AFP–Thousands of vehicles were bogged down Monday in a more than 100-kilometre (62-mile) traffic jam leading to Beijing that has lasted nine days and highlights China’s growing road congestion woes.

… 33-year-old Nashville resident [Tyler Wigg-Stevenson] has assembled a surprising corps of allies and endorsers more than twice his age and known for their hawkish ways of yore, including retired U.S. senator Sam Nunn and Reagan-era secretary of State George Shultz.

Less encouraging is the shape of the initial resistance Wigg-Stevenson often encounters as he travels around the country urging Christians to join the nuclear abolition cause ”” a mind-set that coaxes many believers to accept, even welcome, the imminent end of the world. As signaled by the runaway success of the Left Behind books, end-time expectations hold undeniable sway in evangelical America, which makes long-term investments in a better future seem utterly beside the point.

Thankfully, Wigg-Stevenson and many new-breed evangelicals like him are refusing the kind of end-times bait that lets believers off the hook ”” off the hook of inspired social action that can make their faith a powerful blessing to their society and their time.

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Housing will eventually recover from its great swoon. But many real estate experts now believe that home ownership will never again yield rewards like those enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century, when houses not only provided shelter but also a plump nest egg.

The wealth generated by housing in those decades, particularly on the coasts, did more than assure the owners a comfortable retirement. It powered the economy, paying for the education of children and grandchildren, keeping the cruise ships and golf courses full and the restaurants humming.

More than likely, that era is gone for good.

“There is no iron law that real estate must appreciate,” said Stan Humphries, chief economist for the real estate site Zillow. “All those theories advanced during the boom about why housing is special ”” that more people are choosing to spend more on housing, that more people are moving to the coasts, that we were running out of usable land ”” didn’t hold up.”

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Renewed economic uncertainty is testing Americans’ generation-long love affair with the stock market.

Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.

If that pace continues, more money will be pulled out of these mutual funds in 2010 than in any year since the 1980s, with the exception of 2008, when the global financial crisis peaked.

Small investors are “losing their appetite for risk,” a Credit Suisse analyst, Doug Cliggott, said in a report to investors on Friday.

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….let me tell you why I think the lectionary is insufficient for shaping “Biblical Anglicans for a Global Age” or whatever your vision of discipleship is:

1. The whole Bible is not read in the Sunday lectionary.

2. Difficult texts are eliminated from the lectionary.

3. Controversial texts are eliminated from the lectionary.

4. Lectionary texts are a set up for preachers to think isogetically about preaching; in the same way, lectionary reading also allows the congregation to go for years without hearing biblical texts in their contexts.

5. The traditional idea of lectionary preaching from the previous generation makes one of two mistakes. It either only preaches from the Gospel texts thus eliminating the 2 Tim. 3:16 understanding of Scripture. There are people who can go for years or a lifetime without hearing a sermon on the Old Testament. The other mistake of lectionary preaching is to try and force a common thread through the four (or three) readings that does not exist exegetically. For every sermon I preach on a biblical text, there are supporting texts. The lectionary readings tend to force the preacher towards finding that support in the appointed texts.

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Cities and states across the nation are selling and leasing everything from airports to zoos””a fire sale that could help plug budget holes now but worsen their financial woes over the long run.

California is looking to shed state office buildings. Milwaukee has proposed selling its water supply; in Chicago and New Haven, Conn., it’s parking meters. In Louisiana and Georgia, airports are up for grabs.

About 35 deals now are in the pipeline in the U.S., according to research by Royal Bank of Scotland’s RBS Global Banking & Markets. Those assets have a market value of about $45 billion””more than ten times the $4 billion or so two years ago, estimates Dana Levenson, head of infrastructure banking at RBS. Hundreds more deals are being considered, analysts say.

