“God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.” This is the hallmark sentence of Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology. It is an elegantly simple but dauntingly deep sentence, which took Jenson a lifetime of theological reflection to write.

To write such a sentence requires that we discipline our presumption that we know what we are saying when we say the word “God.” For it turns out that we are most likely to take God’s name in vain when we assume we know what we are saying when we say “God.”

Indeed, one of the ironies of the recent spate of books defending atheism is the confidence these “new atheists” seem to have in knowing which God it is they are sure does not exist. They have forgotten that one of the crimes of which Romans accused Christians – a crime whose punishment was often death – was that Christians were atheists.

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Real democracy is messy. It’s got protestors and agitators and banners and manners and morals and financial pressures and gossip and policemen on horses keeping an eye out to make sure it doesn’t turn violent. Oh, yes, it’s also got government, but apart from paying for those policemen, government ought not to be too deeply involved as these things sort themselves out. If what the Muslims want to do is not illegal, than government should have nothing more to say.

That does not mean, however, that everyone else should also have nothing more to say. The attempt to build a large, new mosque and Islamic center anywhere near the site of the World Trade Center is so offensive, so bizarre, and so deliberate that it should be stopped.

And stopped it will be, through the offered mediation of New York’s Archbishop Dolan, or the skittishness of the financial community, or the disturbance of the neighbors, or the anger of the protestors, or the refusal of the building contractors. It will be messy, and it will be sharp. Inspiring and disturbing, with loud shouts on the streets and a few quiet words in the back rooms.

But that’s democracy””it’s how things get done when you accept that government shouldn’t do everything. The churches and the synagogues have long experience with this kind of democratic negotiation. Time for the mosques to learn how to do it, too.

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O Heavenly Father, who hast called us to thy service in this new day, another gift from your hands: Grant us grace to serve thee faithfully, that both in our hearts and with our lives we may magnify thy holy name; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” For he was astonished, and all that were with him, at the catch of fish which they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zeb’edee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching men.”

–Luke 5:8-10

One feature of American life that has always fascinated me is the degree to which the Supreme Court has become the focal point of its culture. Most Americans seem to believe that the best place to discover right and wrong, to identify good and bad, and to resolve ambiguity, is through legal judgment.

The risk is that the attention given to getting the rules right can distract from the fact that a healthy society is always primarily about relationships and only secondarily about rules. It is only when both of these dimensions are working harmoniously that we might say that we have reached a point that could be called justice.

And this brings me to the story of Naboth’s vineyard from the First Book of Kings (21.1-21). This is a salutary story of what happens when there’s no justice and the powerful get to crush those who stand in their way.

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The greatest geopolitical development that has occurred largely beneath the radar of our Middle East-focused media over the past decade has been the rise of Chinese sea power. This is evinced by President Obama’s meeting Friday about the South China Sea, where China has conducted live-fire drills and made territorial claims against various Southeast Asian countries, and the dispute over the Senkaku Islands between Japan and China in the East China Sea, the site of a recent collision between a Chinese fishing trawler and two Japanese coast guard ships.

Whereas an island nation such as Britain goes to sea as a matter of course, a continental nation with long and contentious land borders, such as China, goes to sea as a luxury. The last time China went to sea in the manner that it is doing was in the early 15th century, when the Ming Dynasty explorer Zheng He sailed his fleets as far as the Horn of Africa. His journeys around the southern Eurasian rim ended when the Ming emperors became distracted by their land campaigns against the Mongols to the north. Despite occasional unrest among the Muslim Uighur Turks in western China, history is not likely to repeat itself. If anything, the forces of Chinese demography and corporate control are extending Chinese power beyond the country’s dry-land frontiers — into Russia, Mongolia and Central Asia….

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Economic experts may believe the recession is over, but try telling that to the public.

Seventy-four percent of Americans believe the economy is still in a recession, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll. Only 25 percent think the downturn is over.

