A priest who heads a branch of the Catholic church has told members of an Anglo-Catholic congregation they face an individual choice whether to defect.

Father Keith Newton, a former Anglican bishop who was ordained as a Catholic priest last month to head the Ordinariate, today addressed worshippers from St James the Great, Darlington, about plans to convert.

Its priest Father Ian Grieves has already publicly declared plans to leave the Anglo-Catholic church to join the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.

He expected “most” of the congregation would support the plans. However, the future of the church and its buildings remains unsure.

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An “Ordinariate of Postulants” has been set up by the diocese of Peru in the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone to host a growing number of Roman Catholic priests who are keen to join the Anglican Church.

In contrast to the situa­tion in England, where three former bishops recently joined the Ordinariate for former Anglicans established by Rome, clerics are making the reverse journey in South America.
The Bishop of Peru, the Rt Revd William God­frey, said that, so far, about ten RC priests had joined the new group to explore the possibility of switching denominations. Some may bring con­gregations with them.

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Many Christian leaders believe that the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic political group banned in Egypt, will grow in political power with Mubarak’s ouster. The brotherhood maintains strong support among some Egyptians. Religious-freedom analysts believe the leaders of the brotherhood, famous for the slogan “Islam is the solution,” could very well usher in repression of all minority religious groups. Christians are Egypt’s largest minority, representing 6 to 10 percent of Egypt’s 85 million people. About 90 percent of all Christians in Egypt are Orthodox.

But while most Egyptian Muslims are Sunni, like the brotherhood, they are not as fundamentalist as it is. One Coptic Orthodox businessman based in Cairo told CT that he was surprised that Christians’ property was not targeted during the growing protests. “I thought that the first thing to be attacked [by protestors] would be the churches,” he said.

“It wasn’t like that. In the neighborhood of my parents, there are many mosques and churches. No single mosque has announced anything against us Christians. Very soon, a big change will happen. Egypt has been like someone sleeping. Now, wake up! Do something better.”

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In January it was revealed up to 300 Essex Anglicans and seven vicars could join the Ordinariate set up by Pope Benedict XVI for disaffected clergy.

Father Richard Tillbrook of St Barnabus Church in Colchester said he had thought long and hard about the offer.

“I have made my decision to stay because I love the Church of England,” he said.

“I pray the new synod may well understand more fully the need to have provision within the Church of England for our sacramental surety and what it’s all about.”

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Bishop Arthur Kennedy has been appointed by the Vatican to participate in an ecumenical dialogue with the Anglican Communion this spring.

Bishop Kennedy, who is the rector of St. John’s Seminary, has been named by Pope Benedict XVI to participate in the next phase of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), the Catholic Church’s official dialogue with the Anglican Communion.

He has previously served as the executive director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

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Airman [Anthony] Mena died instead in his Albuquerque apartment, on July 21, 2009, five months after leaving the Air Force on a medical discharge. A toxicologist found eight prescription medications in his blood, including three antidepressants, a sedative, a sleeping pill and two potent painkillers.

Yet his death was no suicide, the medical examiner concluded. What killed Airman Mena was not an overdose of any one drug, but the interaction of many. He was 23.

After a decade of treating thousands of wounded troops, the military’s medical system is awash in prescription drugs ”” and the results have sometimes been deadly.

By some estimates, well over 300,000 troops have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan with P.T.S.D., depression, traumatic brain injury or some combination of those. The Pentagon has looked to pharmacology to treat those complex problems, following the lead of civilian medicine. As a result, psychiatric drugs have been used more widely across the military than in any previous war.

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A quick survey of priests, ministers, rabbis, and one imam made clear that social media were made for religion, in which connection and community are key.

“I love Facebook,” says Pastor Andrena Ingram of St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in Mount Airy. “You just reach everybody and anybody.” Like many religious congregations, St. Michael’s has a robust website. “When people come to visit us from out of town, very often it’s because they saw the website.”

On Facebook, Ingram posts news and announcements, and coordinates a youth group. She also runs a separate Facebook page “to minister to those both infected and affected with HIV,” connecting her with people as far away as Africa.

“It’s like a cyber-pastorship,” she says.

