When legislation creating civil partnerships was passing through Parliament the government was at pains to give reassurances that these were distinct from marriage. They undoubtedly righted an injustice that many dependent couples, not married, could face great hardship when partners died or were ill. Yet because they were limited to same-sex partners, rather than maiden aunts and siblings, they were a nod in the direction of a quasi-homosexual marriage. This was confirmed later when a Home Office press release, announcing the date on which the legislation would become law, stated that wedding bells would be ringing for
same-sex couples.

And now by allowing religious elements to be incorporated into civil partnerships in contrast it is clear that the government is pushing these civil partnerships to their limits as a form of marriage between homosexuals. And there is absolutely no doubt that the remaining distinctions between civil partnerships and matrimony, despite the usual empty government reassurances, will be tested in the years ahead. Firstly, when the dust has settled a legal test case will be brought against a church which has opted out of allowing a gay couple to use their premises for a civil partnership.

But whether or not such a case wins or loses, the pressure is already building for gay civil marriage, which will eventually become gay religious marriage. And before we know it, what was permissive will become coercive and compulsory.

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Make sure to watch for the dancing creature and the banana!.

According to a 2006 Today’s Christian Woman article,1.5 percent of Americans engage in self-harming behavior. This jumps dramatically to 12 percent among college students (most self-injury begins in the teen years). Most self-harmers are female (60-70 percent), and many, although not all, struggle with eating disorders, too. I’ve not seen research on the incidence of self-harm among Christians compared with the general population, but my experience shows that this problem is far from rare within the church….

I’m not surprised that self-punishing behaviors occur among Christians. And this is not to blame the church. For legalism ”” and I would argue that this is what these behaviors are at their core ”” comes in guises both religious and secular. The desire to control the destiny of a few moments, if not our lives, is a fact of the human condition. But it is a fact that directly opposes the gospel of grace. Indeed, our vain attempts to mete out our own justice and punishments and thus save ourselves merely reflect the universal human desire to be our own God. For those who self-harm, the gospel comes as an invitation to trust in the One who has enacted perfect and complete justice before God on our behalf, through his body, so we don’t have to punish our own.

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If I tell Watson a joke, will it get it? Could it tell me one?
One of the things we programmed it to do was recognize what humans would consider puns. It looks for word associations, for synonymy, for “sounds like.” But does the computer appreciate the humor? No, it doesn’t.

So no chance Watson could be an artist or poet either?
Actually, it could be programmed to have those features. You could train Watson to recognize modern art or classical art, symmetry, shape and color. You could tell it, This is good art, this is bad art. But again, that’s all.

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Northern Rock is poised to launch a range of mortgages offering up to 90 per cent of a property’s value, marking the nationalised bank’s return to riskier lending three years after its collapse and government bail-out….

Northern Rock’s aggressive boom-time lending practices, including the Together mortgage that offered borrowers up to 125 per cent of their property value, caused one of the most high-profile failures of the financial crisis.

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This is an absolutely-must-read-it-all document.

Traditionalist Anglicans who remain in the Anglican Church rather than taking up Pope Benedict XVI’s offer of an Anglican ordinariate are wasting their time and spiritual energy clinging to a dangerous illusion, said the Vatican’s delegate for the Australian ordinariate.

Melbourne Auxiliary Bishop Peter Elliott, a former Anglican, urged Anglicans at a Feb. 26 festival in Perth to take up the pope’s offer of “peace.”

“I would caution people who still claim to be Anglo-Catholics and yet are holding back,” he told The Record, Catholic newspaper of the Archdiocese of Perth, Feb. 26. “I’d say ‘When are you going to face realities?’ because there’s no place for a classical Anglo-Catholic in the Anglican Communion anymore.”

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[The Rev. Erwin Barron, a college professor in San Francisco whose church credentials remain with the Presbytery of the Twin Cities [Minnesota] Area, faced a 2 1/2-hour trial before a presbytery panel of six at Oak Grove Presbyterian Church in Bloomington. After almost three hours of closed deliberations, the panel split 3-3. A two-thirds vote was required for conviction, which lawyers said could have led to defrockment.

“I’m relieved,” Barron said. “I wish it was more definitive. … The decision is not clear for the church.”

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Bigger fuel bills are making this winter harsher for many households. The Energy Information Administration estimates the average household in the Northeast will spend $2,431 on heating oil this winter, up 23.8% from last winter’s total. Businesses from airlines to chemical makers are also facing higher costs.

Most economists think the rise in fuel costs will deter output growth rather than boost inflation. That is because higher energy costs leave less money available to spend on other goods. Given the slack in labor markets and capacity, higher fuel costs won’t translate much into higher wages or prices that would push up core inflation.

The oil-related drag on output, however, means fewer jobs. And faster job growth was a key support for housing in 2011….