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[Austin ] Bramwell is looking for an exposition of Christian ideas over and against modern novelties. But Chesterton is rather a publicist and a polemicist on behalf of those ideals. He is not joining some great conversation with Dun Scotus, Aristotle, and Fredrick Nietzche. Rather he is in a constant scrum with Bertrand Russell, Benjamin Kidd, Cecil Rhodes, H.G. Wells, Sidney Webb, Edward Carpenter, W.T. Stead, etc”¦ Notably, only half those names live on and most are dimmer than Chesterton’s. Judged in that company he is sterling. When was the last time you saw an H.G. Wells insight applied to anything? If Chesterton were alive today a similar list would be something like, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Karen Armstrong, Thomas Friedman, Marty Peretz, Stephen Hawking, and Jonathan Chait. If I were going to produce a polemic against Karen Armstrong’s book The History of God ”“ and I dearly would like to ”“ you might be satisfied with a clever review. You wouldn’t chastise me for failing to produce the Summa Theologica. To criticize Chesterton in this regard seems unfair. Besides The Everlasting Man, his books are mostly recycled newspaper material. Next to a considered book of philosophy, Chesterton seems a little smug. Next to a cartoon and letters to the editor and in response to his actual opponents, he’s not only a genius, but a delightful one.

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“I love his compassionate heart, his generosity, his showing of himself as a person of dignity and grace,” [Ruth] Franz said, her fingers intertwined with Jones and her head resting on his shoulder.

Swooning when Jones explained again how the moon’s orbit affects the tides, Franz gushed: “And he has such an amazing ability to remember stuff.”

[Henry] Jones, who lost his wife a year ago after some 60 years of marriage, appears just as agog and in love as his bride.

“I love her dearly because of the way she thinks and the way she loves the Lord. We’re singing off the same sheet and that’s all you could want in life,” Jones said. “She’s the most wonderful woman in the world … and she’s beautiful ”” I’ve always thought she was beautiful.”

Wonderful stuff–read it all and enjoy the video if you have time.

Episcopalians transformed a Galt House ballroom into a sanctuary with icons, banners and majestic sacred music Saturday for the consecration of Bishop Terry Allen White as the new leader of the Diocese of Kentucky.

“Rejoice, people of Kentucky ”” you have called a listener,” the Rev. Canon Susan L. Sommer told hundreds of worshippers in her sermon, including rows of clergy and bishops, a brass ensemble and a large choir.

“He has an enormous capacity to listen carefully to the Holy Spirit both within the community that he leads and as well as within his own heart,” said Sommer, the priest-in-charge of Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kansas City, Mo., who worked with White when he was dean of the cathedral there.

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Throughout this volume, the Obama administration is depicted as deeply divided and riven with suspicions: the president feeling boxed in by the Pentagon, members of the military battling the White House and one another. In addition to the well-known putdowns of the president’s national security team by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the commander of forces in Afghanistan (which appeared in Rolling Stone magazine and led to his firing last June), and the much-chronicled tensions between senior military officers and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Mr. Woodward recounts a cornucopia of conflicts and adversarial agendas ”” and much pettiness, in-fighting and score-settling that stand in awful contrast to the sobering realities of a nearly nine-year-old war that has already claimed more than 1,000 American lives.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former campaign strategist Mark Penn is described as urging her to take the job of secretary of state because, in Mr. Woodward’s words, “if she did the job for four years, Obama might be in trouble and have to dump Biden and pick her to run with him as vice president.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is described as trying to withhold a “hybrid option” ”” requiring a fewer number of troops ”” from consideration, and even knocking heads with Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the commander of the United States Central Command, over a memo about prospects in Afghanistan.

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At this moment of national religious anxiety, it’s tempting to ask what would happen if other religious rituals were turned inside out and opened to public view. If the people behind the proposed Park51 Islamic cultural complex had put all their plans forward and invited the entire city to comment, could outside observers have made them sound so scary? One of the Sukkah City architects wrote about the goal of making a structure “transparent enough to be inclusive, but dense enough to create a sense of belonging.” Inshallah.

