to be consistent in important respects with the new Anglican Communion Covenant, completed only last December. The Covenant not only reflects the traditional understanding of the ACC as the body composed of the members directly appointed by member churches; it also defines a Communion that recognizes “the central role of bishops as guardians and teachers of faith,” that has four coequal instruments retaining their historic independence and control of their own memberships, and that is not subject to a central executive authority like that into which the ACC standing committee is evolving.
“We focused on allowing people to talk of their local frustrations, but tried to show that only by working together with all Kenyans can peace live in our country. No community can be an island. An island cannot grow, you must interact with others to learn, to educate your children, to make things better.”
–The Rev. Maritim arap Rirei, an Anglican church official, as quoted in the CSM
This summer I’ve been waiting for the opening of the movie Eat, Pray, Love with an anticipation that is a bit different from my hope that Congress would find effective strategies to address climate change. The difference? I don’t think I’ll be disappointed with the movie’s ending.
I’m a Christian, an environmentalist, an academic and a pop-culture junkie. And I think the three verbs in the movie’s title ”” eat, pray, love ”” might provide direction for the thousands of believers from diverse faith traditions who advocated for a religious response to global warming in three stories that unfolded this summer.
Despite sincere prayer and informed lobbying, people of faith have watched: (1) the Senate’s inability to tackle the real problem of climate change, (2) the lack of progress at the United Nations Climate Change Conference and (3) the failure of the oil spill along the Gulf Coast to create a national demand for alternative energy sources.
Defying the authority of their bishop, parishioners and their priest from the closed St. Peter Catholic Church in downtown Cleveland celebrated Mass Sunday in leased commercial space they transformed into a church independent of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese.
The move by the new Community of St. Peter puts members in danger of excommunication because they had been warned by Bishop Richard Lennon, who shuttered St. Peter’s in April, not to hold worship services in places without his approval.
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Still, about 350 people, joined by their spiritual leader, the Rev. Robert Marrone, gathered for their first Mass and communion in their new home — a newly renovated, century-old building on Euclid Avenue and East 71st Street.
What a lot of disappointing commentary.
You have to distinguish between issues of law/rights and issues of prudence. What do the families of the victims think, what do those in New York think should be crucial questions to be answered if they choose that site to build a Mosque on at this particular time. In theology, there is a principle of subsidiarity–those closest to a problem issue are often best equipped to handle the decision about it and the responsibility for it–KSH.
An Amherst rector and three other Episcopal priests from out of state have been nominated to become the 11th bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Buffalo, diocesan officials announced Monday.
The Rev. Canon Barbara J. Price, rector of St. Peter’s Church on Longmeadow Road in Amherst since 2000, is among the nominees to succeed Bishop J. Michael Garrison, who is set to retire in 2011.
The other nominees are: the Rev. Michael N. Ambler Jr., rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Bath, Maine; the Rev. Canon Michael A. Bamberger, rector of Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Sierra Madre, Calif.; and the Rev. R. William Franklin, senior associate priest at St. Mark’s Church in Philadelphia.
Thomas Jay Oord has a nice post up about him which includes the following:
3. Clark was humble. Although he surely had convictions about how we should think theologically, he never presented himself as having all things figured out. When he and I disagreed about some issues, he was always ready to hear me out and learn from me. This made me more open to learning from him.
4. Clark was creative up to the end. His scholarly and devotional output was amazing! Although Alzheimer’s disease eventually took over his life, he participated in several projects with me in his final years. In fact, two of his last essays are printed in books I edited: “Evangelical Theology after Darwin,” in Creation Made Free, and “A Cosmology of Love,” in Love Among Us.
Read it all.
Update: There is a nice picture of him here.
In one incident, [Taryn] Cregon [a mother] was getting ready for work and Zoe [her daughter] was getting ready for camp when, suddenly, Cregon heard hair-spraying in the living room. She’d recently bought a new couch and feared Zoe had spritzed it with hair chemicals. An argument ensued, and Cregon was left dumbfounded, wondering how her daughter could be so irresponsible and thoughtless ”” and then argue when called on it.
The dilemma is pretty typical, according to psychologist Laura Kastner, who along with Jennifer Wyatt wrote a recent book, Getting to Calm: Cool-headed Strategies for Parenting Tweens and Teens. For more than 30 years, Kastner has helped parents and children work toward greater calm in the home. In the hair-spray incident, both mother and daughter got tangled up in what Kastner describes as emotional flooding.
