S&P sees a “material risk that U.S. policymakers might not reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary challenges by 2013; if an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation is not begun by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns.”

Read it carefully and read it all.

I’m obviously biased, but I was very impressed with the quality of the film and the acting, and highly recommend it to you. It is rated PG and with the exception of the brief scenes around the attack itself, is appropriate for the whole family.

After viewing the film, I became aware that Bethany Hamilton’s faith in Christ and the faith of her family generated some controversy on the set. “I think to get anything in the film was a battle,” said Sarah Hill, Hamilton’s youth pastor at North Shore Christian Church (and played by Carrie Underwood). Hill was on the set often, and went on to say:

“Basically, what you’re doing is you have all these people who want to make a movie about Bethany and they don’t know the Lord and they don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus. For what we have in the movie it was such a battle.”

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The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Really lovely–watch it all.

Wow-simply stunning; check it out.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church is making a Holy Week visit to Pittsburgh, where the Episcopal Diocese split in 2008.

She will answer questions from the public Tuesday evening at Trinity Cathedral, Downtown. She also will preach and preside earlier that day in Wilkinsburg as Episcopal clergy renew their ordination vows to Bishop Kenneth Price Jr., of Pittsburgh.

“I look forward to joining the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh as we gather to renew our ordination vows,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said. “There is a particular solemnity about celebrating this rite in a community which has experienced division over those very vows.

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The president of the World Bank has warned that the world is “one shock away from a full-blown crisis”.

Robert Zoellick cited rising food prices as the main threat to poor nations who risk “losing a generation”.

He was speaking in Washington at the end of the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

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O Lord Jesus Christ, pattern of humility, who didst empty thyself of thy glory and take upon thee the form of a servant: Root out of us all pride and self-seeking; that we may willingly bear contempt and reproach for thy sake, and glorying in nothing save thy cross, may esteem ourselves lowly in thy sight; who now livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.

Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If any other man thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith; that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

–Philippians 3:4-11

For many old people ”” long before they become mortally ill ”” that prolonged dwindling is a worsening nightmare: a time of maltreatment in geriatric wards, lying on their bedsores in urine and excrement, of dependence on indifferent foreign minders in expensive care homes, a period of painful confusion, feeling ignored, unwanted and lonely. In a less rich society, such things will become more common.

Given all this, the taboo against suicide or assisted suicide seems incomprehensible. Religious people may think it wrong, although I have never quite understood why. It seems odd to me that they are not eager to meet their maker as soon as possible, if heaven is so devoutly to be desired. Perhaps it is different if one’s religion teaches that one might after death come back as a toad.

But, believers apart, for everyone else there is no philosophical reason against suicide that I can see. The usual slippery slope argument is purely emotional: we are all already on the slippery slope as far as any moral decisions go and constantly have to choose between two evils.

Read it all from the Sunday [London] Times (subscription required).

What’s more important than Libya? At least four other countries….

The outcome of the unfinished revolution in Egypt will affect the prospects for democracy across the region. The outcome in Yemen, where Al Qaeda’s most dangerous branch is headquartered, is important to the struggle against terrorism. A change in Syria, Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world, would upend the balance of power on Israel’s northern borders.

And then there’s the Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, where troops from Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Muslim countries have intervened to quell a Shiite Muslim uprising. It might seem odd to include a power struggle in a quasi-country of half a million citizens on a list of major strategic issues, but the crisis in Bahrain qualifies.

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The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales said Catholics were afraid the Coalition was “washing its hands” of its responsibilities to communities and expecting volunteers to fill the gap.

“It is all very well to deliver speeches about the need for greater voluntary activity, but there needs to be some practical solutions,” he said.

“At the moment the Big Society is lacking a cutting edge. It has no teeth.”

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In the Kingdom of Bhutan, where Christianity is still awaiting legal recognition, Christians have the right to proclaim their faith but must not use coercion or claim religious superiority to seek conversions, the country’s prime minister told Compass in an exclusive interview.

“I view conversions very negatively, because conversion is the worst form of intolerance,” Jigmi Yoser Thinley said in his office in the capital of the predominantly Buddhist nation.

Christian leaders in Bhutan have told Compass that they enjoy certain freedoms to practice their faith in private homes, but, because of a prohibition against church buildings and other restrictions, they were not sure if proclamation of their faith ”“ included in international human rights codes ”“ was allowed in Bhutan.

