The Church of England has welcomed the news that cuts to BBC local radio are to be halved compared to original proposals, saying this is an endorsement of the importance of local communities.

The BBC Trust document published this month was its final report into cost-saving plans (known as the “Delivering Quality First” review) and confirmed that local radio savings would now be in the region of £8m compared to the original proposal of £15m.

In its submission to the BBC review in December the CofE had warned that local radio must not be ignored and challenged the proposed cuts stressing the importance of local radio to the community, both in times of crisis or seasonal emergencies, and on a daily basis,.

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…whether they want to call attention to it or not, Romney’s achievement is historic. Nearly 200 years after the founding of Mormonism by Joseph Smith, who himself ran for president to call attention to his flock’s persecution, Romney’s nomination signals how far his faith, and the country’s acceptance of it, has come.

“If you look at it in a historical perspective, it’s absolutely incredible,” said Richard Lyman Bushman, a leading Mormon scholar and longtime acquaintance of Romney’s. “A century-and-a-half ago, Mormons were detested as a people as well as a religion. They were thought to be primitive and crude. And now to have someone overcome all the lingering prejudice, that’s a milestone.”

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A video camera, audio files and blogging software all helped Diane DiResta handle the recent deaths of loved ones.

When her 91-year-old aunt passed away in 2010, DiResta videotaped the eulogies to create a record of the moving words spoken. She wasn’t ready to talk about her aunt at the service, so she used AudioAcrobat to record her thoughts, then e-mailed that audio file to close family.

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Russia is “categorically against” foreign intervention in Syria and believes any new steps by the UN Security Council would be “premature”, its deputy foreign minister has said.

Gennady Gatilov’s remarks to Interfax news agency come amid international outrage over a massacre on Friday.

Women and children made up the majority of the 108 victims in Houla.

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Strengthen us, we beseech thee, O Lord, with the Holy Ghost the Comforter, and daily increase in us thy manifold gifts of grace; the spirit of wisdom and understanding; the spirit of counsel and strength; the spirit of knowledge and true godliness; and fill us, O Lord, with the spirit of thy holy fear, now and for ever.

The saying is sure: If any one aspires to the office of bishop, he desires a noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, dignified, hospitable, an apt teacher, no drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and no lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way; for if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how can he care for God’s church? He must not be a recent convert, or he may be puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil; moreover he must be well thought of by outsiders, or he may fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

–1 Timothy 3:1-7

“Conservatives say you cannot pick and choose but that’s exactly what they do because the same texts that condemn homosexuality condemn the eating of shellfish,” he said. “I haven’t heard any conservative churchman campaign against shellfish in the last few years.”

–[Anglican Church of Canada] Bishop Michael Ingham, the New York Times, July 5, 2003

It is very sad that an argument of such little weight keeps rearing its head but this is where TEC leadership is these days, alas. Nnick Knisely is not happy with Al Mohler and so he enlists a gentleman named Fred Clark to try to combat Mohler’s jettisoning of the shellfish argument. Matt Kennedy takes apart the feeble attempt of Mr. Clark over here. Please familiarize yourself with all those posts and then take the time to bookmark as well as read through this 2008 blog thread with over 100 comments [which has its origins in a thread from the original T19 blog in 2003], noting most especially the arguments by yours truly and by Chris Seitz in comments #1 and #2.

Update: there is more from 2009 and Randall Balmer’s recycling of the argument there.

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The crisis has exposed sharp differences between some Europeans. Germany is the most admired nation in the EU and its leader the most respected. The Germans are judged to be Europe’s most hardworking people. And the Germans are the strongest supporters of both European economic integration and the European Union.

Greece is the polar opposite. None of its fellow EU members surveyed see it in a positive light. In turn, Greeks are among the most disparaging of European economic integration and the harshest critics of the European Union. And they see themselves as Europe’s most hardworking people.

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Brian Baker’s family and friends had waited years to see him play at the French Open””nine years, to be exact, since he made the boy’s final in 2003. They weren’t going to settle for bad seats.

So the Baker clan, 11 strong and ever optimistic, arrived at Court 6 at Roland Garros as two other men finished off a five-setter that had been held over due to darkness the night before. Next up were two women who played a three-set match while Baker’s entourage scouted out a section in the corner bleachers. Finally they sat and then watched as the most remarkable story of the spring tennis season got even better.

