O Christ our God, who wilt come to judge the world in the manhood which thou hast assumed: We pray thee to sanctify us wholly, that in the day of thy coming we may be raised up to live and reign with thee for ever.

And the LORD answered gracious and comforting words to the angel who talked with me. So the angel who talked with me said to me, ‘Cry out, Thus says the LORD of hosts: I am exceedingly jealous for Jerusalem and for Zion. And I am very angry with the nations that are at ease; for while I was angry but a little they furthered the disaster. Therefore, thus says the LORD, I have returned to Jerusalem with compassion; my house shall be built in it, says the LORD of hosts, and the measuring line shall be stretched out over Jerusalem. Cry again, Thus says the LORD of hosts: My cities shall again overflow with prosperity, and the LORD will again comfort Zion and again choose Jerusalem.'”

–Zechariah 1:13-17

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone….

Read it all.

Divorce is messy, the lessons from a failed marriage often complicated.

Such is the case with this week’s split of the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMIA) from its majority-world leadership in the Church of Rwanda.
Until the 11-year-old partnership crumbled, it seemed to embody the potential for Global South church leaders to rise up and provide spiritual oversight and direction in the developed world.

Now?

“It would be unwise to draw any general conclusions for the future from a dispute which is clearly about particular human relationships,” said Brian Stanley, director of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh.

Read it all.

The rise of the African church could have made Canterbury an important player in international relations””not exactly a rival to Rome (Catholicism’s one billion adherents make that unlikely) but at least a second European center with which Africans would have felt a relation and to which they could have looked for intellectual and ecclesial authority.

Instead, hardly anyone notices when the archbishop of Canterbury is about to be replaced and the unity of Anglicanism is about to be shattered. The job of the archbishop of Canterbury has always been something of a high-wire act, delicately balanced between the Protestant impulses of the church on one side and its Catholic impulses on the other side. And, from time to time, various archbishops have lost their balance (notably when John Henry Newman slipped away to Catholicism in the battles over the Oxford Movement in the 1840s).

This time, unfortunately, it is the wire itself that is breaking….

Read it all.

Young clergy and seminarians from the Anglican Diocese of Montreal are creating an oasis of peace for shoppers who want a break from the stress of a hectic mall as the Christmas rush gears up.

In the Promenades de la Cathédrale shopping centre on Ste. Catherine St. W., along the corridor that runs parallel to Union St., is a quiet area where people can unwind, pray, meditate, or have a spiritual conversation over a hot drink.

Read it all.

According to the sources, [Dean] Beck and [Bishop] Matthews disagreed on the vexed and complex issue of what to do about the severely damaged cathedral, one of New Zealand’s most instantly recognised and loved buildings.

They say Matthews appears to favour demolishing the cathedral and building a new church, either on the same site or elsewhere. Beck, it is said, wants to repair the cathedral and restore it to its former glory.

They also disagree over the distribution of fundraising money ”“ the bishop wanting to scatter the money among all of Christchurch’s parishes. The bishop is said to have taken full control of all decisions, leaving Beck out in the cold.

Read it all.

There’s a reason that St. Martin Episcopal Church’s Blue Christmass service comes on the shortest day of the year.

The annual service recognizes that holidays are a difficult time for some, especially those who have lost loved ones.

“It’s the day with the least light,” said the Rev. Murdock Smith, rector of St. Martin’s. “It’s not meant to be saccharine or ‘feel good.’ It’s to recognize this is what life’s about, and you don’t have to face it alone.”

Read it all.

Iran will not return a U.S. surveillance drone captured by its armed forces, a senior commander of the country’s elite Revolutionary Guard said Sunday.

Gen. Hossein Salami, deputy head of the Guard, said in remarks broadcast on state television that the violation of Iran’s airspace by the U.S. drone was a “hostile act” and warned of a “bigger” response. He did not elaborate on what Tehran might do.

Read it all.

The problem of racial profiling and other concerns over the state’s immigration policy have prompted religious leaders to call for a humane solution to what seems to be an intractable national problem.

Since 1991, LARCUM, an ecumenical group of South Carolina bishops representing the Lutheran Synod, two Episcopal dioceses, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston and the Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, has been meeting to discuss matters theological, ecumenical, ecclesiastical and practical.

Lately, the conversation has shifted to the issue of illegal immigration. These leaders are promoting dialogue and reconciliation and citing the Bible repeatedly.

Read it all.

There is a fascinating new study coming out of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Its titled “$29,000,000,000,000: A Detailed Look at the Fed’s Bail-out by Funding Facility and Recipient” by James Felkerson. The study looks at the lending, guarantees, facilities and spending of the Federal Reserve.