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This week, the plots hatched behind closed doors in the Vatican last year will be played out in the open as the former bishops lead dozens of clergy and hundreds of worshippers in taking up this historic offer.

They will be confirmed in services that will mark a significant watershed in the Anglican Church’s long-running battle over moves to allow women to become bishops.

It represents a new beginning for those entering the Catholic Church, but their departure has deeply wounded the Church of England, which is already riven by bitter rows over gay clergy, and now faces an exodus of traditionalists.

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We need to stop giving our money over to an abstract and destructive financial system, and put it to work locally through credit unions and co-ops that can make realistic and cooperative assessments of debt and risk.

Churches are taking leading roles in fostering these kinds of grounded economies, supporting the kinds of local development projects, Fair Trade arrangements, credit unions, community supported agriculture projects, and other projects I discuss in my book Being Consumed.

Economy is not a separate sphere of life that only intersects with the religious sphere when people act immorally with their money or are unable to meet their needs. The idea that theology and economics are two separate pursuits is a thoroughly modern idea, the product of the last 250 years or so, an idea that Christians traditionally would have found bizarre.

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Like so much else under Heaven, repression in China has often seemed to go in cycles. Every now and then it has suited the country’s leaders to relax their steely grip on the country and allow a modicum of political liberty.

Freer criticism in the media has helped give the party a veneer of credibility. Lip-service to the law and due process has won plaudits overseas and boosted the economy at home. So a thaw would set in for a while, a “Beijing spring”. A freeze would always follow. But, until lately, in each new cycle the springs were seeming warmer and the freezes not quite so harsh. When the country was starting to liberalise, Westerners justified doing business with China on just such grounds. More economic openness would surely lead to more openness of other kinds.

The latest freeze casts this widespread hope into doubt, for three reasons. The first is the scale of the crackdown. Ai Weiwei, China’s best-known artist and dissident, who was detained at Beijing airport on April 3rd, is only the most notable figure to be caught by it. Calls on the internet for a “jasmine revolution” have prompted armed police and plain-clothes goons to descend in huge numbers on public places to stop people from “strolling”, as a veiled form of protest.

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[KIM] LAWTON: Carter has a new book called The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama. He claims the man many voters considered the “peace candidate” has turned into a “war president” with an expanding philosophy about the use of force. Carter says that philosophy was signaled in Obama’s 2009 acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Barack Obama (from 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech): Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That’s why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.

{STEPHEN] CARTER: What’s striking about the war in Libya, whether one is for it or against it, is that it shows that President Obama was serious, that he actually meant what he said, that he actually believes that’s a justified use of American power.

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There is… no escaping the fact that Jesus speaks in the Bible of a hell for the “condemned.” He sometimes uses the word Gehenna, which was a valley near Jerusalem associated with the sacrifice of children by fire to the Phoenician god Moloch; elsewhere in the New Testament, writers (especially Paul and John the Divine) tell of a fiery pit (Tartarus or Hades) in which the damned will spend eternity. “Depart from me, you cursed [ones], into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” Jesus says in Matthew. In Mark he speaks of “the unquenchable fire.” The Book of Revelation paints a vivid picture ”” in a fantastical, problematic work that John the Divine says he composed when he was “in the spirit on the Lord’s day,” a signal that this is not an Associated Press report ”” of the lake of fire and the dismissal of the damned from the presence of God to a place where “they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”

And yet there is a contrary scriptural trend that suggests, as Jesus puts it, that the gates of hell shall not finally prevail, that God will wipe away every tear ”” not just the tears of Evangelical Christians but the tears of all. [Rob] Bell puts much stock in references to the universal redemption of creation: in Matthew, Jesus speaks of the “renewal of all things”; in Acts, Peter says Jesus will “restore everything”; in Colossians, Paul writes that “God was pleased to … reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.”

So is it heaven for Christians who say they are Christians and hell for everybody else? What about babies, or people who die without ever hearing the Gospel through no fault of their own? (As Bell puts it, “What if the missionary got a flat tire?”) Who knows? Such tangles have consumed Christianity for millennia and likely will for millennia to come.

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The NBA’s leading scorer walks slowly into the Oklahoma City Thunder locker room, his eyes fixed on an open black leather Bible with his name engraved on the cover.

A pack of reporters awaits him, but he remains embedded in Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, a book in the New Testament. He reads carefully in front of his locker for several minutes, marking favored passages with a light blue highlight pen.

