In choosing the name Benedict, the Pope linked himself with Benedict XV, the pope who tried to halt the carnage of the Great War, and, in a much longer frame of reference, St Benedict of Nursia, whose rule is the basis of the entire Western monastic tradition which preserved Europe’s culture through the Dark Ages. The universities can no longer be trusted to perform this function since they have become both beacons of relativism and cash-and-carries. Whereas his predecessor identified Marxist materialism as the greatest threat to human freedom, Benedict is so concerned about the condition of contemporary Europe that in June he established a pontifical office to help re-evangelise it.

Secularism is at the heart of Benedict’s concerns. By this the Pope does not mean the delimitation of Church and State, the sacred and profane ”“ which is intrinsic to Christian culture as well as political society since the Reformation ”“ but the amnesiac eradication of one of the principal roots of Western civilisation and the deliberate marginalisation of all religion to the private sphere. In its stead has come a society that thinks its existential despairs can be ameliorated by limitless consumer goods, or worse, by a state that racks up fathomless amounts of debt so as to throw money at problems that may have no material resolution.

While truly sinister philosophies and technologies, all camouflaged with the rhetoric of choice and freedom, infiltrate how we regard and treat the old or sick, or play around with the building blocks of life itself, the public space is dominated by a culture several notches below that of the late Roman empire.

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As Pope Benedict XVI arrived here Thursday for the first state visit to Britain by a pope, he offered his strongest criticism yet of the Roman Catholic Church’s handling of the sex abuse crisis, saying it had not been “sufficiently vigilant” or “sufficiently swift and decisive” in cracking down on abusers.

Speaking to reporters on his flight from Rome, Benedict also said that the church’s “first interest is the victims.”

“I must say that these revelations were a shock for me, a great sadness,” he said of the crisis that has undermined the church’s moral authority in many parts of Europe and beyond.

He expressed “sadness also that the authority of the church was not was not sufficiently vigilant and not sufficiently swift and decisive to take the necessary measures.”

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Delegates to the Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia’s annual convention voted this week to allow the church to bless same-gender relationships.

The resolution was submitted by the Rev. Ann Lovejoy Johnson, associate rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Charleston. It “urges our Bishop to honor same-gender relationships by supporting public rites for the blessing of same-gender relationships in congregations where such blessings are supported and so desired.”

The final decision rests with the diocese’s bishop, the Rt. Rev. W. Michie Klusmeyer, who responded with a prepared statement when contacted by the Gazette on Tuesday.

“Thank you for your interest, but I wonder where your interest was when wonderful things have happened in the past in the Episcopal Church? And try as you like to make us one, we are not a one issue church,” he said in the statement. He would not comment further, and calls to St. John’s were not returned Tuesday afternoon.

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Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II shook hands with Pope Benedict XVI as he arrived Thursday for a historic four-day visit to Britain.

The queen greeted the pope at her Scottish residence near Edinburgh, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, before sitting down with him for a private meeting. A military marching band played the national anthem God Save the Queen, for which the pope removed his white cap.

Earlier, the pope arrived at the Edinburgh airport in an Alitalia plane. A Union Jack and Vatican City flag were flown out of the cockpit windows after it landed.

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….given the combination of the expiration of the home buyer tax credit and the increasing number of loans moving to final foreclosure, we knew that home prices overall would take a hit, but it would take a while.

Well we’re here.

Two new reports out today prove the consequences of oversupply of organic inventory (12.5 months on existing homes in July according to the National Association of Realtors) and the shadow inventory of foreclosed properties (estimates vary widely and wildly). CoreLogic’s Home Price Index shows home prices “flat” in July as transaction volume continues to decline. “This was the first time in five months that no year-over-year gains were reported,” according to the release. In June, prices were up 2.4 percent year over year. In addition, “36 states experienced price declines in July, twice the number in May and the highest number since last November when prices nationally were still declining.”

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Women for the first time earned a majority of U.S. doctoral degrees, building on decades of gains in higher education.

