Wow.

A thirteen hour time difference, over 9,000 miles, and the International dateline separate St. Vincent’s Cathedral in Texas from a new church plant in Cambodia’s province of Pursat.

That kind of distance might make a direct partnership between Cambodia and Texas seem nearly inconceivable, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact, St. Vincent’s put up half the funds necessary to make the new church plant a reality and has sent teams over to work directly on the project.

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O God, the glory of thy saints, who being above all, and through all, and in all, dost yet accept the prayer of the contrite: Grant that I, being hallowed in mind, fervent in spirit, and chaste in body, may offer to thee the pure sacrifice of a heart uplifted in thy praise, and a life devoted to thy service; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do. Then the word of the LORD came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? says the LORD. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

–Jeremiah 18:1-6

The Libyan rebel commander, Gen Abdul Fattah Younis, has accused Nato of standing idly by while pro-Gaddafi forces kill people in Misrata.

If Nato waited another week to intervene, the besieged city’s people faced extermination, he told reporters in the de facto rebel capital Benghazi.

A Nato-led coalition mandated by the UN to protect civilians is enforcing a no-fly zone and attacking ground targets.

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–Over half of Episcopal congregations (52.4%) are small, family-sized congregations where average worship attendance is 70 persons or less (2009 Parochial Report data). Pastoral-sized congregations make up the next largest proportion of parishes and missions (28.6%). Corporate-sized congregations with 351 or more in worship represent only 3.3% of Episcopal congregations.

–The median Episcopal parish had 66 persons at Sunday worship in 2009 according to the annual Parochial Report””down from 72 in 2006 and 77 in 2003.

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Bishop M. Thomas Shaw of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and several other clergy yesterday called on Massachusetts lawmakers to pass transgender-rights legislation and asked religious communities to throw their support behind the bill.

Shaw said that virtually all transgender people have experienced discrimination or harassment and about one-quarter have been fired from their jobs.

“Supporting this legislation, and supporting transgender people in the life of the church and in secular society really has to do with the living out of my baptismal covenant,’’ he said.

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

Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.

So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.

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One of the great Canadian Anglican leaders of the last generation–KSH.

Church of England and Roman Catholic bishops are confused about the Big Society, claimed Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols during a visit to Southwark on Monday.

The Roman Catholic primate was speaking in Southwark’s St George’s Cathedral after the Anglican and Roman Catholic diocesan bishops of England had spent Monday meeting together at the Amigo Hall.

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Counterterrorism operations in Yemen have ground to a halt, allowing Al Qaeda’s deadliest branch outside of Pakistan to operate more freely inside the country and to increase plotting for possible attacks against Europe and the United States, American diplomats, intelligence analysts and counterterrorism officials say.

In the political tumult surrounding Yemen’s embattled president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, many Yemeni troops have abandoned their posts or have been summoned to the capital, Sana, to help support the tottering government, the officials said. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group’s affiliate, has stepped in to fill this power vacuum, and Yemeni security forces have come under increased attacks in recent weeks.

A small but steadily growing stream of Qaeda fighters and lower-level commanders from other parts of the world, including Pakistan, are making their way to Yemen to join the fight there, although American intelligence officials are divided on whether the political crisis in Yemen is drawing more insurgents than would be traveling there under normal conditions.

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Sexual, physical and emotional abuse not only devastates the victims but damages God’s mission, according to the spokesman of an Anglican network working to protect the vulnerable.

As well as being chair of the Professional Standards Commission of the Anglican Church of Australia, Garth Blake is a founding member of the Anglican Communion Safe Church Consultation. This is an informal network of Communion members working to prevent abuse in churches and their surrounding communities.

“Some Anglican Provinces have seen highly publicised lapses in behaviour by some clergy and church workers with tragic consequences for those who have been abused”, he said. “Our growing international group is committed to the physical, emotional and spiritual welfare and safety of all people involved in churches throughout the Anglican Communion.”

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Herewith the BBC description of this section:

After 24 people died following two days of protests in Afghanistan in the wake of the burning of a copy of the Koran by a fundamentalist Christian church in Florida, William talks to Joel C Hunter, a pastor in Florida and a leader within the National Association of Evangelicals, to ask him how he reacted to the news that a pastor had burned a Koran.

William also reflects on the violence in Afghanistan which resulted from the Koran burning with the former bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, and he is joined by historian and analyst Professor Iftikhar Malik from Bath Spa University, to discuss what role the Taliban is thought to have played in these events.

Listen to it all (starts about 28:30 in and last about 15 1/2 minutes).

Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi had grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him. His subtitle alerts us that this is not a conventional biography in that he does not repeat the well-documented story of Gandhi’s struggle for India but rather his struggle with India, the country that exasperated, infuriated, and dismayed him, notwithstanding his love for it.

