Committee members continued to meet on Capitol Hill to present legislation that could be voted on by the Congress to cut $1,200bn from the budget over 10 years.
But both sides had already begun to blame each other, with Republicans resisting tax rises in any form and Democrats demanding extra revenues be balanced against spending cuts on the grounds of fairness.
This article put me in an awkward position. Because the article is poor and misleading, I do not want to post it. However because I have an Episcopal/Anglican related site and a contextual site, and I am located in the area where this is the local paper which comes to the end of our driveway daily, I feel I have no choice. Once again I trust readers to be discerning and thorough–KSH.
I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.
At five Bon Secours Health System hospitals on the East Coast, giving fewer blood transfusions during heart surgeries has had some counterintuitive results: Not only did costs fall, but care improved, officials say.
“People think transfusions are good, but ”¦ the higher rate of transfusions that people get, that’s associated with a longer hospital stay and a higher death rate,” chief medical officer Marlon Priest says.
Bon Secours’ campaign to reduce blood transfusions during heart bypass and valve replacement surgeries is part of a growing national trend to standardize care and rein in differences in how doctors and hospitals practice medicine.
Here is the opinion–read it all if you so desire (warning: long pdf).
After Sunday worship in recent months, Mormon bishops around the country gathered their congregations for an unusual PowerPoint presentation to unveil the church’s latest strategy for overcoming what it calls its “perception problem.”
Top Mormon leaders had hired two big-name advertising agencies in 2009, Ogilvy & Mather and Hall & Partners, to find out what Americans think of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Using focus groups and surveys, they found that Americans who had any opinion at all used adjectives that were downright negative: “secretive,” “cultish,” “sexist,” “controlling,” “pushy,” “anti-gay.”
On seeing these results, some of those watching the presentation booed while others laughed, according to people at the meetings. But then they were told that the church was ready with a response: a multimillion-dollar television, billboard and Internet advertising campaign that uses the tagline, “I’m a Mormon.” The campaign, which began last year but was recently extended to 21 media markets, features the personal stories of members who defy stereotyping, including a Hawaiian longboard surfing champion, a fashion designer and single father in New York City and a Haitian-American woman who is mayor of a small Utah city.
The Council of General Synod (CoGS) has approved a balanced 2012 budget for the national church of $12.698 million.
At its Nov. 18-20 meeting here, a balanced budget was also forecast for 2013 with “no further staffing cuts” before 2016.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that declining revenues coupled with cost-push inflation could mean that General Synod will once again face a deficit budget in 2014. This deficit could balloon to $1 million by 2016, according to a report submitted to CoGS by the church’s Financial Management Committee (FMC).
This morning, I invite you once again to rejoice with me. One hundred and fifty years ago the cross of Christ was raised in your country, and the Gospel was proclaimed for the first time. Today, we give thanks to God for the work accomplished by the missionaries, by the “apostolic workers” who first came from among you or from distant lands, bishops, priests, men and women religious, catechists, all those who, both yesterday and today, enabled the growth of the faith in Jesus Christ on the African continent. I honour here the memory of the venerable Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, an example of faith and of wisdom for Benin and for the entire African continent.
Dear brothers and sisters, everyone who has received this marvellous gift of faith, this gift of an encounter with the risen Lord, feels in turn the need to proclaim it to others. The Church exists to proclaim this Good News! And this duty is always urgent! After 150 years, many are those who have not heard the message of salvation in Christ! Many, too, are those who are hesitant to open their hearts to the word of God! Many are those whose faith is weak, whose way of thinking, habits and lifestyle do not know the reality of the Gospel, and who think that seeking selfish satisfaction, easy gain or power is the ultimate goal of human life. With enthusiasm, be ardent witnesses of the faith which you have received! Make the loving face of the Saviour shine in every place, in particular before the young, who search for reasons to live and hope in a difficult world!
The Church in Benin has received much from her missionaries: she must in turn carry this message of hope to people who do not know or who no longer know the Lord Jesus.
The impact on family finances has been direct and dismaying: In 2003, 14 percent of the average Missouri worker’s median household income went to cover premium costs for health insurance through her employer. By 2010, that household was paying 19.6 percent of its income for health insurance.
The more of a family’s income that’s spent on health insurance costs, the less there is to pay for housing expenses, utilities, transportation, college education for children and savings for emergencies and retirement. Instead of looking toward for the future, families find themselves scrambling to cover the rising expenses of the present.