I returned to Union Square Park on Wednesday night, as the actual holiday began, worried that the winning (and by then only remaining) structure might have devolved into a battleground, with different tribes of Jews trying to lay public claim to it. But I found no black hats and gray beards wielding prayer books. No blissed-out Israeli ravers eating organic produce from Whole Foods. No observance of any kind. The sukkah was roped off and ignored.

It seemed sad that a competition that spawned such excitement about design and open-mindedness made no effort to also support actual religious practice. But on the Upper West Side, where one of the runner-up sukkahs had been deposited on a sidewalk, a few neighborhood families that discovered it had run home and grabbed food, then reconvened for dinner under the stars.

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Winston Churchill once moaned about the long, dishonourable tradition in politics that sees commerce as a cow to be milked or a dangerous tiger to be shot. Businesses are the generators of the wealth on which incomes, taxation and all else depends; “the strong horse that pulls the whole cart”, as Churchill put it. No sane leader of a country would want businesspeople to think that he was against them, especially at a time when confidence is essential for the recovery.

From this perspective, Barack Obama already has a lot to answer for. A president who does so little to counter the idea that he dislikes business is, self-evidently, a worryingly negligent chief executive. No matter that other Western politicians have publicly played with populism more dangerously, from France’s “laissez-faire is dead” president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to Britain’s “capitalism kills competition” business secretary, Vince Cable (see article); no matter that talk on the American right about Mr Obama being a socialist is rot; no matter that Wall Street’s woes are largely of its own making. The evidence that American business thinks the president does not understand Main Street is mounting

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What makes us the way we are? Why are some people predisposed to be anxious, overweight or asthmatic? How is it that some of us are prone to heart attacks, diabetes or high blood pressure?

There’s a list of conventional answers to these questions. We are the way we are because it’s in our genes. We turn out the way we do because of our childhood experiences. Or our health and well-being stem from the lifestyle choices we make as adults.

But there’s another powerful source of influence you may not have considered: your life as a fetus. The nutrition you received in the womb; the pollutants, drugs and infections you were exposed to during gestation; your mother’s health and state of mind while she was pregnant with you ”” all these factors shaped you as a baby and continue to affect you to this day…..

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Google chief executive Eric Schmidt on Friday said that Microsoft’s Bing search engine was the company’s main threat, not Facebook or Apple.

“While it’s true Web search is not the only game in town, searching information is what it is all about,” Schmidt said in Wall Street Journal interview video posted online.

He described Apple as a well-respected competitor and Facebook as a “company of consequence doing an excellent job in social networking,” but said that Microsoft’s latest-generation search engine was Google’s main competition.

“We consider neither to be a competitive threat,” Schmidt said, referring to Facebook and Apple. “Absolutely, our competitor is Bing. Bing is a well-run, highly competitive search engine.”

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Tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs within weeks unless Congress extends one of the more effective job-creating programs in the $787 billion stimulus act: a $1 billion New Deal-style program that directly paid the salaries of unemployed people so they could get jobs in government, at nonprofit organizations and at many small businesses.

In rural Perry County, Tenn., the program helped pay for roughly 400 new jobs in the public and private sectors. But in a county of 7,600 people, those jobs had a big impact: they reduced Perry County’s unemployment rate to less than 14 percent this August, from the Depression-like levels of more than 25 percent that it hit last year after its biggest employer, an auto parts factory, moved to Mexico.

If the stimulus program ends on schedule next week, Perry County officials said, an estimated 300 people there will lose their jobs ”” the equivalent of another factory closing.

“It’s very scary, because there’s just no work,” said Brian Davis, a 36-year-old father of four, who got a stimulus-subsidized job with the City of Lobelville after he lost his job of 17 years at an auto parts plant that shed hundreds of jobs. Now he faces the prospect of unemployment again.

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“We wish to call to your attention the recent actions … which we believe are accelerating the process of alienation and disassociation of the Diocese of South Carolina from the Episcopal Church,” the [Episcopal] Forum [of South Carolina] wrote in a letter to the Executive Council and House of Bishops.