In the 2008-2009 school year, women received just over half of all doctorates, up from 49 percent in 2007-2008 and 44 percent in 2000, according to a report released today by the Washington-based Council of Graduate Schools, which represents more than 500 universities. The report doesn’t include professional degrees in law, business and medicine.

The milestone became inevitable because women have received the majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees since the 1980s, building a pipeline of doctoral candidates, Nathan Bell, the council’s director of research and policy analysis, said in a telephone interview. Women are building on the gains of an earlier cohort of female scholars who were pioneers, said Elizabeth Sutton, who received her Ph.D. in art history in 2009.

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IT is often thought the main threat of radical Islamism to the West and, indeed, the world, is terrorism. It is also said to be the isolation of Muslim communities, which allows extremists to recruit people to their cause.

Such views are not mistaken but they confuse effects with causes. What the world has to recognise is that we are not simply dealing with faith, but with a political, social and economic ideology. Radical Islamism is a worldview. Its nearest parallel, despite many differences, is Marxism.

Radical Islamists claim their all-encompassing program for society is rooted in fundamental Islamic sources. They reject the interpretations of Koran and sharia law offered by reformist or moderate Muslims. We must, of course, respect the faith of ordinary Muslims, but the ideology has to be met in a different way.

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This is not about secretive mutterings in the dead of night or freakish eccentrics, explained Dah Aligbonon Akpochihala, an eminent voodoo priest who has taken to the airwaves to preach the old messages of faith, fidelity and obedience integral to his religion. It is about bringing a younger generation on board.

“Voodoo is sabotaged, demonized, as if there was nothing good in it,” Mr. Aligbonon said in his austere office ”” a bare, whitewashed room, with a cracked linoleum floor and disused fan.

A slight, mild-mannered aristocrat in a blue robe, Mr. Aligbonon maintains his modest cinder-block temple on a busy commercial street in this bustling commercial capital, one of the continent’s major ports. The temple sits between a beauty parlor and a hardware stall, and offers spiritual consultation and ceremonies to Mami Wata (a water divinity) ”” along with photocopying, binding services and CDs in the Fon language of Mr. Aligbonon’s broadcasts. Chickens peck in the courtyard ”” they have multiple uses, food and sacrifice ”” laundry hangs on the rack and a baby bawls from within.

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O God, who by the preaching of thy blessed servant and bishop Ninian didst cause the light of the Gospel to shine in the land of Britain: Grant, we beseech thee, that, having his life and labors in remembrance, we may show forth our thankfulness by following the example of his zeal and patience; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

We call to mind, O God, before thy throne of grace all those whom thou hast given to be near and dear to us, and all for whom we are specially bound to pray, beseeching thee to remember them all for good, and to fulfill as may be expedient for them all their desires and wants. We commend to thee any who may have wronged us, whether by word or deed, beseeching thee to forgive them and us all our sins, and to bring us to thy heavenly kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Gavin Hamilton

“Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify thy name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”

–John 12:27,28

As the United Kingdom braces to receive one of the best-known and most controversial figures on the planet, Pope Benedict XVI, a question hangs over the state visit: Why is he coming?

The leader of the world’s 1 billion-plus Catholics does not particularly like to travel, Benedict biographer David Gibson says.

Since a high-profile visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories nearly a year-and-a-half ago, he’s gone only to a handful of small countries not far from Rome — racking up nothing like the number of air miles logged by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.

And the United Kingdom is not a Catholic country. On the contrary, Britain’s break from Rome in the 16th century echoes, if faintly, to the present day, with laws on the books forbidding the heir to the British throne from marrying a Catholic.

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Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania Bishop Charles Bennison has told House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson that a recent letter she wrote about his re-instatement has made his ministry in the diocese “more difficult.”

In a letter dated Sept. 10, Bennison also characterized Anderson’s letter as “so misleading as to raise the question whether you actually read all of the trial evidence on which your statements are based.”

Read it all and follow the link to the text of the actual letter as well.

