In view of the tragically difficult times that the whole Middle East, and especially Syria, is going through, H. B. Patriarch Gregorios III wrote a letter on 20 April 2011 to Western leaders, asking them to help boost social and political evolution in the region. He stressed that the current revolutions are unlikely to benefit Christians, and may even result in more Christians being obliged to flee the unrest. He believes that Western support for peace is very important for Muslim-Christian living together in the Arab region, for the Christian presence there, for the communion and witness of its Churches to be maintained and for the aims of the recent Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops to be fulfilled.

From April, but still relevant–read it all.

This week the shortcomings of this muddling-through were laid bare… Financial markets turned on Italy, the euro zone’s third-biggest economy, with alarming speed. Yields on ten-year Italian bonds jumped by almost a percentage point in two trading days: on July 12th they breached 6%, their highest since the euro was created. The Milan stockmarket slumped to its lowest in two years. Though bond yields subsequently fell back, the debt crisis has clearly entered a new phase. No longer confined to the small peripheral economies of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, it has hurdled over Spain, supposedly next in line, and reached one of the euro zone’s giants. All its members, but especially Germany, face a stark choice.

Consider the stakes. Italy has the biggest sovereign-debt market in Europe and the third-biggest in the world. It has €1.9 trillion ($2.6 trillion) of sovereign debt outstanding, 120% of its GDP, three times as much as Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined””and far more than the €250 billion or so left in the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the currency club’s rescue kitty. Default would have calamitous consequences for the euro and the world economy. Even if the more likely immediate prospect is sustained stress in the Italian bond market, that will surely prompt investors to flee European assets, making the continent’s recovery ever harder. Meanwhile in the background there is the absurd pantomime of Barack Obama and congressional Republicans feuding over how to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling to stave off an American “default”…. That may have distracted American investors briefly; once they realise how much is at stake in Italy, it will not help.

Read it all.

The Very Reverend Doctor Guy Fitch Lytle III, Professor of Church History and Anglican Studies, Bishop Juhan Professor of Divinity, and Dean Emeritus of The School of Theology of the University of the South, died on July 15, 2011 in Winchester, TN, of complications of diabetes.

He was born on October 14, 1944, to Nelle Stuart Lytle and Guy Fitch Lytle, Jr., in Birmingham, AL. An avid tennis player, Dr. Lytle won the Alabama Youth Tennis Championship title and went on to compete in the National Youth Tennis Championship. Dr. Lytle graduated from Princeton University in 1966. He was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University in England, and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

After teaching positions at the Catholic University of America, University of Texas: Austin, and the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Dr. Lytle joined the University of the South as Dean of the School of Theology. For eleven years he served the University of the South with creativity and distinction, during which time the School doubled in size, built a new chapel – The Chapel of the Apostles, found financial stability, and gained national prominence. During Dr. Lytle’s tenure, he was a significant supporter of theology and the liturgical arts, and vastly increased participation of Sewanee students in world mission outreach and cross-cultural experiences. With his wife Maria, he developed programs in Hispanic ministries and attracted significant numbers of Latino students to the School. Above all, Dr. Lytle was an Episcopal priest of unwavering commitment to his Lord, Jesus Christ.

He is survived by his wife, Maria Rasco Lytle, of Sewanee, TN; his brother, Stuart Lytle, Newburyport, MA; his daughter and son-in-law, Elizabeth Lytle Knowles and Joe Knowles, of Lynchburg, VA; his daughter, Ashley Lytle, of Atlanta, GA; and his grandchildren, Madeline, Sophia, and Jacob Knowles, of Lynchburg, VA.

The family will greet visitors on Monday, July 18, from 12:00-1:30 PM at the University of the South’s Chapel of the Apostles, Sewanee, TN. The funeral service will follow at 2:00 PM, with the Right Rev. Don Wimberly officiating. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in Dr. Lytle’s memory to the School of Theology Dean’s Discretionary Fund for student financial needs.

I love the picture here. From a family member via Facebook:

We would like to thank everyone for the prayers and love we have received since the unexpected passing of The Rev. Dr. Guy Lytle…[Friday]. Please join us in a service celebrating Guy’s life on Monday, July 18 at 2:00pm at the Chapel of the Apostles in Sewanee. ALL CLERGY are invited to vest (alb & white stole) and process. Please help share this news with those not on Facebook. Blessings.

Marshall McLuhan was a committed Christian. How did he come to his faith and did it influence his ideas? And has his work any meaning for the Church today?

Listen to it all (about 48 1/2 minutes).

If Marshall McLuhan were alive today, there isn’t much that would surprise him ”” not the Internet, or Google, or Twitter, or WikiLeaks, or even the phone-hacking scandal now transfixing much of the U.K.

In broad outline, if not in precise detail, he predicted all of these and more.

“Rereading him, I still get new insights,” says Robert Logan, a former colleague of the Canadian media guru some now call The First Seer of Cyberspace. “The man was a total genius. If he came back today, on his 100th anniversary, he would say, ”˜Yeah, that’s about what I expected ”” and people haven’t learned a thing.”

Read it all.

[John] Sloan has been Alabama’s bishop suffragan since 2008. Before that, he served as rector of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Huntsville, Ala., for 14 years, and at a number of churches in the Diocese of Mississippi.

Sloan founded the Special Session program in the diocese for summer campers with mental and physical disabilities. In the national church, he serves as a member of the Standing Commission for Liturgy and Music. He has participated in nearly 20 medical mission trips to Honduras.

Sloan, a native of Vicksburg, Miss., is married to Tina Brown Sloan. They have two children, McKee and Mary Nell.

Read it all.

O God, who hast taught us that in thy mysterious providence suffering is the prelude to glory, and hast made much tribulation the entrance to thy heavenly kingdom: May we learn from this thy will, and also from creation around us, to wait for our deliverance from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of thy children; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not winnow; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sowed, and gather where I have not winnowed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.’

–Matthew 25:24-30

Mr. Schwartz weathered painfully dismissive reviews to see his shows prosper and live on for decades in syndication. Many critics suggested that they were successful because they ran counter to the tumultuous times in which they appeared: the era of the Vietnam War and sweeping social change.

Give or take a month or so, the original network run of “The Brady Bunch” coincided with two major upheavals in American society. The show, about a squeaky-clean blended family in California, began in 1969, shortly after Woodstock, and ended in 1974, soon after President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal.

Mr. Schwartz’s work may have been seen as lighthearted entertainment, but some scholars of popular culture took it very seriously. David Marc and Robert J. Thompson, authors of “Prime Time, Prime Movers,” in which they advance an auteur theory of television, considered Mr. Schwartz an innovator who made a “surgical strike into the national psyche.”

Read it all.