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We see in this set of facts, as early as 2004, a recurring pattern. While professing to honor diversity — and indeed, to seek “unity in diversity” — the groups allied with Via Media have always taken root only in those dioceses led by orthodox clergy who stoutly resisted the ordination to the episcopacy of individuals in a noncelibate relationship outside of Holy Matrimony as defined (and still defined) by the Book of Common Prayer. For thus upholding the rubrics of the BCP, they have been accused of fomenting schism within ECUSA, sued, deposed and hounded from the Church.

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In today’s world of instant access to news, mission agencies may feel compelled to “do something” when danger arises. Although the Bible gives examples of varying responses to danger, the mission agencies’ “something,” more often than not, may be to encourage or order an evacuation. What might have been a God-appointed time to embrace suffering and those who suffer may be prematurely aborted.

According to a United Nations study, “The World at War,” increasing areas of the world are involved in “intrastate wars” where 75 percent of the victims are noncombatants. That figure represents a staggering story of human suffering and enormous needs.

I can remember two occasions when we and others stayed “in the same boat,” as it were, with people caught in conflict and suffering. On one occasion we had to stay; it soon became too late to leave. On the other occasion we had a choice, and we chose to stay.

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Of all the elderly people he’s visited, the Rev. Kenneth Dupin remembers a woman named Katie in particular.

Katie had a houseful of treasured memorabilia, and she loved to regale him with stories of Washington high society in the 1950s. But after she was moved to a nursing home, “she started crying,” Dupin says. “I went over to her, and she pulled me down to where I could hear her, and she said, ‘Please take me home.'”

She never did go back home, but after she died, her memory stayed with Dupin. He tells NPR’s Audie Cornish that it got him wondering if there was a way to keep people like Katie out of nursing homes and closer to their families. His idea might seem strange, but “granny pods” are catching on.

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The 10th Parallel is the line of latitude 700 miles north of the equator. It cuts across central Africa: Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, all the way to the Philippines. More than half of the world’s Muslims live along the parallel, so do most of the world’s Christians.

Journalist and poet Eliza Griswold spent seven years traveling in this region of the world, a place where religious conflict intersects with the growing struggle for land, resources and political power. She examines all of this in a new book called “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam.”

Eliza Griswold joins me now from our New York bureau. Thanks for being here.

Ms. ELIZA GRISWOLD Author, “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam”): Thanks for having me, Rachel.

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Nine months after an Army psychiatrist was charged with fatally shooting 13 soldiers and wounding 30, the nation’s largest Army post can measure the toll of war in the more than 10,000 mental health evaluations, referrals or therapy sessions held every month.

About every fourth soldier here, where 48,000 troops and their families are based, has been in counseling during the past year, according to the service’s medical statistics. And the number of soldiers seeking help for combat stress, substance abuse, broken marriages or other emotional problems keeps increasing.

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Women have been denied opportunities for development and participation in all spheres of life, including the religious. This has had negative impacts on men and women.

Slowly, painfully, we have been learning to set our sexual stereotypes and prejudices beside the challenges of the Gospel. We are called to a life of justice, compassion, intelligence and patience that takes us beyond our own comfort and interests. While women have always played significant roles in Anglicanism (we are, after all, a Church to which definitive shape was given by a woman — Elizabeth I!), it is only in the last few generations that we have discovered how life-giving it is for them to be involved in leadership and ministry in every order and level of the Church. We can no longer make invidious distinctions between “women in the Church” and “the Church.”

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He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I Know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in Thy great,
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

And when he had come to Jerusalem he attempted to join the disciples; and they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him, and brought him to the apostles, and declared to them how on the road he had seen the Lord, who spoke to him, and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus.

–Acts 9:26-27

Absence of Mind, a small and fiercely concentrated book containing lectures given at Yale….[focuses] on the oddly obsessive urge in various kinds of contemporary thought to dissolve the mind itself, to deny the evidential importance of what it feels like to be a conscious subject.