Shortly after reading the command, “Find your strength in the Lord, in his mighty power,” Kevin Durant closes his Bible and lifts his eyes to the reporters.

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At the time, [Stan] Winder was disabled and relied on a wheelchair to get around. At age 56, doctors told him his illness would likely get worse.

But the voice returned with its command…[“Get up and walk].

“I went through all kinds of rationalizations why that could not happen,” he said, “and this was a crazy thing, all that sort of thing.”

It seemed to Winder that God was speaking to him, offering to restore his health if only he would cooperate.

“So I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’ I got up, and the minute my feet hit the floor, there was absolute freedom,” he said.

Read it all–also from the front page of the local paper.

Craig Robinson heard the wind turn violent outside Refuge Temple of St. Stephen, where he cleans up every Saturday afternoon to prepare for the next morning’s services.

Curious, the 50-year-old Moncks Corner resident made his way from the sanctuary to the front of the church. That’s when he saw the tornado outside.

“I bent down on my knees and asked the Lord to have mercy,” Robinson said, standing before the wood, brick and glass remains of Refuge Temple on Saturday evening. Shortly after he began his prayer, he heard the roof collapse and, over the next five minutes or so, nearly everything around him turned to rubble while he stayed on the floor.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

Our business this week is to die and rise with Christ, who died and rose for us: dying to sin, that we may rise again to righteousness, in repentance, faith, and good works. Throughout the week we exercise Faith, by hearing the account of his Passion written in all four gospels, and we imitate his sacrificial Charity, by acts of offering and intercession. On Good Friday follows the ceremony known as the Veneration of the Cross. A cross is unveiled before the congregation: “before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you” (Galatians 3:1), and we approach the altar to kneel at its foot. In that act of worship, we acknowledge our sin, our betrayal of the Lord’s charity, as the choir sings the Reproaches of Christ: “O my people, what have I done unto thee, or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me”. The choir expresses our Repentance with the Trisagion: “Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and Immortal, have mercy upon us”. Yet “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20), and penitence turns to praise of what his perfect love and obedience has accomplished for us on the cross: “We adore thy cross, O Lord, and we praise and glorify thy holy resurrection; for, lo, by the cross, joy hath come to the whole world”. With this praise is mingled the prayer for blessing in Psalm 67. Thus do we bear testimony to the wonderful exchange transacted for us upon the cross: “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us – for it is written, Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree – that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (Galatians 3:13, 14). He took upon himself the curse of our sin, that he might give us the blessing of his righteousness.

–(The Rev.) Gavin Dunbar is rector Saint John’s, Savannah, Georgia

There is something beautiful about the way in which Augustine and Thomas integrated the map of the self society provided them within a complex account both of Christian belief and practice and an extensive account of the forms of human relationship. Indeed Anglicans still employ versions of these exhortations and prayers. Nevertheless, they sound strange to many in the pews who think of themselves not as embodied souls with intellect, will and appetite but as persons with rights, selves with particular histories and individuals whose nature is unique. These people may well look to marriage to provide mutual society, help and comfort. These, after all, are good things for selves in search of flourishing. Nevertheless, the tie of marriage to procreation will most certainly be jarring if children are not part of a couple’s notion of flourishing. Again, persons (in the modern sense of the word) probably do believe government is to provide civil order and administer justice fairly. These tasks create the space necessary for the pursuit of private goals. However, is government within its rights to maintain true religion, and ought government to be given the right to monitor the private virtues and vices of individuals? Embodied souls once thought that as the intellect was to order the powers of will and appetite, so the ruler was to order the unruly wills and affections of the citizenry. Nevertheless, in our time persons protective or their rights may with good reason believe assignment of these responsibilities to government intrudes inordinately on the freedom of individuals in pursuit of good, as they understand it.

The theological task, therefore, is to integrate the present account of human agency within a comprehensive account of Christian belief and practice. It is false to say that progressive voices have not attempted to do just this. It would also be false to say that more traditional voices have not sought to bring the changes in moral practice now common in the West under the scrutiny of such an account. The problem is that progressives have made the connection by reducing Christian belief to rather vacuous account of divine and human love; and traditionalists have, as it were, “majored” in dogmatic assertions while remaining unaware of the moral gains that have come with our present map of the self. If I hope for a more adequate account of Christian belief and practice from progressives, I hope also that traditionalists will manifest less dogmatism and more awareness of the moral gains that have accrued to the West because of its current account of moral agency. In a way, addressing these inadequacies defines the theological and moral task now presented to the churches of the West. If this task were to be undertaken by Anglicans, the Achilles Heel of Anglicanism in North America and the United Kingdom would most certainly be exposed, and perhaps the Anglican Communion in those lands would be spared Achilles fate. Perhaps other churches might even undertake the same task.