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Matt Alexander and his friend Ed O’Bryan, a Charleston doctor, were chatting at Chick-fil-A following an afternoon of surfing at Folly Beach in the summer of 2008 when — for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to them — the conversation turned from waves to global medical missions.

Alexander, now 29, and O’Bryan, 32, discussed their shared enthusiasm for caring for patients in parts of the world with desperate shortages of health professionals. They griped that many missions treat people on a limited-time-only basis.

The duo was still sandy-footed and salty-haired when they hatched the idea for Palmetto Medical Initiative, a Charleston nonprofit group that aims to bring high-quality health care to impoverished corners of the world.

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The mad housewife is a reliable comic icon, her trials trivialized as boredom and cabin fever. It’s hard for most people to accept that mothers ”” even maybe their own mothers! ”” can be unloving, and sometimes unsafe. Which helps explain why killings like those ascribed to Ms. Schenecker, among some 200 American mothers who kill their children every year, always seem so surprising.

It’s easy to write these cases off as freak results of severe mental illness. But most of these women’s stories also include a lot of ordinary stress and social isolation, the fallout from divorce and the dispersal of extended families. Increasingly cut off from real-time conversations, mad housewives find solace in e-communities, where “life” is so much more soothing and predictable than dealing with teenagers. While news reports say Ms. Schenecker was seeking help from real-life counselors in the weeks before the killings, her Facebook page, with its pretty family photographs and homilies, is a portrait of polished denial.

Amid the debate about whether social networks are depriving us of healthier, non-virtual encounters, a University of Texas study last fall claimed that Facebook was not supplanting such interactions. Perhaps that’s true, but one thing I’m sure of, from my own lucky odyssey, is that all the poking and tagging in the world can’t compete with a pair of real-time eyes when it comes to noticing that someone needs more help than she’s getting.

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[James] Eunice, a 17-year-old Valdosta native who drowned while duck hunting last month at Ocean Pond in Lake Park, has been posthumously named to the University of Georgia’s football roster by head coach Mark Richt.

During Eunice’s funeral last Saturday, Jay Rome and Malcolm Mitchell, who played football with Eunice at Valdosta High and have signed letters of intent to play for Georgia, came to the podium with a box. A letter that Richt had written to the Eunice family was read to the mourners in attendance.

At the end of the letter, Richt wrote, “Oh yeah, James made the team.”

Then Rome and Mitchell took an official Georgia jersey out of the box. On the jersey were Eunice’s last name and the No. 23 he had worn at Valdosta.

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From this first principle of absolute submission to the supreme authority of the revealed word of God, must proceed another principle, by which our ministrations, like our Church, should be characterized. It is the maintenance and presentation of the obvious doctrine of the Scriptures. My brethren, we assume without hesitation that there is such an obvious doctrine. We assume that it is the general doctrine which, in its simplest form, is expressed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, and in its more expanded outline spreads itself through our liturgy, articles and offices. We assume it, because, if the Bible be not meant to be less intelligible than the common compositions of upright men, there must be a meaning which shall be obvious; because amongst twenty readers at this day, nineteen are substantially agreed in the general interpretation; and because this interpretation has been essentially the same through all the Christian ages, wherever there has been freedom to read and to interpret.

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O God, fountain of love, pour thy love into our souls, that we may love those whom thou lovest with the love thou givest us, and think and speak of them tenderly, meekly, lovingly; and so loving our brethren and sisters for thy sake, may grow in thy love, and dwelling in love may dwell in thee; for Jesus Christ’s sake.

–Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882)

Upon your walls, O Jerusalem, I have set watchmen; all the day and all the night they shall never be silent. You who put the LORD in remembrance, take no rest, and give him no rest until he establishes Jerusalem and makes it a praise in the earth.

–Isaiah 62:6-7

Wonderful stuff-watch/listen to it all.

Update: There is a great picture there also.

Is this the greatest personal honor in his life?….

The tentativeness of the question elicited the familiar whooping roar of laughter occasionally emitted by this publicly serious man.

“When he was about 77, my father and I were talking,” Russell answered. “And he said: ”˜You know, you’re all grown up now, and I want to tell you something. You know, I am very proud of the way you turned out as my son, and I’m proud of you as a father.’