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The nearly instantaneous deployment of the police to prevent even notional gatherings in big cities the past two weeks is just one example of what Chinese officials call “stability maintenance.” This refers to a raft of policies and practices refined after “color revolutions” abroad and, at home, tens of thousands of demonstrations by workers and peasants, ethnic unrest, and the spread of mobile communications and broadband networking.

Chinese officials charged with ensuring security, lavishly financed and permitted to operate above the law, have remained perpetually on edge, employing state-of-the-art surveillance, technologically sophisticated censorship, new crime-fighting tools, as well as proactive efforts to resolve labor and land disputes, all to prevent any organized or sustained resistance to single-party rule.

“It is a comprehensive call to arms for the entire bureaucracy to promote social stability,” said Murray Scot Tanner, a China security analyst at C.N.A., a private research group in Alexandria, Va.

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The Vancouver-area Anglican diocese is trying to recoup more than $100,000 in court costs from a bitter dispute with conservative dissidents over four church properties.

The diocese, led by Bishop Michael Ingham, recently applied to the B.C. Appeal Court to retrieve a portion of the soaring court costs in a case rooted in a battle over same-sex blessings and how to interpret the Bible.

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The Maori call it upoko runaka, the farewell for the dead. In Christchurch yesterday, they said, it was also much more: a ritual to heal a broken city, and to reconnect its people with the earth that has so hurt them.

It began with local tribal chief Maurice Gray, in a black suit and holding a tokotoko, a staff carved with his family’s history that is symbolic of his authority as an elder.

He strode into an intersection lined with dignitaries and emergency workers and brandished the tokotoko at a small pile of broken masonry collected from shattered buildings in the heart of the city.

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An annual conference of Anglican bishops in Newcastle has been told the church is even more relevant during times of natural disasters.

The past few months has been described as an ‘onslaught of disaster’ with the Queensland floods, West Australian fires and New Zealand’s double tragedies of the Pike River mine disaster and Christchurch earthquake.

Newcastle Bishop, Brian Farran says in Brisbane, unaffected parishes were critical in providing support to those in the flood zone.

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The problem here is that this defence of the authority of human reason is ultimately circular and parasitical. It assumes and depends upon its conclusion. This philosophical defence of the validity of reason by reason is thus intrinsically self-referential. It cannot be sustained.

The rational defence of reason itself may amount to a demonstration of its internal consistency and coherence – but not of its truth. There is no reason why a flawed rationality will show up its own flaws. We are using a tool to judge its own reliability. We have convened a court, in which the accused and the judge are one and the same.

Reason needs to be calibrated by something external….

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Steven A. Cook:… Egyptians and foreign observers have taken to calling recent events in Egypt a “revolution,” but technically speaking it isn’t — at least not yet. Mubarak is gone, but his military remains in charge of the country, the proposed constitutional changes are limited, and much of the security apparatus and even the once-ruling National Democratic Party remain strong (at least outside of Cairo and Alexandria).

Now, the constitutional committee has sought to go beyond the five constitutional amendments and the deletion of one article to which the military is (and Mubarak was) committed. The committee has now put eight amendments on the table, including an explicit reference to writing a new constitution.

It’s important to remember that transitions to democracy are fraught and that revolutions rarely end the way that the people on the barricades hoped they would.

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Almighty God, whose servant Chad, for the peace of the Church, relinquished cheerfully the honors that had been thrust upon him, only to be rewarded with equal responsibility: Keep us, we pray thee, from thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, and ready at all times to give place to others, (in honor preferring one another,) that the cause of Christ may be advanced; in the name of him who washed his disciples’ feet, even the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

O God, heavenly Father, whose every motion towards us springs from thine inexhaustible love: Enable us, we humbly beseech thee, cheerfully to sacrifice ourselves for the well-being of those with whom we have to do, and also to love them with the tender love which thou hast for the world; that so though now we see thee darkly through the veil of our blindness, we with them may presently see thee in the fullness of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Euchologium Anglicanum

Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or’What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.

–Matthew 6:31-34

A ragtag army of opponents to Col. Moammar Gadhafi began moving west toward Tripoli from the east and the U.S. ordered two warships to the Mediterranean Sea, as the prospect of an extended war loomed over Libya.

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Peter John Gomes (rhymes with homes) was born in Boston on May 22, 1942, the only child of Peter Lobo and Orissa White Gomes. His father, born in the Cape Verde Islands off Africa’s west coast, was a cranberry bog worker. His mother was a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music. Peter grew up in Plymouth with literature, piano lessons and expectations that he would become a minister. He was active in the Baptist Church and preached his first sermon at 12.

He worked as a houseman to help pay for his education. After graduation from Plymouth High School in 1961, he attended Bates College in Lewiston, Me., a co-educational liberal arts school founded by abolitionists in 1855. He majored in history and received a bachelor’s degree in 1965, then earned a bachelor of divinity degree at Harvard in 1968 and was ordained a Baptist minister….