Diocese officials say the resolutions, if approved, would assert the authority of Scripture and be a step toward realizing a vision of “Making Biblical Anglicans for a Global Age.”

Bishop Mark Lawrence said the Forum was resorting to fear tactics.

“With this latest attack, the Episcopal Forum continues its weary institutional approach to God, as if you can keep people in a church by fear.” Lawrence said. “What we are seeking to do in the Diocese of South Carolina is to hold fast to the best of our Episcopal heritage while sharing Christ’s transforming freedom to the needs of people today.”

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The last time the state’s budget was this small, gasoline cost a buck a gallon and South Carolina had a half-million fewer residents.

That was in the fall of 1999, when George W. Bush was running for his first term as president and the Internet stock bubble had yet to pop.

Now, more than a decade later, we’ve been through two recessions and just about everything costs more — fuel costs have more than doubled, college tuition has nearly tripled, health care has soared.

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The installation of Jane Alison Shaw as the eighth dean of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill on Nov. 6 is a milestone ”” she will be the first woman to lead the cathedral, which was founded during the Gold Rush in 1849.

Dr. Shaw will also be the cathedral’s first openly gay dean.

“I’m glad I live in a moment in history when I can answer the call,” Dr. Shaw said in a telephone interview from England, where she is finishing work as the dean of divinity at Oxford University.

While one’s sexual orientation rarely raises an eyebrow in San Francisco these days, the Episcopal Church has been torn apart over the issue of full inclusion for gay men and lesbians. Dr. Shaw’s elevation to lead one of the denomination’s most prominent churches is “a signal moment,” said The Rev. Marc Handley Andrus, bishop of the Diocese of California. “We seek to be a house of prayer for all people.”

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O God of love, we yield thee hearty thanks for whatsoever thou hast given us richly to enjoy; for health of mind and body, for the love and care of home, for the joys of friendship, and for every good gift of happiness and strength. We praise thee for thy servants who by their example and encouragement have helped us on our way, and for every vision of thyself which thou hast given us in sacrament or prayer; and we humbly beseech thee that all these thy benefits we may use in thy service, and to the glory of thy holy name; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord.

Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness.

–James 3:1

(A Statement issued yesterday on behalf of the Bishop of Chichester, the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe, the Bishop of Beverley, the Bishop of Burnley, the Bishop of Edmonton, the Bishop of Horsham, the Bishop of Plymouth, the Bishop of Pontefract, Bishop Lindsay Urwin OGS and others.)

Anglican Catholic bishops have announced that in addition to the provision of an Ordinariate offered recently by Pope Benedict there is to be a new Society [of St Wilfrid and St Hilda] for bishops, clergy, religious and laity in order to provide a place within the Church of England where catholics can worship and minister with integrity without accepting innovations that further distance the Church of England from the greater churches of the East and West.

At two upbeat gatherings this week of over 600 clergy and religious from the northern and southern provinces of the Church of England, there was unanimous condemnation of proposed legislation to allow the ordination of women as bishops that will soon go to the dioceses for discussion, debate and approval.

The unveiling of The Missionary Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda reflects a determination not to accept a Code of Practice as currently suggested by the General Synod but to work for and create a more realistic approach which allows the integrity of those who cannot accept this innovation to be preserved, to flourish and grow within the Church of England. This development represents a constructive initiative on the part of those who cannot accept the innovations proposed in legislation and who are hurt and frustrated by the General Synod’s inability to provide for their theological position.

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O God, whose blessed Son became poor that we through his poverty might be rich: Deliver us, we pray thee, from an inordinate love of this world, that inspired by the devotion of thy servant Sergius of Moscow, we may serve thee with singleness of heart, and attain to the riches of the age to come; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Police departments have collected thousands of handguns through buy-back programs in communities throughout the country. Now they want the contents of your medicine cabinet.

Opiate painkillers and other prescription drugs, officials say, are driving addiction and crime like never before, with addicts singling out the homes of sick or elderly people and posing as potential buyers at open houses just to raid the medicine cabinets. The crimes, and the severity of the nation’s drug abuse problem, have so vexed the authorities that they are calling on citizens to surrender old bottles of potent pills like Vicodin, Percocet and Xanax.