“My father is my hero, O.K., and I cannot perceive of anything topping that,” Russell continued, his voice becoming husky….

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The Rev. George D. Young, III, was elected on Saturday, Feb. 12 as fourth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee, pending the required consents from a majority of bishops with jurisdiction and standing committees of the Episcopal Church.

Young, 55, rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Fernandina Beach, Florida, was elected on the eighth ballot out of a field of five nominees. He received 107 votes of 142 cast in the lay order and 59 of 84 cast in the clergy order. An election on that ballot required 95 in the lay order and 56 in the clergy order.

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The Ordinariate Portal, the self described “one-stop site for news of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham” reported the good news on Friday of the ordination to the Order of Deacon of the highly respected former Anglican Bishop Edwin Barnes.

In former Bishop Barnes own words, “Today was very good. Bishop Crispian of Portmouth made us very welcome, and although there was only a handful of us in his private chapel for my ordination to the diaconate, we had some good music. For Our Lady of Lourdes, we’d chosen a bit of the Anglican Patrimony. We sang as an introit: Bishop Ken’s “Her Virgin Eyes saw God Incarnate born”, to Lawes’ tune ‘Farley Castle’. I was not the solitary deacon on parade; Stephen (good name for a Deacon) Morgan, who is finance secretary to the Diocese, propped me up and ensured I did not fall over my feet…”

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With more than 1,100 stores and $17.8 billion in total revenue in 2010, Penney is certainly a major player in American retailing. But Google’s stated goal is to sift through every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant Web sites.

Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases?

The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

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In a San Antonio chapel last August, after reciting their wedding vows and exchanging their rings, Sally and Mark Austin prepared to receive communion for the first time as husband and wife. Just before they did, their minister asked them to sign a document. It was a ketubah, a traditional Jewish marriage contract.

The Austins’ was not an interfaith marriage. Nor was their ceremony some sort of multicultural mashup. Both Sally and Mark are evangelical Christians, members of Oak Hills Church, a nationally known megachurch. They were using the ketubah as a way of affirming the Jewish roots of their faith.

In so doing, the Austins are part of a growing phenomenon of non-Jews incorporating the ketubah, a document with millennia-old origins and a rich artistic history, into their weddings. Mrs. Austin, in fact, first learned about the ketubah from her older sister, also an evangelical Christian, who had been married five years earlier with not only a ketubah but the Judaic wedding canopy, the huppah.

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Given these shortcomings, it’s hard to see how the Dublin document advances even “honest conversation,” much less “our common life in Christ” (46-47). We will all have to do better.

1. With a full 15 of their membership missing in action, many for reasons of conscience, that the Dublin primates saw fit to produce any document at all on “the purpose and scope of the Primates’ Meeting” appears presumptuous and imprudent. In the current climate of broken trust, it was bound to be approached suspiciously. For what commonly accepted criteria of Christian decision-making were used, shorn of party prejudice? And if it is pointed out that the document lacks theological conviction as well as continuity with the recent past, this only creates other problems. Why publish such a thing, when the chances are small that the text, even as a non-committal working document, will be received by a future, restored Primates’ Meeting?

2. “No meeting can allow itself to be shaped wholly by the people who are not there,” said Archbishop Williams afterward, a sound general principle. Given the deep divisions within Anglicanism, however, which the several instruments of the Communion have proven increasingly unable even to address directly, much less resolve, it may have been better to call off the Dublin meeting altogether, as Canterbury reportedly contemplated at one point: refuse to press on with business as usual, in favor of an intervention or course correction. One hears an impatience in the archbishop’s statement that “two thirds of the Communion at least wish to meet and wish to continue the conversations they have begun.” Who will take responsibility for the whole by speaking publicly and candidly about the way forward and how we will get there? The archbishop himself has done so before and must do so again, as a “focus and means of unity” for the Communion (Anglican Covenant, 3.1.4)….

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Bishop [Thomas] Tobin has found strong support for his position on same-sex marriage in Episcopal Bishop Geralyn Wolf and in Imam Farid Ansari, of the Muslim America Dawah Center of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island Council for Muslim Advancement.