A new Barna Group study illustrates that no single Christian leader captures the attention of the nation’s population. When asked to identify the single most influential Christian leader in the U.S. today, two out of every five Americans (41%) are unable to think of anyone who would meet that description.
Billy Graham is the name mentioned most often in response to the unaided survey question (a measure often described as “top-of-mind” awareness). One out of five Americans names the octogenarian evangelist, with 19% of adult residents identifying Mr. Graham as the nation’s most influential Christian leader.
Half as many adults (9%) believe “the Pope” or Pope Benedict to be the most significant Christian leader in the nation. Nearly the same proportion (8%) considers President Barack Obama to hold this prominent role.
The Obama administration on Monday will name Iran, including its central bank, as a territory of “primary money laundering concern,” say senior U.S. officials, in an effort to further pressure Tehran after recent disclosures about its alleged role in terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation.
The U.S. Treasury Department won’t formally sanction Iran’s central bank, Bank Markazi, as many Republican and Democratic lawmakers are demanding.
But U.S. officials said this new action would serve as a warning to governments and businesses in Europe, Asia and Latin America to wind down their ties to Bank Markazi and their purchases of Iranian crude oil, as even tougher actions likely will be coming down the road.
The Roman Catholic Church is about to buy a beacon of Protestant televangelism.
The Crystal Cathedral, a temple of glass in Garden Grove, Calif., will be sold to the Catholic Church for $57 million ”” a decision that left some congregants furious and their future up in the air.
When the Crystal Cathedral declared bankruptcy last year, it soon became clear that the legendary building would have to be sold. There were several offers, but in the end, the church’s board favored the Catholic diocese in Orange County.
Sheila Schuller Coleman, the cathedral’s pastor, said in a videotaped message that it was the best way to save the church.
In recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.
How do we know? Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., conducts exams as part of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests 15-year-olds in the world’s leading industrialized nations on their reading comprehension and ability to use what they’ve learned in math and science to solve real problems ”” the most important skills for succeeding in college and life. America’s 15-year-olds have not been distinguishing themselves in the PISA exams compared with students in Singapore, Finland and Shanghai.
When the tech firm Yipit moved last month from General Assembly, a communal office campus on 20th Street and Broadway, to its own loft space on 18th Street and Fifth Avenue, its 14 employees simply grabbed their coffee cups and MacBook Airs and did the job on foot.
Arriving at their new home, they milled about, admiring the water-cooler, and the breath mints in the bathroom, and then got down to work, requiring no more than a power source and a pass code for the Wi-Fi. By the time the two guys from Moishe’s Moving Company arrived with a half-dozen boxes of office sundries, Yipit was back in business. There had already been a staff meeting, conducted while a handyman knelt in the rec room setting up a Ping-Pong table. All told, the move took about 10 minutes.
With a recent $6 million Series-B (or second round) financing deal, and plans to double its workforce in a year, Yipit sits in the mid-to-low range of New York’s thriving tech spectrum, below the behemoths, like AOL and Twitter, and the happily mid-sized, like Foursquare and Gilt Groupe, but above the sort of start-ups that had been their neighbors at General Assembly’s shared tables.
In a radical rethinking of what it means to go to school, states and districts nationwide are launching online public schools that let students from kindergarten to 12th grade take some””or all””of their classes from their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. Other states and districts are bringing students into brick-and-mortar schools for instruction that is largely computer-based and self-directed.
Journal Community
In just the past few months, Virginia has authorized 13 new online schools. Florida began requiring all public-high-school students to take at least one class online, partly to prepare them for college cybercourses. Idaho soon will require two. In Georgia, a new app lets high-school students take full course loads on their iPhones and BlackBerrys. Thirty states now let students take all of their courses online.
Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools, up 40% in the last three years, according to Evergreen Education Group, a consulting firm that works with online schools.
Heavenly Father, who hast called us by thy grace to be a colony of heaven here on earth: Deepen within us, we beseech thee, a sense of our citizenship with the saints in glory; and grant that through all the days of our pilgrimage in this world we may humbly walk with thee in the way of holiness, and faithfully care for the needs of others, till we come to thy everlasting kingdom; through the mercy of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
–Frank Colquhoun (1909-1997)
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while you may have to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold which though perishable is tested by fire, may redound to praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Without having seen him you love him; though you do not now see him you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy. As the outcome of your faith you obtain the salvation of your souls.