The Anglican Communion: As many of you know, there is this thing running around the Anglican Communion called the “Anglican Covenant.” It was a product (at least its concept) from the Windsor Group convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, several years ago. At Lambeth Conference it was discussed, and while I have to admit that we were told that no decisions were going to be made at Lambeth, it does appear that a decision was made that a Covenant would be presented to be adopted by all of the Provinces of the Anglican Communion.

We have people from the Episcopal Church who have been working on this group (among others) to help write a Covenant. Quite honestly, they seem to be rather supportive of such a document. As I stated last year and previously, I support the concept of a Covenant. It is what it is ”“ a Covenant, not a legal Contract. It is a way of living together, and in the larger scheme of God’s Salvific Creation, the Anglican Communion is still relatively young and is suffering from growing pains. Something that helps us is probably not a bad thing. Those who worked on it have suggested that it is broad enough, with enough “mays,” “ifs,” “possiblies” and the like, that there is much latitude for the Episcopal Church, and other Provinces to continue to move forward where the Holy Spirit appears to be leading, but at the same time, an opportunity to remind everyone that we are in relationship.

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Secularism is famously Benedict’s bête noire, and he’s coming to the right place to engage it. A recent national study found that in a household in Great Britain today where both parents are actively religious, a child stands only a 47 percent chance of becoming religious. In a household where just one parent is religious, those odds drop by a factor of half, to 24 percent, and where neither parent is religious, the odds that a child will become religious plummets to a statistically insignificant 3 percent.

David Voas of the University of Manchester draws the obvious conclusion: “In Britain, institutional religion now has a half-life of one generation.”

Benedict’s core challenge is to persuade a jaded secular public to take a new, more appreciative look at the social role of religious faith. There’s precedent to suggest he’s capable of pulling it off: In France in September 2008, his speech at Paris’ Collège des Bernardins, on the monastic contribution to Western culture, was hailed as a masterful reflection on church/state relations even by the most ideologically charged defenders of French laïcité.

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The first state visit by a pope to Britain comes at a low point in relations between Catholics and Anglicans and under the weight of the clerical sex abuse crisis.

Pope Benedict XVI arrives in Scotland on Thursday morning to spend four days in Britain ”” the first visit by a pope in nearly 30 years and the first papal state visit since King Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534 over a divorce.

The trip includes a meeting with Queen Elizabeth in Scotland, a speech in Westminster Hall, an ecumenical service with the archbishop of Canterbury and the beatification of a 19th century Anglican who converted to Catholicism.

Looming over the visit are 400 years of religious tensions and more contemporary divisions.

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On the eve of the Pontiff’s visit, ZENIT spoke with Reverend Canon David Richardson, also the director of the Anglican Center in Rome, about the importance of the trip in terms of ecumenism.

Speaking about his experiences meeting the Pontiff on several occasions as part of his position, the envoy said, “He has always been warm and I admire him greatly as a theologian.”

He added, “To have in the present the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury two such towering theological figures means that this is a fascinating time to be in my appointment.”

Richardson spoke about Cardinal John Henry Newman, due to be beatified by the Holy Father on Sunday, who he said is “a somewhat ambiguous figure both within Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism.”

“As an Anglican he had something of the prophet’s mantle and called the Church of England, that part of Anglicanism which was his home, back to a vision of itself which it had lost or was in danger of losing,” the representative said.

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Sitting in front of laptops, the students started in on their game-building, each one beginning with a blank screen. They created borders, paths and obstacles by dragging and dropping small cubes from a menu. They chose an animated sprite to serve as a game’s protagonist. They picked enemy sprites and set them marching in various patterns around the screen. They wrote the text that introduced the game and the text that flashed when a player reaches a new level. (“If the entrance to your cave is being guarded by a bear or a woolly mammoth,” said Doyle, sounding teacherly, “you have to tell us it’s a bear or a woolly mammoth.”) They added a variety of rewards and punishments. If the game seemed too easy, they made it harder. If the game seemed too hard, they made it easier. Earlier that day, I watched a girl named Maya make a game. She created a labyrinth, changed all the colors, swapped enemies in and out, changed the background, changed the music and finally set the game’s timer to 90 seconds. Then she played her game and finished it in 75. She adjusted the timer to 75 seconds and played again, this time losing. Finally, she set the timer at 80 and beat the game, but only just barely, at which point she declared the whole thing perfect.