The researchers took all of the individual transactions across all facilities created to deal with the crisis, to figure out how much the Fed committed as a response to the crisis. This includes direct lending, asset purchases and all other assistance. (It does not include indirect costs such as rising price of goods due to inflation, weak dollar, etc.)

The net total? As of November 10, 2011, it was $29,616.4 billion dollars ”” (or 29 and a half trillion, if you prefer that nomenclature). Three facilities””CBLS, PDCF, and TAF”” are responsible for the lion’s share ”” 71.1% of all Federal Reserve assistance ($22,826.8 billion).

Read it all.

Contrary to the celebratory pieces on voluntary single motherhood by journalists like Roiphe, we found that married parents generally do experience more happiness and less depression than parents who are unmarried. For instance, among women, 50 percent of married mothers report that they are “very happy” with life, compared to 39 percent of cohabiting mothers and 25 percent of single mothers, even after controlling for differences in education, income, and race/ethnicity. The transition to parenthood is hard, but being married helps soften the blow.

We also found that the impact of parenthood is not negative on outcomes such as marital stability or whether one perceives one’s life to have meaning. In fact, married parents — especially women — are significantly more likely to report that their “life has an important purpose,” compared to their childless peers. For instance, 57 percent of married mothers reported high levels of a sense of purpose, compared to 40 percent of childless wives.

Read it all.

The intertwining of religion and sports is nothing new in American culture. Both basketball and volleyball were invented by men involved with chapters of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Massachusetts. Or consider the pioneering college coach Amos Alonzo Stagg (1862-1965), who created the batting cage in baseball, five-man teams for basketball and several of the standard aspects of football, from the man in motion, lateral pass and Statue of Liberty play to helmets, tackling dummies and names on uniforms.

The historian Clifford Putney has written that Stagg and his contemporaries combined faith with sports and competition because they believed that God wanted people to live healthy, vigorous lives. They believed that sports could help to make people good and thereby bring them closer to what God intended for them.

Read it all.

James A. Roberts was watching an ABC News Nightline episode on basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal recently when he heard about the size of the retired player’s Florida home: 70,000 square feet.
Even for a man who spends his time studying consumer behavior as a marketing professor at Baylor University, Roberts was stunned.

His latest book, “Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don’t Have in Search of Happiness We Can’t Buy,” tells the story of the American Dream gone awry by profligate materialism. The size of O’Neal’s home offered further proof.

To Roberts’ mind, what began as “Keeping up with the Joneses” has morphed into “Keeping up with the Gateses” (or, perhaps, the O’Neals).

Read it all.

O Lord Jesus Christ, before whose judgment-seat we must all appear and give account of the things done in the body: Grant, we beseech thee, that when the books are opened in that day, the faces of thy servants may not be ashamed; through thy merits, O blessed Saviour, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.

–Scottish Prayer Book

A Psalm of David, when he was in the Wilderness of Judah. O God, thou art my God, I seek thee, my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is. So I have looked upon thee in the sanctuary, beholding thy power and glory. Because thy steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise thee. So I will bless thee as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on thy name.

–Psalm 63:1-4

On Dec. 6, Christ Episcopal Church in Woodbury seated its fourth child bishop in observance of The Feast of Saint Nicholas. Selecting a child bishop is a tradition of many English cathedral choir schools and collegiate chapels.

This year, Kaitlyn Johnson, a fifth grader, was selected as child bishop.

Read it all.

We Jjouranlists are probably too bleary-eyed after a sleepless night to understand the full significance of what has just happened in Brussels. What is clear is that after a long, hard and rancorous negotiation, at about 5am this… [past Friday] the European Union split in a fundamental way.

In an effort to stabilise the euro zone, France, Germany and 21 other countries have decided to draft their own treaty to impose more central control over national budgets. Britain and three others have decided to stay out. In the coming weeks, Britain may find itself even more isolated. Sweden, the Czech Republic and Hungary want time to consult their parliaments and political parties before deciding on whether to join the new union-within-the-union.

So two decades to the day after the Maastricht Treaty was concluded, launching the process towards the single European currency, the EU’s tectonic plates have slipped momentously along same the fault line that has always divided it””the English Channel.

Read it all.

Contemporary western societies have witnessed the emergence of a new tribalism, fuelled by the logic of capitalism with its proliferation of niche identities and by the politics of multiculturalism with its advocacy of mere “difference,” while lacking the language to articulate any vision of a common good.