“As Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Rhode Island, I firmly support the traditional definition of marriage as the union between one male and one female,” Bishop Wolf said in a statement released to Rhode Island Catholic in January. “I believe that Holy Matrimony is a sacred religious rite, whose definition should not be re-interpreted by legislation or civil courts.”

According to a statement released by the Media Committee of the Rhode Island for Muslim Advancement, the Islamic community of Rhode Island “affirms the standards set forth in the Torah, Gospel and Holy Qur’an on the issue of same-sex relationships and marriage.”

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Not only is political “moderation” an ill-­defined concept, but the confusion between religious and political spheres makes analysis even more problematic. People are quick, far too quick, to assume that because a woman or a man is religiously “liberal” with regard to Islamic practices such as wearing the hijab or drinking alcohol, for instance, she or he will hold equally “liberal” political views. In my ­experience, nothing could be further from the truth. There are innumerable cases of political personalities, intellectuals and civil society activists who are indeed Muslims with liberal views and practices but who publicly support the most hardline dictatorial regimes and/or the most violent resistance groups everywhere from Algeria to France. So moderation in religion cannot be correlated with its supposed political equivalent. In the western-generated analysis, however, there is a tendency to conflate these categories.

Relations with the “west” offer another interesting standard by which to evaluate the political and religious stances of contemporary Muslims. The violent extremist groups view their relations with the west only in terms of complete opposition and enmity, couched in religious, political, cultural and economic ­conceptual language. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims – particularly western Muslims – recognise the achievements of western societies, while at the same time claiming the right to determine for themselves the parameters of their identity, the nature and extent of their religious practices, and their spiritual and moral convictions. Seen from this perspective, criticism and rejection of the west are linked only to a refusal to accept political, economic or cultural domination.

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By sheer happenstance, I happen to have caught this live this morning.What an amazing goal–KSH.

At St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, the staff recycles 30 different types of trash. They got rid of the old Coke machine, installed motion-sensor lights that run on solar power and have stacked quite the compost pile.

St. Gregory’s has gone green, and the moves aren’t just about saving the planet – they’re saving the congregation money, too.

The church partnered with Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, a nonprofit that works with churches, synagogues and all bodies of faith to make them more environmentally friendly. The group’s reach soon may grasp more Athens churches – Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Baptist and nondenominational clergy took in a GIPL presentation last week.

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What happened in Egypt yesterday will change not only this 80 million-strong nation; it will change politics throughout the Arab world. Not all the dominoes will fall. But many governments will now scramble to avoid the same conditions that engendered revolution. So they should. Democracy is in a lamentable state in the Middle East. Rulers routinely abuse rights, flout the public will and deny their people a future. They must learn that only good government can bring happiness and stability. Egypt has been both a warning and an inspiration.

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The fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak marks a historic shift in the Middle East, away from the power structure America has leaned on for the past three decades and toward a new one still being shaped by a demographic and technological wave that the U.S. and its allies haven’t learned to control.

America’s future standing in the region now depends heavily on whether Washington’s other friends, especially those in the Persian Gulf, are more adroit than Mr. Mubarak at getting ahead of that wave.

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One revolution ended Friday. Another may soon begin.

In a moment that may prove as decisive to the Middle East as the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, 18 days of protest hurtled Egypt once again to the forefront of politics in the Middle East. In the uprising’s ambition, young protesters, savvy with technology and more organized than their rulers, began to rewrite the formula that has underpinned an American-backed order: the nation in the service of a strongman.

The ecstatic moments of triumph in Tahrir Square seemed to wash away a lifetime of defeats and humiliations, invasions and occupations that, in the weeks before the revolution, had seemed to mark the bitterest time for both Egypt and the Arab world.

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God Almighty bless us with his Holy Spirit this day; guard us in our going out and coming in; keep us ever steadfast in his faith, free from sin and safe from danger; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

On the holy mount stands the city he founded; the LORD loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. Glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God.

–Psalm 87:1-3

Hosni Mubarak has stepped down as president of Egypt, after weeks of protest in Cairo and other cities

The news was greeted with a huge outburst of joy and celebration by thousands in Cairo’s Tahrir Square – the heart of the demonstrations.

Mr Mubarak ruled for 30 years, suppressing dissent and protest, and jailing opponents….

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