“When we flood, we are having neurons fire in this emotional part of the brain,” says Kastner.
What started as a local zoning debate about an Islamic center near Ground Zero, and then morphed into a fight over religious expression, has now turned into an election-year political brawl.
Caught in the middle of the rancorous partisan fight are American Muslims, whose own voices have been drowned out by politicians on both the left and the right.
“In a fundamental sense, this is not a conversation about Muslims,”said Omid Safi, professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “This is a conversation in which the Muslims are being used as the football with which to play the game of competing visions of America.”
Israel had been “Promoted” in may and is no longer considered an emerging economy. This was simply a technical adjustment by Harvard Asset Management – to adjust for the fact that Israel was no longer classified by MSCI as a developing economy.( index maker MSCI moved Israel from emerging country to developed country back in May). The sell-off was just part of a re-balancing between their emerging economy to their developing economy accounts.
John Longbrake, Sr. Communications manager at the Harvard Management Company emailed the following confirming that it was not a divestment.
the Management Company’s most recent S.E.C. filing details changes in holdings, as is routine, but no change in policy. The University has not divested from Israel. Israel was moved from the MSCI, our benchmark in emerging markets, to the EAFE index in May due to its successful growth. Our emerging markets holdings were rebalanced accordingly. We have holdings in developed markets, including Israel, through outside managers in commingled accounts and indexes, which are not reported in the filing in question”.
Last Friday, at the start of Ramadan, President Obama presided over the White House’s annual iftar dinner and made some rather bland remarks about religious freedom. The context, of course, was the controversy over the proposed mosque in Lower Manhattan, which is not, as Obama insisted, about freedom of religion but about religious tolerance. And then, having once again gotten high praise for so very little, he went to bed a panicked man and reached, trembling, some hours later, for a political morning-after pill to take back some of what he had said. Whew, for a moment there he was pregnant with principle.
No more. “I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” Obama said in revising and extending and eviscerating his remarks of the previous night. He had merely been commenting on freedom of religion. Turns out he’s for it.
The president muddled his message. Does he not grasp that questioning the “wisdom” of the mosque’s placement is predicated on thinking that 9/11 was a Muslim crime? Does he not understand that the issue here is religious prejudice, not zoning? The answer, of course, is that he does. But unlike Henry Clay, he would rather be president than right.
O Lord, who hast brought us through the darkness of night to the light of the morning, and who by thy Holy Spirit dost illumine the darkness of ignorance and sin: We beseech thee, of thy loving-kindness, to pour thy holy light into our souls; that we may ever be devoted to thee, by whose wisdom we were created, by whose mercy we were redeemed, and by whose providence we are governed; to the honour and glory of thy great name.
I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.
–Psalm 121:1
Americans continue to express near-record-low confidence in newspapers and television news — with no more than 25% of Americans saying they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in either. These views have hardly budged since falling more than 10 percentage points from 2003-2007.
The findings are from Gallup’s annual Confidence in Institutions survey, which found the military faring best and Congress faring worst of 16 institutions tested. Americans’ confidence in newspapers and television news is on par with Americans’ lackluster confidence in banks and slightly better than their dismal rating of Health Management Organizations and big business.
The decline in trust since 2003 is also evident in a 2009 Gallup poll that asked about confidence and trust in the “mass media” more broadly. While perceptions of media bias present a viable hypothesis, Americans have not over the same period grown any more likely to say the news media are too conservative or too liberal.
In a government that professes religious neutrality, these kinds of judicial attacks on named religious groups are extraordinary. One must ask: What business does a federal judge have declaring as a “finding of fact” that religious beliefs are harmful or beneficial to any group? Who is he to look into the hearts of religious believers and see only “stereotypes and misinformation”? Since when is a law held in suspicion simply because religious bodies endorsed it and churchgoers voted for it?
Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists, and others targeted by Judge Walker would give a different account of their motives. They affirm the unique status of the marriage of man and woman because they regard it as a blessing, not a harm, for all of society. They counsel people against all nonmarital sexual relations, heterosexual or homosexual, because marriage provides the best environment for both adults and children to flourish.