–1 Peter 1:3-8
The defendant in the case, identified as Jose Pimentel, 27, had bought bomb-making materials and “began to build them,” said one person briefed on the case, who added that the Police Department had had the man under surveillance for about a year.
“The Police Department basically had an informant with this guy,” said a second law enforcement official familiar with the investigation. “The guy is sort of giving to the informant all of these material on bomb building and talking about building a bomb and supporting the mujahedeen by targeting ”” he’s kind of all over the place; sometimes it’s targeting servicemen and women returning from Afghanistan, sometimes it’s the police, sometimes its build it and test it, but it’s all over the place.”
ROBERT BENTLEY: My father never talked about it until he joined the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. We were in school. If we were studying World War II, you ask him a question about it, he said, read your history book. That was the only answer we got.
SWEENEY: I hear a lot of this from family members here, who say the survivors group gave their fathers and husbands a place where they could finally open up and begin to heal.
This group plans to continue to meet unofficially as the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors. Al Pomeroy is another of these sons. He says keeping the group going is a matter of respect.
Ms. [Michèle] George emphasized that from 2014 onward, General Synod needs to stabilize revenues. Currently proportional giving from dioceses makes up 67% of General Synod’s budget. This giving has been decreasing by 3% annually. If this trend continues, by 2014 COGS may once again face the reshaping of national programs.
Conceding that talks on a grand budget deal are near failure, Congressional leaders on Sunday pointed fingers at each other as they tried to deflect blame for their inability to figure out a way to lower the federal deficit without having to rely on automated cuts.
The testy exchanges ”” which dominated the Sunday talk shows ”” made clear that leaders in both parties now see the so-called sequester ”” a term meaning an automatic spending cut ”” as the most likely solution to reduce the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over 10 years, instead of a negotiated package of spending reductions and tax increases, something they have been unable to achieve over the last 10 weeks.
The Pope has recently issued an invitation to Anglicans to move into full communion with the See of Rome in the Ordinariate where it is possible to enjoy the “Anglican patrimony” as full members of the Roman Catholic Church. Three priests in the Diocese have taken this step. They have followed their consciences.
For those who remain there can be no logic in the claim to be offering the Eucharist in communion with the Roman Church which the adoption of the new rites would imply. In these rites there is not only a prayer for the Pope but the expression of a communion with him; a communion Pope Benedict XVI would certainly repudiate.
At the same time rather than building on the hard won convergence of liturgical texts, the new Roman rite varies considerably from its predecessor and thus from Common Worship as well. The rationale for the changes is that the revised texts represent a more faithful translation of the Latin originals and are a return to more traditional language.
[KIM] LAWTON: Father James Martin says humor is an underappreciated value in the spiritual life. Martin has written a new book called Between Heaven and Mirth. He says humor, laughter and joy are essential elements of spiritual health.
[THE REV. JAMES] MARTIN [SJ]: If you’re not finding joy in your faith, there’s something wrong with the way you are looking at your faith. And humor keeps us human, basically, brings us down to earth and reminds us that we’re not God.
LAWTON: Martin says all too often, joy has a “disreputable reputation” in religious circles.
MARTIN (in speech): Have you ever been to Mass where the priest says (in boring voice) “And so we join with choirs of angels and their unending hymn of praise, holy, holy, holy Lord?” And you think, if that’s the way the choirs of angels are singing their praise we are in big trouble. (laughter)
Thousands of Egyptian protesters have re-occupied Tahrir Square in the capital, Cairo, after a violent attempt by troops and police to evict them.
They returned less than an hour after the assault, chanting against Egypt’s ruling military council.
Demonstrators earlier fled as security forces fired tear gas and beat them with truncheons. At least four people have died since Saturday, reports say.
Prospects for better understanding between Anglicans and Roman Catholics in Canada may not seem as bright in some ways as they did 40 years ago, leaders of the two communions implied Nov. 13 at a worship service at St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal.
But the liturgy during a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Anglican-Roman Catholic (ARC) Dialogue of Canada expressed a commitment to press ahead, with gratitude.
“Genuine faith is more than assent: it is expressed in action,” said one of the texts read by a “lector” near the close of the bilingual gathering, attended by a few hundred people””nowhere near the capacity of the Basilica Church of Oratory. About five Anglican and 10 Roman Catholic bishops from different parts of Canada attended the service.
