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Anglicans are to meet in Nairobi next week to launch an appeal and advocacy campaign on the food crisis sweeping East Africa.

The meeting which will bring together primates and bishops from the worst hit areas, comes as the UN announced a deepening of the famine in southern Somalia.

The meeting is being organised jointly by the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa and the Anglican Alliance for development, relief and advocacy, through its Africa facilitator, Emmanuel Olatunji.

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“If you have to be terminal, this is the place to come,” said Harriet Boyle, as the sun poured into her room through huge windows.

Sitting in a bed with floral sheets and a patterned comforter, the grandmother with the carefully applied makeup put down her large-print book and described life at Rosary Hill Home, a free palliative care facility run by the Dominican Sisters Congregation of St. Rose of Lima in Hawthorne, north of New York City.

“It’s the most unusual place I’ve ever been. You’re not conscious of people being ill here. We all have cancer and we’re all terminal, but it’s serene and there are lots of moments of fun and laughter,” she said.

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Guernsey’s Anglican Dean has said he is worried about the impact of an ongoing review into church funding.

The island’s Parochial Ecclesiastical Rates Review Committee (PERRC) expects to report on the issue this year.

It will recommend whether the parish churches and rectory buildings should continue to be funded by ratepayers.

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(Here the founder of a Catholic Worker house describes their work in an area of stark inequalities[:])

It is the best of times and the worst of times in Oklahoma City. Our perception of how we are doing depends on where we are in the great economic scheme of things. If you are in the oil business, you are riding high. Driven by the strong prices for energy, Oklahoma’s oil sector is spending money lavishly, most notably on the new 50-floor skyscraper headquarters of Devon Energy in downtown Oklahoma City. The city is investing nearly $750 million over the next few years in its central core.

But this is a tale of two cities. Just a dozen blocks from the glamour of bio-engineering research institutes, I tried to get a health department inspector to condemn a rented house which had no heat, no electricity, no running water, no hot water, and in which the sewer was clogged. The tenant is a disabled man whose neighbours allow him to use their bathroom. The inspector called the landlord, but two months later there was still no hot water and the sewer was still blocked.

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Listen to it all if you so desire.

They sat in plastic chairs amid the sawdust and unfinished floorboards, chipped paint and bare plaster. All were in their Sunday best, about 200 people listening to the first prayer said in the new home of St. George’s Anglican Church.

“Drive from this place those demons that have possessed its inhabitants,” boomed the voice of the Rev. Don Armstrong. “Restore this place to its former sanctity and purpose.”

There was a bit of irony to Armstrong’s prayer, a double-meaning to both building and man.

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Guess where the diocese is first. Next, read it all. This is a serious question–how many other such bishops are there in the Anglican Communion?–KSH.

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Witnesses told a House of Representatives subcommittee on Aug. 4 that the Sudanese border state of South Kordofan is descending into racial and religious violence, as the world looks on.

“The Nuba people fear that we will be forgotten, that the world will stand idly by while mass killings continue without redress,” said Anglican bishop Reverend Andudu Adam Elnail, of Sudan’s Episcopal Diocese of Kadulgi, in his testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights.

“Our hope,” Rev. Elnail said, “is that the United States will lead the international community in taking prompt, effective action to protect tens of thousands of displaced people, including an untold number of civilians being killed house-to-house and bombed by their own government.”

Read it all and note that Kadulgi’s Anglican bishop is among those cited.

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Local government officials are struggling to gauge the impact of the Standard & Poor’s unprecedented downgrade of federal credit even as Washington watches global reaction to its latest financial setback.

Will the ratings agency downgrade counties and states? Will the federal government’s predicament cost local taxpayers? And can local governments have better credit than the federal government?

“We are in uncharted territory,” Prince William County Board Chairman Corey A. Stewart (R) said. “No one knows what the ultimate long-term ramifications are. .”‰.”‰. But we know they’re going to be significant.”

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Almighty God, whose servant Dominic grew in knowledge of thy truth and formed an order of preachers to proclaim the good news of Christ: Give to all thy people a hunger for your Word and an urgent longing to share the Gospel, that the whole world may come to know thee as thou art revealed in thy Son Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

O Lord, who hast given us thy Word for a light to shine upon our path: Grant us so to meditate upon that Word and to follow its teaching, that we may find in it the light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all of you, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God. Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God which he obtained with the blood of his own Son.

–Acts 20:26-28

A half-hearted approach by the EBC will achieve little. Even full-blown “shock and awe” will only buy time. That’s because the real instability stems from fears euro-zone governments will impose losses on those holding individual country bonds if debts prove unsustainable. Those fears are mounting as the growth outlook deteriorates. Italy’s announcement of new austerity measures Friday may help address concerns over the deficit but could actually worsen the short-term challenge of growth.

That’s why the second part of the crisis resolution requires a vast expansion of the euro zone’s bailout facilities and most likely a move by European countries to guarantee European Financial Stability Facility’s bonds, effectively turning them into genuine euro-zone bonds.

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Of the many influences I could mention, these have had the greatest impact:

First, and most significant, Stott held unswervingly to the priority and power of the Word of God. Perhaps more than any other person in the last half-century, he restored confidence in the authority of the Bible and the centrality of Scripture in preaching and teaching.

Second, his confidence in the trustworthiness of Scripture encouraged an intellectual curiosity. He was intellectually rigorous. He didn’t shrink from difficult texts. He didn’t dismiss paradox. He didn’t excuse apparent contradictions. Instead, they became the fodder for inquiry. One of the greatest gifts he gave me was his example of a mind fully engaged and fully alive in the pursuit of the knowledge of God.

Third was his discipline of prayer….

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Bradley Alford, a money manager in Atlanta, just hit the panic button.

No, really. Mr. Alford just hit the key on his computer that initiates the Wall Street equivalent of the nuclear option: Sell everything.
He was acting on orders from two wealthy clients who became so alarmed by the troubled outlook that they simply wanted out. Over the last 10 days or so, they asked him to sell all of their stocks and invest in a mutual fund he oversees that is somewhat insulated against a potential market collapse.

“I have never, ever done it before,” says Mr. Alford, who is the chairman of Alpha Capital Management and has been managing money for 22 years. “This was unprecedented.”

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“You do have a sense that this is tough territory,” said Mark Tompkins, University of South Carolina political science professor. “Romney is a fiscal moderate who happens to be Mormon. Huntsman is a fiscal moderate who happens to be Mormon.

“Neither of them has an obvious constituent base in South Carolina.

“It is not about religion so much as it is about ideology.”

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Nigerian financial regulators nationalized three banks Friday night in the course of an ever-widening probe of corruption allegations and mismanagement of fiscal institutions in the oil-rich nation.

Authorities took over Afribank PLC, Bank PHB and Spring Bank PLC after markets closed in Africa’s most populous nation, quickly renaming the institutions Mainstreet Bank Ltd., Keystone Bank Ltd. and Enterprise Bank Ltd., the country’s finance ministry said.

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The Anglican Church of Southern Africa will next week officially join an international campaign to end violence against women and girls known as the White Ribbon Pledge campaign.

At the Women’s Day service at St Georges Cathedral Cape Town on Tuesday (9th August), the bishops of the Dioceses of Cape Town, False Bay and Saldanha Bay will be signing a pledge on behalf of their churches “Not to commit, condone or remain silent about all forms of Gender-based violence.”

The White Ribbon Campaign aims to eradicate gender based violence. A statement from the Office of the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town announcing this event states that “Violence and particularly gender-based violence in all its forms is an endemic reality of South African society” and calls everyone to action.

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