At the outset Lelyveld dispenses with the conventions of biography, leaving out Gandhi’s childhood and student years, a decision he made because he believed that the twenty-three-year-old law clerk who arrived in South Africa in 1893 had little in him of the man he was to become. Besides, his birth in a small town in Gujarat on the west coast of India, and childhood spent in the bosom of a very traditional family of the Modh bania (merchant) caste of Jains, then the three years in London studying law are dealt with in fine detail and with a disarming freshness and directness in Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Lelyveld’s argument is that it was South Africa that made him the visionary and leader of legend. He is not the first or only historian to have pointed out such a progression but he brings to it an intimate knowledge based on his years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in both South Africa and India and the exhaustive research he conducted with a rare and finely balanced sympathy.

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Moral evaluations are important, then, but they are not radically different from all the other evaluations that we make every day, even if we have an ingrained wish they were or an ingrained tendency to think they are.

Moral discussion is a domain of ambiguity where our all-things-considered judgments can be underdetermined by the objective facts.

That’s the murky, complex reality. Somehow, I submit, we must learn to live with it.

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Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson will speak about religion and young people April 6 at 4:30 p.m. in Sage Chapel and April 7 in New York City on advocacy for gay rights. Both programs are sponsored by Cornell United Religious Work (CURW).

Robinson’s talk, “How Religion Is Killing Our Most Vulnerable Youth,” is the 2011 Frederick C. Wood Lecture at Cornell. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Robinson is the first openly gay noncelibate priest ordained as a bishop in the United States, and he has more than 25 years of service in the Episcopal Church.

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

A lot of attention has been focused on the way bookstores and publishing companies are managing the e-book revolution. The role of libraries has often been overlooked. But when HarperCollins Publishing Co. recently announced a new policy that would limit the number of times its e-books can be borrowed, it sparked a larger conversation about the future of libraries in the digital age.

These days, you don’t have to go anywhere near a library to check out an e-book. You can download one to your digital device in a matter of seconds. And there’s no more pesky overdue notices ”” the e-book simply disappears from your device when your time is up.

Read or listen to it all.

Mary Seabrook joked that she won’t have to go to Weight Watchers if food prices keep climbing.

“They are awful,” the Ladson resident said while shopping in a downtown Charleston grocery store. “I just shop for the stuff that’s on sale. I just won’t eat as much.”

Overall food prices will climb 3 percent to 4 percent this year as world demand in an economic recovery drives up the cost of fuel as well as basic commodities such as corn, wheat, soybeans and sugar, agricultural economist Chris Hurt of Purdue University said Monday during the Food Media Seminar at Charleston Place Hotel.

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An online video promoting church weddings is launched today on the Church of England website, to meet an increase in demand for information on church weddings. Featuring vicars enthusiastic about weddings, couples who have rated their church weddings extremely highly, and the Bishop of Hertford, the professionally produced five-minute video explains how the church has a warm wedding welcome for all.

Read it all and take the time to watch the video (slightly under 5 minutes).

Canon Callaway, Deputy for Anglican Partnerships at Trinity Wall Street, is widely known throughout the Anglican Communion, particularly for his work in forging enduring links with the Church in Africa and establishing mutual partnerships as a model for ministry.

CUAC is a worldwide association of over 120 institutions of higher education and a network of the Anglican Communion. Its patron is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams. Along with its predecessor, the Association of Episcopal Colleges, which consists mostly of the Episcopal colleges in the US, CUAC’s mission is promoting cross-cultural contacts and educational programs.

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(ENS) Read it all.

What recompense then shall we give unto Him? Or what fruit worthy of
His own gift to us? And how many mercies do we owe to Him!

For He bestowed the light upon us; He spake to us, as a father to his
sons; He saved us, when we were perishing.

What praise then shall we give to Him? Or what payment of recompense
for those things which we received?

We who were maimed in our understanding, and worshipped stocks and
stones and gold and silver and bronze, the works of men; and our
whole life was nothing else but death. While then we were thus
wrapped in darkness and oppressed with this thick mist in our vision,
we recovered our sight, putting off by His will the cloud wherein we
were wrapped.

For He had mercy on us, and in His compassion saved us, having beheld
in us much error and perdition, even when we had no hope of
salvation, save that which came from Him.

For He called us, when we were not, and from not being He willed us
to be.

–2 Clement 1:3-8

Grant us, O Lord, to rejoice in beholding the bliss of the heavenly Jerusalem; that as she is the home and mother of the multitude of the saints, we also may be counted worthy to have our portion within her; through thine only begotten Son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

–Mozarabic Sacramentary

The mountains melt like wax before the LORD, before the Lord of all the earth. The heavens proclaim his righteousness; and all the peoples behold his glory.