The Anglican Church has declared a seven-day fasting and prayers for Nigeria and its leadership, Primate of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), Most Rev. Nicholas Okoh, has said.
Okoh disclosed this at the 2011 Carnival for Christ, a gathering of all Anglicans in the diocese of Abuja.
He said that the prayers and fasting would begin from Nov. 28 to Dec. 3 and that the prayers would be directed at God’s intervention for peace to return to the country.
The Bishop of South Carolina, the Rt Revd Mark Lawrence, is curÂrently under investigation by the disciplinary board of the national Church on charges of having “abÂandoned” the Episcopal Church (News, 14 October). He is charged with a variety of omissions and commissions, includÂing failure to take legal action against a parish in his diocese which had realigned itself…
The Church’s crusade against conservative disÂsenters is pointless, wasteful, and self-destructive. And, although Dr Jefferts Schori has defended her actions as necessary to protect the Church’s assets, it is hard to understand what material benefits the Church’s programme could reasonably achieve. If the Episcopal Church retains the properties of departing congregations, it will be stuck with church buildings that the few (if any) remaining loyalists cannot afford to maintain. In the best-case scenario, it may be able to offset the cost of litigaÂtion by selling them for use as mosques or saloons.
The Episcopal Church has plunged into a maelstrom of institutional turmoil and litigation, alienating some of its most committed constituÂents. Representing less than one per cent of the American population, it has not affected the atÂtitudes of the general public, or benefited gay men and women, who are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. And it has not impressed the secular élite, who are as contemptuous of the Episcopal Church, for all its political correctness, as they are of all Christian groups, whose members they regard as superstitious ignoramuses.
In what has become a pre-Thanksgiving tradition in the Charleston area, thousands came together for the annual “Feeding the Multitude” event to share fellowship and their cultures on Johns Island on Saturday.
Nearly 1,000 volunteers from more than 30 churches on Johns and Wadmalaw islands pulled together this week to provide a free Thanksgiving-style feast for nearly 2,000 in the fourth annual event at St. John’s Parish (Episcopal) Church. Volunteers also took meals to 200 people who are unable to leave homes and leftovers to Crisis Ministries.
The Church can not keep this Word of God to herself; hers is the vocation to announce it to the world. This Jubilee Year should be a privileged occasion for the Church in Benin to give renewed vigour to her missionary consciousness. Apostolic zeal, which should animate all the faithful, is a direct result of their baptism, and they cannot shirk their responsibility to profess their faith in Christ and his Gospel wherever they find themselves, and in their daily lives. Bishops and priests, for their part, are called to revive this awareness within families, in parishes, in communities and in the different ecclesial movements. I would like once more to highlight the admirable and essential role played by catechists in the missionary activities of your dioceses. On the other hand, as I emphasized in the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini, “In no way can the Church restrict her pastoral work to the ”˜ordinary maintenance’ of those who already know the Gospel of Christ. Missionary outreach is a clear sign of the maturity of an ecclesial community” (No. 95). The Church, therefore, must reach out to everyone. I encourage you to persevere in your efforts to share missionary personnel with those dioceses experiencing a shortage, whether in your own country, in other African nations or in distant continents. Do not be afraid to call forth missionary vocations among the priests, religious and the laity!
So that the world may believe this Word which the Church proclaims, it is indispensible that Christ’s disciples be united among themselves (cf. Jn 17: 21). As leaders and pastors of your people, you are called to have a lively consciousness of the sacramental fraternity which unites you, and of the unique mission which has been entrusted to you, so that you may be effective signs and promoters of unity within your dioceses.
Bishops across the country, backed by Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, have condemned the coalition government’s controversial welfare reforms, which they say risk pushing thousands of children into poverty and homelessness.
Eighteen Church of England bishops, backed by Williams and the archbishop of York, John Sentamu, are demanding that ministers rewrite their flagship plan to impose a £500-a-week benefit cap on families.
Their letter to the Observer begins this way:
The introduction of a cap on benefits, as suggested in the Welfare Reform Bill, could push some of the most vulnerable children in the country into severe poverty. While 70,000 adults are likely to be affected by the cap, the Children’s Society has found that it is going to cut support for an estimated 210,000 children, leaving as many as 80,000 homeless. The Church of England has a commitment and moral obligation to speak up for those who have no voice. As such, we feel compelled to speak for children who might be faced with severe poverty and potentially homelessness, as a result of the choices or circumstances of their parents. Such an impact is profoundly unjust.