The work appeared simple, but the challenge was evident. Twenty minutes in, the Sports for the Mind classroom was hushed but for the sound of keyboards being pounded and a faint arcadelike cacophony of poinging and bleeping over the syncopated pulse of game music. That night for homework, they would play one another’s games and write up constructive critiques.

The gold standard in class, I was told by nearly every student I spoke with, was to create a game that was hard to beat but harder still to quit. Kai was sitting in one corner working on a game he named What the Cave. It was teeming with robot enemies. “The whole point,” Kai said, “is you want your game to be hard, but you want it to be good.” He studied his screen for a moment. Then using his mouse, he deftly deleted a row of enemies. “What you want,” he said finally, “is good-hard.”

The language of gamers is, when you begin to decipher it, the language of strivers. People who play video games speak enthusiastically about “leveling up” and are always shooting for the epic win. Getting to the end of even a supposedly simple video game can take 15 or more hours of play time, and it almost always involves failure ”” lots and lots of failure.

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Efforts to tame America’s ballooning budget deficit could soon confront a daunting reality: Nearly half of all Americans live in a household in which someone receives government benefits, more than at any time in history.

At the same time, the fraction of American households not paying federal income taxes has also grown””to an estimated 45% in 2010, from 39% five years ago, according to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research organization.

A little more than half don’t earn enough to be taxed; the rest take so many credits and deductions they don’t owe anything. Most still get hit with Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes, but 13% of all U.S. households pay neither federal income nor payroll taxes.

“We have a very large share of the American population that is getting checks from the government,” says Keith Hennessey, an economic adviser to President George W. Bush and now a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, “and an increasingly smaller portion of the population that’s paying for it.”

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Don’t get me wrong ”“ I think that it’s great that the Pope’s coming here, and that the Church of England is engaging with his visit in a constructive manner. But I haven’t heard anyone take the opportunity ”“ at a time when religion’s profile has suddenly soared ”“ to state the basic Protestant case: that faith is, in essence, a matter of active and personal choice, the result of an individual contract with God rather than something mediated through the authority of the Church in Rome.

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Here is one:

I welcomed and agreed with most of “We’re No.1(1)!,” by Thomas L. Friedman (column, Sept. 12), especially his observations about students’ lack of motivation and work ethic. As a retired community college teacher, I’m surprised that teachers don’t report even higher percentages of apathetic students.

Like him, I find it troubling that no politician dares to say that maybe everyone’s taxes have to go up.

I’m puzzled, though, as to how we might return to the discipline and values of the so-called Greatest Generation. Coupled with those older values were qualities that we don’t want to revive: intolerance, fatalism about one’s place in the world, excessive stoicism, repression, bigotry and the exploitation of women and minorities.

We want the tolerance, openness and search for equality and self-fulfillment that are the better side of baby boomer values. The challenge for the next generation will be to face up to the realities while promoting the well-being of all.

Anne Matlack Evans

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“Every family has a secret and the secret is that it’s not like other families,” Alan Bennett writes in A Life Like Other People’s. This family memoir, extracted from his 2006 autobiographical volume, Untold Stories, is at once a touching portrait of his parents, “the tenderest and most self-sufficient couple,” and a sobering tale of depression and dementia.

Bennett, the British dramatist best known on this side of the Atlantic for the satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe, and his stage and screenplay versions of The History Boys and The Madness of King George, first uncovered a deep family secret in 1966, when he was 32. He and his father were checking his mother into a mental hospital for depression, the first of what would be many hospitalizations. When asked if there was other mental illness in the family, Bennett unhesitatingly answered no. “After all, I’m the educated one in the family. I’ve been to Oxford. If there had been ‘anything like this’ I should have known about it.”

