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.”
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….
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.
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.”
“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.
[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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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).
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.