In other words, our competition is hell. Hell is at work wherever the will of God is defied.

Every time a little child is left unloved, unwanted, uneducated, unnoticed. Every time a marriage ends. Every time racial differences divide a street or a city or a church. Every time money gets worshipped or hoarded. Every time a lie gets told. Every time generations get separated. Every time a workplace becomes de-humanizing. When families get broken up. When virtue gets torn down. When sinful habits create a lives of shame or a culture of shamelessness. When faith gets undermined and hope gets lost and people get trashed. That’s when hell is prevailing.

It is not acceptable to Jesus that hell prevail. Your job is not to meet a budget, run a program, fill a building, or maintain the status quo. Your job is to put hell out of business.

Read it all (used this one in adult Sunday school this morning–KSH).

Opponents of a measure that would make it a misdemeanor to circumcise male children in San Francisco filed a lawsuit Wednesday to get the initiative stricken from the November ballot.

The plaintiffs called the measure anti-Semitic, a threat to the religious freedom of Jews and Muslims, and an infringement on parental and medical rights. But during a news conference on the steps of City Hall, attorney Michael Jacobs said the group is suing on the grounds that state law prohibits local governments from restricting medical procedures.

That’s the job of the state Legislature, said Jacobs, flanked by two Muslim women in head scarves and a doctor in a white coat….

Read it all.

REV. MICHEL BRIERE: The eldest daughter of the Church, that’s what we were called. Today, saying you believe in a religion takes a real identification of faith. Today, the number has really diminished.

[DEBORAH] POTTER: Twenty years ago, about 80 percent of French people described themselves as Catholic. Today, it’s just over half and less than 5 percent””most of them older””regularly go to Mass. Father Briere blames a growing culture of consumerism and a Catholic hierarchy that he says has been too rigid, failing to draw young people into the Church. That’s true across Europe, but France is a special case, a country where religion is widely seen as a source of trouble. If France had an official religion it would be laicite or secularism, a principle that’s enshrined in this country’s constitution and reflects its history of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, as well as the French Revolution, that basically booted the Catholic Church from power.

That history lives on in French movies and classrooms, where students are taught in gory detail about a 16th-century massacre, when thousands of Protestants [Huguenots] were slaughtered by the Catholic forces of the King. And that history still lies on public display in Paris. These are the bones of Catholic priests killed and mutilated by a revolutionary mob in 1792””small wonder that the French concept of separation of church and state is strikingly different from that in the US, says Jocelyne Cesari, a French political scientist and research fellow at Harvard.

Read it all.

Indeed, as well as not paying for their metro tickets, the people of Greece barely paid a penny of the underground’s £1.5 billion cost ”” a ”˜sweetener’ from Brussels (and, therefore, the UK taxpayer) to help the country put on an impressive 2004 Olympics free of the city’s notorious traffic jams.

The transport perks are not confined to the customers. Incredibly, the average salary on Greece’s railways is £60,000, which includes cleaners and track workers – treble the earnings of the average private sector employee here.

The overground rail network is as big a racket as the EU-funded underground. While its annual income is only £80”‰million from ticket sales, the wage bill is more than £500m a year ”” prompting one Greek politician to famously remark that it would be cheaper to put all the commuters into private taxis.

Read it all.

When President Obama announced his decision to surge more troops into Afghanistan in 2009, I argued that it could succeed if three things happened: Pakistan became a different country, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan became a different man and we succeeded at doing exactly what we claim not to be doing, that is nation-building in Afghanistan. None of that has happened, which is why I still believe our options in Afghanistan are: lose early, lose late, lose big or lose small. I vote for early and small.

My wariness about Afghanistan comes from asking these three questions: When does the Middle East make you happy? How did the cold war end? What would Ronald Reagan do?

Read it all.

In late May, a NATO soldier was killed as he emerged from his tent. Two weeks earlier, two NATO soldiers were killed while eating a meal. In late April, eight U.S. troops were shot dead at a meeting at Kabul airport.

The attacks had one thing in common: The killers all wore Afghan military or police uniforms.

Foreign troops serving in Afghanistan say they’re increasingly concerned about the “enemy within.” Yet they emphasize the importance of keeping anxiety in check amid a climate of deepening mutual distrust.

Read it all.

Syria’s military has moved into a village near the border with Turkey and a town near the boundary with Lebanon, activists say.

Hundreds of Syrians, some with gunshot wounds, have fled into Lebanon, according to reports.

At least four civilians were reportedly killed by security forces during house-to-house raids and at funerals held for those killed in Friday’s rallies.

Read it all.

O God, the God of all goodness and of all grace, who art worthy of a greater love than we can either give or understand: Fill our hearts, we beseech thee, with such love toward thee that nothing may seem too hard for us to do or to suffer, in obedience to thy will; and grant that thus loving thee, we may become daily more like unto thee, and finally obtain the crown of life which thou hast promised to those that love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–B. F. Westcott

No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “reckoned to him as righteousness.” But the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him that raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

–Romans 4:20-25

Now let’s be serious. When 815-level lawyers threaten and cajole diocesan bishops not to reveal multiple sex-abuse cover-ups at the highest level lest former leaders be embarrassed, what can we expect, and why do we look down on the RCC? Serious and credentialled investigative reporters can contact me.

As a rector I had to follow a priest who was simply passed along by another bishop, and as a bishop have had the same experience with a staff member who was protected by his bishop, with catastrophic results here

On paper, we are a one-strike church, but in reality, too may people are walked. 815 refused comment on this story with principled-sounding obfuscation, which essentially tells it all, doesn’t it? There is no more transparency at 815 than previously, as some of the commentators above [on this thread] know to their pain.

— Bishop Paul Marshall of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem, Penna.

There is no independent journalistic entity that covers the Episcopal Church in the fashion that the Church Times covers the Church of England, and thus no one to hold us accountable when we are being unnecessarily secretive, or when people in positions of authority insist on prerogatives that aren’t healthy for the wider church. We have to do that ourselves.

—Jim Naughton of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C.

Parry, 69, led the Abbey Boy Choir of Conception Abbey from 1982 to 1987. He said he had sexual contact with five or six choir members. Most were over 18, but two were 16 to 18 years old, he said.

“As far as I’m concerned, great harm was done to those people,” he told the newspaper in an interview from Las Vegas, where he now lives. “To lie and not recognize that would be a gross injustice to those folks.”

He did not return a telephone message left by The Associated Press on Friday.

Read it all.

After the plaintiff reported the abuse in 1987, Parry was sent for three months of treatment at Servants of the Paraclete in New Mexico. Then he stayed in the Southwest, working at Lutheran and Catholic parishes.

In 2000, the lawsuit says, Parry underwent psychological testing because he was considering entering another Catholic monastery.

“The results of this testing revealed that Fr. Parry was a sexual abuser who had the proclivity to reoffend with minors,” the lawsuit says.

The results were provided to Conception Abbey, the Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas and the Episcopal bishop for the Diocese of Nevada, the lawsuit says. Yet from 2000 until Thursday, Parry was employed by All Saints Episcopal Church in Las Vegas.

Read it all.

A Las Vegas Episcopal priest resigned from his duties at his church Thursday after his name surfaced in a lawsuit alleging a Missouri monastery covered up sexual abuse by him.

The lawsuit, filed in Missouri by a former choir boy, alleged the Roman Catholic monastery, Conception Abbey, kept secret the boy’s 1987 sexual assault by Bede Parry, then a Catholic priest who directed the choir.

Parry, 69, who was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, had been serving as the organist and choir director at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Las Vegas since 2000.

Read it all.