The judge offered reassurances that overturning Proposition 8 would not “affect the First Amendment rights of those opposed to marriage for same-sex couples.” He stressed a prior ruling that “no religious officiant will be required to solemnize a marriage in contravention of his or her religious beliefs.” But this has never been the principal threat.
The real threat impinges more upon traditionalist laypeople and parachurch organizations.
There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what language you speak, what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run. An America where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America where the newest arrival to our shores is no less American than the ever-so-great granddaughter of the Pilgrims.
But there’s another America as well, one that understands itself as a distinctive culture, rather than just a set of political propositions. This America speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic. It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism originally, and then a Judeo-Christian consensus that accommodated Jews and Catholics as well. It draws its social norms from the mores of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora ”” and it expects new arrivals to assimilate themselves to these norms, and quickly.
These two understandings of America, one constitutional and one cultural, have been in tension throughout our history. And they’re in tension again this summer, in the controversy over the Islamic mosque and cultural center scheduled to go up two blocks from ground zero.
We are committed to ensuring the spiritual, emotional and physical safety of all within this Diocese and all whom we seek to serve in the name of Christ. We are committed to serving the weak and most vulnerable in our midst, those who are oppressed, and the children and youth of our Diocese.
We do not believe that Bishop Bennison has the trust of the clergy and lay leaders necessary for him to be an effective pastor and leader of the Diocese of Pennsylvania, nor that he can regain or rebuild the trust that he has lost or broken.
We believe that it would be in the best interest of the Diocese that Bishop Bennison not resume his exercise of authority here.
Janet Trisk is a member of the Sea of Faith Network, which is an organization of people who, despite their varied church memberships, believes that God has no real objective existence. He is merely a human construct and a potent symbol.
Janet Trisk is an appointed member of one of the most powerful bodies in the Anglican Communion. To quote the Sea of Faith Network’s own website, her beliefs entail “the claim that even after we have given up the idea that religious beliefs can be grounded in anything beyond the human realm, religion can still be believed and practiced in new ways.”
The most ancient traditions of Islam are going high-tech, with a slew of modern offerings for those observing the holy month of Ramadan, which begins today.
Cellphone applications such as “iPray” or “iQuran” offer a beeping reminder of requisite prayer times, while the “Find Mecca” and “mosque finder” programs help the Muslim traveler in an unfamiliar city find the nearest place to pray.
“When I saw these applications for the first time, I thought: this is amazing,” said James Otun, who has several Islamic applications on his Apple iPhone and iPad. “Whoever came up with this idea: God bless him or her.”
What would the contours and outline of comprehensive immigration legislation based on these biblical principles look like? The Bible tells us God has ordained the civil powers (the government) to punish lawbreakers and to reward those who obey the law (Romans 13:1-7). Unfortunately, the U.S. government has not respected its own immigration laws enough to enforce them consistently for more than two decades (since President Reagan’s amnesty of illegal aliens in 1986). The government has not controlled the borders. The reality has been that too often, those who desire to enter our country illegally have encountered two apparently contradictory signs at our border: one saying “No Trespassing” and the other saying “Help Wanted.”
Any immigration reform that will generate sufficient public support to pass Congress must begin with securing the border first, then deal in a constructive and compassionate way with the 12 million undocumented workers already in the United States.
The failure of the 2006 effort shows reform must be done sequentially, not simultaneously. The people do not trust the government to commit the resources necessary to secure the border. The government will have to demonstrate its commitment by securing the border first.
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates says the US will definitely start reducing the number of its soldiers in Afghanistan next July.
On Sunday, the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, said that he might advise President Barack Obama to delay the exit plan.
America’s baby boomers””those born between 1946 and 1964””face a problem that could weigh on the economy for years to come: The longer it takes for the economy to recover, the less money they’ll have to spend in retirement.
Policy makers have long worried that Americans aren’t saving enough for old age. And lately, current and prospective retirees have been hit on many fronts at once: They have less money, they earn less on what they have, their houses aren’t rising in value and the prospect of working longer to make up the shortfall has dimmed significantly in a lousy job market.
“We will have to learn to make do with a lot less in material things,” says Gary Snodgrass, a 63-year-old health-care consultant in Placerville, Calif. The financial crisis, he says, slashed his retirement savings 40% and the value of his house by about half.