On Saturday, the police will set up drop-off stations at a Wal-Mart in Pearland, Tex., a zoo in Wichita, Kan., a sports complex in Peoria, Ariz., and more than 4,000 other locations to oversee a prescription drug take-back program. Coordinated by the Drug Enforcement Administration, it will be the first such effort with national scope.

The take-back day is being held as waves of data suggest the country’s prescription drug problem is vast and growing. In 17 states, deaths from drugs ”” both prescription and illegal ”” now exceed those from motor vehicle accidents, with opiate painkillers playing a leading role. The number of people seeking treatment for painkiller addiction jumped 400 percent from 1998 to 2008, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

read that second to last sentence again and think about its implications–it simply boggles my mind. Now read the whole article–KSH.

Two years after the peak of the financial crisis, the federal government swooped in to stabilize a crucial part of the credit-union sector battered by losses on subprime mortgages.

Regulators announced Friday a rescue and revamping of the nation’s wholesale credit union system, underpinned by a federal guarantee valued at $30 billion or more. Wholesale credit unions don’t deal with the general public but provide essential back-office services to thousands of other credit unions across the U.S. The majority of retail credit unions are sound, but they will have to shoulder the losses through special assessments over the next decade.

Friday’s moves include the seizure of three wholesale credit unions, plus an unusual plan by government officials to manage $50 billion of troubled assets inherited from failed institutions. To help fund the rescue, the National Credit Union Administration plans to issue $30 billion to $35 billion in government-guaranteed bonds, backed by the shaky mortgage-related assets.

Officials said the plan won’t cost taxpayers any money. Still, it marks the latest intervention by the U.S. government into a financial system weakened by the real-estate bust….

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“It’s like the American dream in reverse.” That’s how President Barack Obama, ten days after taking office last year, described the plight of Americans hit by the faltering economy. His catchy description fell short ”” the dream has turned into a nightmare for tens of millions.

So much so that an opinion poll this week showed that 43 percent of those surveyed thought that “the American Dream” is a thing of the past. It “once held true” but no longer does. Only half the country believes the dream “still exists,” according to the poll, commissioned by ABC News and Yahoo against a background of dismal statistics on growing poverty, inequality, unemployment, and Americans without health insurance.

Before turning to the gloomy numbers, a brief detour to the meaning of the phrase “the American Dream,” long a familiar part of the U.S. (and international) lexicon. The survey defined it as “if you work hard, you get ahead.” That’s neat shorthand for the concept that the American social, economic and political system makes success possible for everyone….

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Joni Eareckson Tada is a woman of many talents. She’s a bestselling author, an acclaimed artist, and an internationally known advocate for people with disabilities. Paralyzed for more than 40 years, Tada is one of the longest living quadriplegics on record. She endures chronic pain, and just a few months ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Tada says it’s her faith that keeps her going.

JONI EARECKSON TADA: Boy, when Jesus said in this world you will have trouble, he wasn’t kidding. In this world there will be trouble. Perhaps the gift of this cancer and pain and quadriplegia is that it forces me to recognize my desperate, desperate need of God, and that is a good thing.

LAWTON: Tada was an active, athletic teenager. Then, at the age of 17, she broke her neck in a diving accident in the Chesapeake Bay. Her spinal chord was severed, and she became paralyzed from the shoulders down. She has limited arm motion but can’t use her hands or her legs. Immediately after the accident, she was angry and depressed and begged friends to help her commit suicide. Ultimately, she says she found peace when she committed her life to God.

EARECKSON TADA: God is that big, and he’s that good, and his grace is that sufficient.

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In many ways, this book functions as a genealogy of intellectual history and a critique of modern culture, in much the same way as books like Alasdair McIntyre’s After Virtue or David Wells’s No Place for Truth do. But in his critique the point on which Allison takes his stand is the Reformation doctrine of justification, the formal cause of which is the righteousness of Christ imputed or “worded” (logidzomai) to us. It is this transcendent act that stands in contrast to both ancient and modern attempts to root our justification somewhere else.