He was wrong….

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….the sheer sloppiness of Polly Toynbee”˜s tirade (yes, another one) in …[the] Guardian is breathtaking….

So, let’s pick on the worst elements of religious expression (which millions of religious people also find weird and/or dodgy), shall we, and ignore the rest? What response would I get if I used Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and the other usual suspects as the epitome of secular atheism? Like everything else in this world ”“ the real one in which most of us live ”“ religious institutions or movements comprise huge ranges of agreement and dispute with just about everything the institution or movement lays claim to. There is no objective monolith ”“ not even when leaders pretend there is.

And, just to be really clear, (elements of) the secular world looks on with utter perplexity at all sorts of religious motivation, belief and behaviour: self-sacrifice, humility, generosity, etc. (There I go again ”“ generalising”¦) The mere fact that ”˜the secular world looks on with utter peplexity’ tells us nothing other than that some people are perplexed by other people ”“ it says nothing about the subject of the perplexity itself….

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Where once secularism and humanism were relics of a bygone religious age, its voice is important again. But pointing out the blindingly obvious need to keep faiths in their private sphere has united religious gunfire against secularists. All atheists now tend to be called “militant”, yet we seek to silence none, to burn no books, to stop no masses or Friday prayers, impose no laws, asking only free choice over sex and death. Religion deserves its say, but only proportional to its numbers. No privileges, no special protection against feeling offended.

The director of pastoral affairs in the Westminster diocese, Edmund Adamus, says Britain has become a “selfish hedonistic wasteland” of sex and secularism. He echoes the supreme arrogance of all the religious who claim there is no morality without God. Nonsense, but unlike the religious the godless claim no moral superiority. Wise humanists know that good and bad are pretty evenly distributed. Humanity has an innate moral sense, without threats of divine wrath and reward. Good and bad works are done by both the secular and the religious. But wherever the institutions of religion wield real power, they prove a force for cruelty and hypocrisy.

Atheists are good haters, they claim, but feeble compared with the religious sects. Atheists have dried-up souls, without spiritual or visionary transcendentalism. To which we say: the human imagination is all we need to hold in awe. Live in optimism without fear of judgment and death. There is enough purpose and meaning in life, love and leaving a good legacy. Oppose the danger of religious zealotry with the liberating belief that life on earth is precious because this here and now is all there is, and our destiny is in our own hands.

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The U.S. tied with Switzerland for fifth place in a “world giving index” by the British-based Charities Aid Foundation that measured charitable behavior across the globe.

The ranking in the “World Giving Index 2010” was based on the U.S.’s showing in three categories””60 percent of Americans gave to an organization; 39 percent volunteered for a group; and 65 percent were willing to aid a stranger.

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We hear a lot these days about the “conflict” between science and religion ”” the atheists and the fundamentalists, it seems, are constantly blasting one another. But what’s rarely noted is that even as science-religion warriors clash by night, in the morning they’ll see the battlefield has shifted beneath them.

Across the Western world ”” including the United States ”” traditional religion is in decline, even as there has been a surge of interest in “spirituality.” What’s more, the latter concept is increasingly being redefined in our culture so that it refers to something very much separable from, and potentially broader than, religious faith.

Nowadays, unlike in prior centuries, spirituality and religion are no longer thought to exist in a one-to-one relationship.

This is a fundamental change, and it strongly undermines the old conflict story about science and religion. For once you start talking about science and spirituality, the dynamic shifts dramatically.

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Almighty God, who didst give to thy servant Cyprian boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of the same our Lord Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

O God, who by thy Son Jesus Christ hast set up on earth a kingdom of holiness, to measure its strength against all others: Make faith to prevail over fear, and righteousness over force, and truth over the lie, and love and concord over all things; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

–War Prayers (1940)

As we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by soothsaying. She followed Paul and us, crying, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.” And this she did for many days. But Paul was annoyed, and turned and said to the spirit, “I charge you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour.

–Acts 16:16-18