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O Everliving God, let this mind be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; that as he from his loftiness stooped to the death of the cross, so we in our lowliness may humble ourselves, believing, obeying, living, and dying to the glory of the Father; for the same Jesus Christ’s sake.

Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. Who is the King of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle! Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory!

–Psalm 24:7-10

The president of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs is noting that a decision to freeze dialogue with the Holy See from Sunni Islam’s highest authority may have been hasty.

In 1998, Ali Al-Samman was the architect of the joint committee that brings together the Cairo-based Permanent Committee of Al-Azhar for Dialogue among the Monotheistic Religions and the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

In Part 1 of a two-part interview with ZENIT, Al-Samman offered his perspective on the Jan. 20 announcement of a dialogue-freeze from the Cairo-based Islamic Research Council of the University of Al-Azhar, which came in protest of Benedict XVI’s statements on religious freedom following a Jan. 1 attack on a Coptic church in Alexandria.

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The opposition of Nigerian Bishops and their congregations to any softening of attitudes towards homosexuality has made them increasingly uneasy with the notion of being in full communion with overseas churches which allow – in their view – an unacceptable latitude in sexual matters. The size and faithfulness of this province means that in any ensuing schism, to be able to claim communion with the Church of Nigeria will be invaluable for a body seeking to present itself as the genuine inheritor of the Anglican tradition. As British, Australian and North American churches fight within themselves over the status of women Bishops and active homosexual clergy, the Church of Nigeria, along with the other African provinces such as South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda, finds itself courted by traditionalists and reformists, Anglo Catholics and Evangelicals, as a fountain of legitimacy for whatever schismatic or unifying agency can claim it. In an extraordinary moment of thwarted ecumenicism the low church, evangelical, and frequently anti-Catholic African Anglicans even found themselves rejecting an advance by Pope Benedict XVI, who wanted to bring them into his newly formed Personal Ordinariate, where they would have been permitted exceptional latitude in liturgy and practice, including the ordination of married men.

The irony of this is that the Church of Nigeria itself is relatively untroubled by internal dissent. The old debates between Anglo Catholicism and Evangelism which wracked British and North American Churches in the 19th century barely touched the African Provinces, where Anglicanism was always defined by its distance from both the Catholic Church on one side and the Baptist and Pentecostalist movements on the other.

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(ACNS) The key development priorities proposed by the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa (CAPA) and agreed by the assembly were:

Economic empowerment, with support for micro-finance, including working on a roadmap towards an Anglican bank. (The conference heard powerful presentations on micro-finance from Peterson Kamau of Five Talents, the church’s micro-finance institution, and Moses Ochieng of the CGAP consortium of donors and development agencies.)
Peace and reconciliation, learning from the experience of the church in countries affected by conflict.
Governance

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Recovering addict Danny Mocibob loves race car driving and sometimes even smashes them up — all in the name of doing church work.

“I lived on the streets when things got really bad for me, so I know what can happen if you get caught up in addiction,” says the member of Brockville’s Wall St. United Church.

Now he’s part of the novel church outreach program called Racing Against Drugs, which he says is stopping rural kids from drinking, drugging and driving. His church sponsors cars at Brockville Ontario Speedway and in demolition derbies, and racers like Mocibob work with law enforcement to get the message out to young people and families at the events.

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The number of middle aged people living alone has soared by a third in the past decade, with singles making up 29% of Britain’s 26m households.

Home editor Mark Easton explained that an extra half a million of 45 to 64-year-olds were now living on their own.

The reasons behind the trend were both the demographic bulge caused by the baby boomer generation, but also the dramatic drop in marriage and co-habitation.

Listen to it all (a little under 8 1/4 minutes).

The law calling for an annual National Day of Prayer imposes solely on the duties of the U.S. president, leaving private citizens no legal standing to challenge it, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday (April 14).

The unanimous decision overturns a 2010 lower court ruling that found the law unconstitutional. The ruling comes just weeks before many Christian groups plan to hold annual observances to mark the contested day on May 5.

“If anyone suffers injury … that person is the president, who is not complaining,” ruled a three-judge panel of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

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