–Psalm 97:5-6

The future leader of the Episcopal Diocese for the Buffalo region has been on a tour, visiting the many parishes under his watch, meeting with congregation leaders and taking a moment to play any nearby organ.

The Rev. Dr. R. William Franklin is the bishop elect for the Diocese of Western New York. In that role he will act as the chief clergy officer for the area, which covers seven counties and has 63 different parishes. He’ll provide oversight to those congregations and act as the main bridge between church and community.

Franklin’s tour recently took him to St. Matthias Episcopal Church in East Aurora, where he met with parish directors and examined the building’s architecture, showing his general appreciation of church history. During that time, Franklin spoke of his goals when he officially becomes bishop next month, including welcoming a younger generation and providing another supportive voice for the community.

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A bird flew out at the break of day
From the nest where it had curled,
And ere the eve the bird had set
Fear on the kings of the world.

The first tree it lit upon
Was green with leaves unshed;
The second tree it lit upon
Was red with apples red;

The third tree it lit upon
Was barren and was brown,
Save for a dead man nailed thereon
On a hill above a town.
That night the kings of the earth were gay
And filled the cup and can;
Last night the kings of the earth were chill
For dread of a naked man.

”˜If he speak two more words,’ they said,
”˜The slave is more than the free;
If he speak three more words,’ they said,
”˜The stars are under the sea.’

Said the King of the East to the King of the West,
I wot his frown was set,
”˜Lo, let us slay him and make him as dung,
It is well that the world forget.’

Said the King of the West to the King of the East,
I wot his smile was dread,
”˜Nay, let us slay him and make him a god,
It is well that our god be dead.’

They set the young man on a hill,
They nailed him to a rod;
And there in darkness and in blood
They made themselves a god.

And the mightiest word was left unsaid,
And the world had never a mark,
And the strongest man of the sons of men
Went dumb into the dark.

Then hymns and harps of praise they brought,
Incense and gold and myrrh,
And they thronged above the seraphim,
The poor dead carpenter.

”˜Thou art the prince of all,’ they sang,
”˜Ocean and earth and air.’
Then the bird flew on to the cruel cross,
And hid in the dead man’s hair.

”˜Thou art the son of the world.’ they cried, `
”˜Speak if our prayers be heard.’
And the brown bird stirred in the dead man’s hair
And it seemed that the dead man stirred.

Then a shriek went up like the world’s last cry
From all nations under heaven,
And a master fell before a slave
And begged to be forgiven.

They cowered, for dread in his wakened eyes
The ancient wrath to see;
And a bird flew out of the dead Christ’s hair,
And lit on a lemon tree.

–G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

I am a big fan of the First Amendment. I have argued against the Smithsonian’s decision to remove a controversial video showing ants crawling over a crucifix. I have argued on behalf of Muslims who wanted to build an Islamic community center near Ground Zero in Manhattan. I have even defended the rights of members of the Westboro Baptist Church to protest at military funerals in the name of a God who hates. But I have finally found a religious liberty case I cannot get behind….

Given the facts and the law as I understand them, however, I believe that Khan and the Justice Department are overreaching here. Nineteen days is a long time to leave schoolchildren (who also have rights) without a teacher, particularly at the end of a semester. And while it is troubling to hear that the district did not even negotiate with Khan ”” a charge to which district officials refused to respond ”” it is hard to see how this request could have been reasonably accommodated.

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The idea of a shared national office, possibly located in Ottawa, for the Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC), is receiving mixed reviews from respective executive councils. In fact, said Archbishop Fred Hiltz, leadership of the Anglican Church of Canada may need to “step back” and consider more carefully the benefits of a shared national office.

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Coles’s background as a lean, Leftie Eighties pop icon and his metamorphosis into portly Anglican priest may not have fazed Mr Somerville, but it has surprised some of the parishioners in St Mary the Virgin, the magnificent medieval C of E church in Finedon, Northamptonshire, where Coles will be installed on April 12. ”˜”˜Some thought I had been Lionel Richie from The Commodores,’’ he says. ”˜”˜Others thought I had come from a commune. It did cause quite a bit of confusion.’’

His heady days as a rock star have come in handy, though. ”˜”˜I was talking to a couple of the teenagers the other day and one cheekily asked: ”˜Have you ever been in a nightclub?’ They were taken aback when I said, ”˜Oh yes, the last one was Amnesia in Ibiza,’ and reeled off half a dozen more. It’s amazing how a bit of street cred can help with the youngsters. They won’t feel you understand them if all they see you as is a paragon of virtue.’’

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