In clerical collar and vestments, he was a figure of homiletic power in the pulpit, hammering out the cadences in a rich baritone that The New Yorker called a blend of James Earl Jones and John Houseman. In class, he was a New England patrician: the broad shoulders, the high forehead and spectacles that tilted up when he held his head high, the watch-chain at the vest and a handkerchief fluffed at the breast pocket.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

For Janis Galvin fasting for Lent has long meant saying no to candy for the 40 days before Easter. But when the season begins this year on March 9, it’s apt to mean something more: walking when she’d rather drive, for instance, or turning the thermostat way down.

Galvin, an Episcopalian, will join with about 1,000 others who’ve signed up for the 2011 Ecumenical Lenten Carbon Fast, a daily regimen for reducing energy consumption and fighting global warming.

Lent is getting a makeover, especially in some Protestant traditions where it hasn’t always drawn strong interest. The carbon fast is one of several initiatives aimed at reinvigorating Lent by linking themes of fasting and abstention to wider social causes.

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Read it all. The penalty was definitely weak, but Chelsea did well to come back in the second half–KSH.

Southern Baptist bookstores have quietly suspended a four-year-old program that warned customers to read with “discernment” books by several up-and-coming authors whose books “could be considered inconsistent with historical evangelical theology.”

Chris Rodgers, the director of product standards and customer relations for Nashville-based LifeWay, said the warnings were discontinued because they were “irrelevant to our customers.”

“There was little to no interest in it,” Rodgers said. “No one asked about the authors.”

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Prescription for a long life: Work hard. Don’t retire early.

The idea that your job or your boss is leading you to an early grave is one of several myths debunked in an analysis of a 90-year study that followed 1,528 Americans. Among other myths: be optimistic, get married, go to church, eat broccoli and get a gym membership.

Researchers Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin report their conclusions in a new book, The Longevity Project. “Everybody has the ideas ”” don’t stress, don’t worry, don’t work so hard, retire and go play golf,” says Friedman, a psychology professor at University of California-Riverside. “We did not find these patterns to exist in people who thrived.”

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Lawmakers and governors in many states, faced with huge shortfalls in employee pension funds, are turning to a strategy that a lot of private companies adopted years ago: moving workers away from guaranteed pension plans and toward 401(k)-type retirement savings plans.

The efforts come as the governors of Wisconsin and Ohio, citing dire budget problems, are engaged in bitter showdowns with public-employee unions over wages, pensions and collective bargaining rights.

The new plans allow states to set a firm, upfront limit on the amount they will contribute and leave it up to the employee and the financial markets to make the money grow. In a traditional pension system, the employer promises a certain benefit, then must find a way to pay for it.

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The federal government isn’t simply bleeding money. Because of its addiction to red ink, it’s bleeding power, which is starting to flow away from the nation’s capital and out to the states. This is the little-recognized reality behind the remarkable political upheaval being seen in state capitals.

Republican governors such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Indiana’s Mitch Daniels are pursuing their own controversial fiscal policies out of what they consider financial necessity; they have budgets to balance, and little time and few options to do the job. But governors of both parties also have less reason to wait and hope for help from a federal government that, with overwhelming budget deficits, is losing its ability to offer financial goodies to the states.

For decades, the implicit deal between Washington and state capitals has been that the feds would offer chunks of cash, and in return would get commensurate influence over the states’ social policies. Now that flow of federal goodies has begun what figures to be a long-term decline, as the money Washington has available to pass around to the states is squeezed.

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A three-year dispute between the diocese of Ottawa and two historic churches that left the Anglican Church of Canada over the blessing of same-sex unions has ended. A negotiated settlement will divide assets between the two parties.

In 2008, the parishes of St. Alban the Martyr and St. George’s voted to join the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC), saying the Anglican Church of Canada “no longer adhered to the clear teaching of Scripture.”

As part of the agreement, the diocese will disestablish the parish of St. George’s and sell the property to ANiC. Once the sale is completed by March 1, the property will be renamed St. Peter & St. Paul’s Anglican Church.

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After months of negotiation, two Ottawa parishes of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC) ”“ St Alban’s the Martyr and St George’s ”“ have reached a negotiated settlement with the Anglican Church of Canada’s Diocese of Ottawa.

The settlement will be effective 1 July 2011 and will entail:
Ӣ both congregations changing their church names
”¢ the people of St George’s retaining their church building in the heart of Ottawa
”¢ the people of St Alban’s relinquishing their building
Ӣ a further undisclosed division of assets between the parishes and the diocese.

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After months of negotiations, the Diocese of Ottawa has reached an agreement with the leaders of two congregations that have left the Anglican Church of Canada. The agreement was approved by Diocesan Council on January 16 and recently by the vestries of the two congregations.

In 2008, clergy and congregations in the historic churches of St. Alban’s and St. George’s in downtown Ottawa voted to join the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC) because of their opposition to the direction the Diocese and national church were taking, especially in regard to the blessing of same-sex civil unions.

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