Such multicultural pluralism is a mirror image of the postmodern ethics of difference, where each person is assumed to be absolutely “other.”

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams argues that, once this doctrine of otherness has taken hold of political imagination, we are left with the depressing prospect of “a world in which there aren’t and couldn’t be any real discussion of the goals and destiny of human beings as such.”

Read it all.

He looks very suspicious to me (g)–KSH.

Before “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” first hit off-Broadway and Broadway, respectively, 40 years ago ”” the first like an ember that caught fire, the other like an explosion ”” who but the most prescient or devout would have laid odds on any musical that ended with a crucifixion?

But both shows have been entertaining audiences ever since. And there’s no sign of either of them wearing thin. A revival of “Godspell” opened on Broadway this fall; and a revival of “Superstar,” born at Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival and now playing at the La Jolla Playhouse, is slated for Broadway next spring. One can’t help wonder what it is about these works that enabled them to beat the odds when they were new and that has enticed a new generation now to try to reproduce their success.

Read it all.

When Rob Schwarzwalder, senior vice president at the Family Research Council, criticized evangelical groups for ignoring threats to religious freedom, he got some pushback.

“[T]o say that these organizations have not spoken out is not true,” concluded one article in the Christian Post, though it also acknowledged that Schwarzwalder might be looking for a “more robust and vocal outcry” than the organizations had provided.

The dispute was aired in online posts on the website of First Things, the journal that offers ecumenical and interreligious commentary on the role of religion in the public square. It signaled that some leading evangelicals have begun to reassess their response to a developing political issue.

Read it all.

The positive reactions appeared to be driven by relief that leaders had reached an agreement at all, rather than enthusiasm for the deal itself. If recent history is any guide, the glow could fade fast as investors focus on the details, or on a continued lack of clarity over what role the European Central Bank will play.

“The summit was the first step toward fiscal integration, which is a problem we need to solve, but it will be a long, drawn-out process,” said Mohit Kumar, head of European rates strategy at Deutsche Bank in London….

Read it all.

A $1.5 million renovation of a retreat center launches Dec. 16 on Albuquerque’s Westside.

The Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande purchased the Conference and Spiritual Life Center at 6400 Coors NW in January for $1.7 million and is investing $1.5 million to expand and upgrade it. It will have state-of-the-art conference capabilities, a 45-room retreat house and will house the offices of the diocese.

Read it all.

[Yesterday]… on Register Radio, in response to a listener’s questions, we had long-time National Catholic Register columnist Father Dwight Longenecker on. He recounted his journey from evangelical Christianity to becoming an Anglican minister, and eventually his conversion to the Catholic Church and ordination as a Catholic priest. Father Longenecker provided some insight into the structure of the ordinariate, which is allowing Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church. He also shared with listeners what was the tipping point for him in considering Catholicism.

Check it out.

While sexual intimacy, commitment and communication are important, the focus on generosity adds a new dimension to our understanding of marital success. Though this conclusion may seem fairly self-evident, it’s not always easy to be generous to a romantic partner. The noted marriage researcher John Gottman has found that successful couples say or do at least five positive things for each negative interaction with their partner ”” not an easy feat.

“In marriage we are expected to do our fair share when it comes to housework, child care and being faithful, but generosity is going above and beyond the ordinary expectations with small acts of service and making an extra effort to be affectionate,” explains the University of Virginia’s W. Bradford Wilcox, who led the research. “Living that spirit of generosity in a marriage does foster a virtuous cycle that leads to both spouses on average being happier in the marriage.”

Social scientists are now wondering if this virtuous cycle extends to children too.

Read it all.

“Businesses, are, in reality, quasi-religious sects. When you go to work in one, you embrace A New Faith. And if they are really big businesses, you progress from faith to a kind of mystique. Belief in the product, preaching the product, in the end the product becomes the focus of a transcendental experience. Through ‘the product’ one communes with the vast forces of life, nature, and history that are expressed in business.”

–Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York, Doubleday, 1965), p. 232

Gracious God, who didst call thy monk Thomas Merton to proclaim thy justice out of silence, and moved him in his contemplative writings to perceive and value Christ at work in the faiths of others: Keep us, like him, steadfast in the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ; who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Almighty God, source of justice beyond human knowledge: We offer thanks that thou didst inspire Karl Barth to resist tyranny and exalt thy saving grace, without which we cannot apprehend thy will. Teach us, like him, to live by faith, and even in chaotic and perilous times to perceive the light of thy eternal glory, Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, throughout all ages. Amen.