The “arrogance” of the title takes two forms, modern-day versions of the yeast of the Sadducees and Pharisees. The Sadducean denial of resurrection and a transcendent judgment is equated with modern secularism, thriving after Newton in an atmosphere of materialism and (under the influence of the Enlightenment) the rejection of divine revelation as a source of knowledge. The advent of the Industrial Age brought the ability to manipulate nature on a large scale, a capacity compounded by the Digital Age. The tendency in human nature is toward radical autonomy, inimical to Christian faith; a tendency as well to discount the reality of evil and to place confidence in humanity rather than in God. This leads to idolatry, the enthronement of self, and the disintegration of both aesthetics and ethics as transcendent and objective values are displaced by the self-authenticating autonomous self.

On the other hand is modern Phariseeism, which evinces a confidence of a different sort. The book itself begins with William Temple’s description in Christianity and the Social Order of the individual at the center of his own world. Modern Pharisees attempt to maintain their own center through self-esteem rather than good works (the different and yet similar recipe of the biblical Pharisees). What both have in common is the desire to establish their own righteousness, a variation in turn on the modern Sadducean theme of confidence in humanity. Allison also offers what amounts to a lengthy excursus on the Pharisaic themes present in various Christian traditions: Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Protestant. One concludes by implication that the legalistic missteps of these traditions, deviating from a proper emphasis on the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, are in part responsible for the triumph of both the modern Phariseeism of self-esteem (directly) and the secularism of modern Sadduceeism (by way of reaction).

The antidote to both is trust in Jesus Christ and his action for us….

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Despite two decades of public health initiatives, stricter government dietary guidelines, record growth of farmers’ markets and the ease of products like salad in a bag, Americans still aren’t eating enough vegetables.

This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a comprehensive nationwide behavioral study of fruit and vegetable consumption. Only 26 percent of the nation’s adults eat vegetables three or more times a day, it concluded. (And no, that does not include French fries.)

These results fell far short of health objectives set by the federal government a decade ago. The amount of vegetables Americans eat is less than half of what public health officials had hoped. Worse, it has barely budged since 2000.

“It is disappointing,” said Dr. Jennifer Foltz, a pediatrician who helped compile the report. She, like other public health officials dedicated to improving the American diet, concedes that perhaps simply telling people to eat more vegetables isn’t working.

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The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has named Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington to guide the incorporation of Anglican groups into the Catholic Church in the United States.

In this position, he is a delegate of the congregation and heads the U.S. bishops’ ad hoc committee charged with assisting CDF in implementing the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus. Pope Benedict XVI issued the document in November 2009 to provide for establishing personal ordinariates for Anglican groups who seek to enter corporately into full communion with the Catholic Church.

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Update: Rocco has important comments on this:

Intriguingly, it bears noting that Rome’s choice of its US delegate has fallen to a prelate: 1. whose mentor, the late Cardinal John Wright, bore a particularly concerted devotion to the now-Blessed John Henry Newman… and 2. who is particularly well known to the most prominent leader of US Anglicanism’s breakaway traditional faction.

Bishop of his native Pittsburgh until his DC transfer in 2006, Wuerl shares warm ties with the Steel City’s former Episcopal bishop, Robert Duncan, who led much of his flock out of the Anglican Communion’s traditional American province last year to become the founding head of a parallel group, the Anglican Church in North America. (Duncan was accordingly deposed as a cleric of the Episcopal church.)

What’s more, after the 2003 consecration of New Hampshire’s Gene Robinson as the Communion’s first openly-gay hierarch — the watershed moment in Anglicanism’s long-simmering divide over hot-button doctrinal and moral questions — the roots for what’s become the ACNA were laid at a summit in Plano, Texas, which drew an eyebrow-raising letter from a lone ecumenical representative pledging his “heartfelt prayers” for the gathering as he observed that “significance of your meeting is [being] sensed far beyond” the South, and even beyond the walls of the Anglican Communion.