Assorted popular scientists and psychologists have insisted that what we think we are doing, what we experience as thinking or judging or deciding, is illusory: we are self-deceived, because we are in fact acting out a script prescribed by genetically driven imperatives, or by the ergonomics of impersonal forces in the psyche.

This “exclusion of felt life” overflows into wider cultural attitudes and has the effect of lowering our expectations of ourselves ”“ and so of reducing our imaginative reach. As Robinson puts it starkly at one point: who are “we”, if the entire life of “reflection and emotion” is simply the method adopted by genes for their self-propagation?

Read it all (another from the long line of should-have-already-been-posted–KSH).

A contributing reporter for The New Yorker, Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, Griswold is deft at interweaving historical details with her narrative. Subtitled “Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam,” the book ranges from bombed-out Mogadishu suburbs in Somalia to the Jakarta, Indonesia, neighborhoods where former jihadis peddle Prophet-sanctioned medicines.

In Africa, she interviews public figures: evangelist Franklin Graham on a visit to Sudan, and Somali warlords with connections to al-Qaida.

Grisworld does some of her best reporting in Indonesia and Malaysia, where her depiction of the lives of average people caught in the cross hairs of wider geopolitical conflicts is devastating. She writes movingly of indigenous Malaysians who continue to resist conversion by both world religions, in the face of an assault to their environment and livelihoods.

For Griswold, whose father was the Episcopal bishop of Chicago, religion is personal. Yet she finds her own conflicts as someone coming from a decidedly more liberal faith tradition than the ones she encounters.

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Browning is now retired, but his name recently surfaced in an unrelated case. It is alleged that he did not inform secular authorities when he learned in 1993 of allegations against Donald Davis, the former bishop of the Northwestern Pennsylvania diocese. Davis, who died in 2007, was accused of abusing several minor girls in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

By the time Charles Bennison was a bishop candidate in the Diocese of Pennsylvania in 1996, a lot of people wielding power in the Episcopal Church knew of the serious allegations against him and his brother – and they chose to keep quiet. This information could have been decisive in the selection of a diocesan leader.

Allegations of such collusion have, with good reason, long roiled dioceses in the Roman Catholic Church, fueling accusations that church leaders are more interested in protecting their own interests, and those of their colleagues, than in truly protecting victims and prosecuting abusers.

Regrettably, this appears to also have been the case with a number of spiritual leaders in the Episcopal Church, men and women charged with shepherding the weakest and most vulnerable members of the flock.

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The first of six large group gatherings kicked off the four-day event with a live band, drama troupe, a “parade of Bishops,” and keynote speaker ”” The Rev’d Canon William Cliff, Rector of The Collegiate Chapel of St. John the Evangelist at Huron University College and parish priest for Huron University College and the Anglican Community at the University of Western Ontario.

“I want scripture to come alive for you,” exclaimed Cliff as he laid out three ground rules for the youth to follow for his presentations during the gathering and for when reading scripture in general. The rules included: The Gospel is always astonishing; The Gospel is never fair ”” “because the Gospel is about grace”; and God always acts first. “We are going to find the most unfair, grace-filled, astonishing reading in which God acts first,” declared Cliff.

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We were shaken, but not undone, by the reversal of the verdict of the Trial Court by the Court of Review for the Trial of a Bishop. We have had, after all, disappointing experiences with bishops, spanning three decades, and we have been routinely discouraged with their responses. We are particularly concerned that Bishop Charles E. Bennison stated publicly at trial that he still believes that he acted appropriately in this matter and would take the same approach again if called to do so. He has learned nothing.

The light of truth shone in the verdict of the Trial Court. They had the courage to listen to our testimonies with open hearts. Always with spiritual presence, they acted with utmost integrity and diligence. How brave they were. Their landmark ruling gave us hope that the Episcopal Church could be a guiding beacon to all people everywhere who are affected in some way by clergy sexual abuse and the complicit behaviors of those bishops who again and again choose to protect their own, instead of protecting their flock.

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