Brian Baker, the 27-year-old American who took six years off from pro tennis and had five operations, won his first match at the French Open, 6-3, 7-6(1), 7-6(5) over Xavier Malisse. He’ll play Gilles Simon of France on Wednesday, perhaps inside Court Philippe Chatrier. “It’s definitely something I didn’t envision,” Baker said.

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The American Dream is a crucial thread in this country’s tapestry, woven through politics, music and culture.

Though the phrase has different meanings to different people, it suggests an underlying belief that hard work pays off and that the next generation will have a better life than the previous generation.

But three years after the worst recession in almost a century, the American Dream now feels in jeopardy to many….

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The five candidates seeking to become the ninth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts, which includes Worcester County, come from diverse backgrounds and include a former music industry executive, a former Roman Catholic priest and book editor, and a former banker.

Clergy and lay delegates will vote on a new bishop Saturday at Christ Church Cathedral in Springfield.

Pending the consent of the church’s 77th General Convention, which will be held in July, the new prelate will be ordained Dec. 1 during ceremonies at the MassMutual Center, also in Springfield.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Watch it all–please.

The three congregations of St Christopher’s on the Costa Azahar, north of Valencia, united in the service in a church member’s large garden overlooking the Mediterranean in Ampolla.

Their Australian locum priest, Fr. Kevin Ellem, spoke passionately of the power of God’s Spirit to invigorate His Church today. Fr Kevin added a native touch to the occasion by leading the service wearing an outback approved sun hat.

Read it all and enjoy the pictures.

“The new arrangements are being tested at a time when the Church is more polarised now than at any time in its recent history,” says Andrew Carey, a columnist in the Church of England Newspaper and son of the former Archbishop of Canterbury. “The controversy around the appointment of [the openly gay] Jeffrey John as a bishop in 2003, and his subsequent withdrawal, and then the decision to go ahead with women bishops, have only deepened the divisions during Rowan’s time as Archbishop. These issues now hang over the Church like a stalactite.”

Carey is broadly on the Low Church or Evangelical wing of the Church of England. At the other end of the spectrum, the novelist and churchgoer Kate Saunders shares his pessimism about any “unity” candidate emerging. “We sometimes pride ourselves as Anglicans on being a broad church, and that does have many benefits, but the downside is that we can never agree with each other, even on the most basic questions, such as whether we are essentially a Protestant church or a reformed Catholic church. And that debate goes all the way back to the Reformation.”

In more recent times, the chosen method for keeping the various factions of the Church content when selecting an Archbishop of Canterbury has been to alternate High Church and Low Church appointments. Or Catholic and Evangelical, if you prefer those terms (labels are another thing Anglicans disagree on)….

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The number of Americans and Canadians being cremated upon their deaths is rising sharply, according to data collected by the Cremation Association of North America. Both countries lag far behind Britain, where funeral directors confronted the shift decades ago.

Americans are more conservative and religious in their attitudes towards the final disposition of their loved ones than Britons, death care industry experts say.

Evidence for that can be seen in the regional breakdown: Cremation is least prevalent in the so-called “Bible belt” states of the South-East….

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A Letter From The Rector (James Cooper)

Dear Trinity Family,

I am writing today to inform you of a decision undertaken by the current Vestry. After extensive study, conversation, and deliberation, it has been decided that the Trinity Conference Center in West Cornwall, Connecticut, will cease operations effective in November.

The Trinity Conference Center was created so that non-profit and religious organizations could have access to a first-class site for conferences and retreats at reduced and accessible rates. For countless vestries, parishioners, grassroots organizations, and non-profit leaders, the center was a place where excellence in hospitality and beautiful surroundings inspired reflection, conversation, and the kind of being together that truly brought people together….

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Listen to it all if you so desire.

Look at them all (27 total, auto play slideshow option available).

A fertilizer bomb could have caused the blast that ripped through a building full of small shops, an official told The Associated Press on Tuesday as the FBI joined the investigation.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the smell of ammonia at the scene of Monday’s explosion on Moi Avenue indicates the possible presence of a fertilizer bomb, which is commonly made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.

Among the 33 people wounded was a woman who blamed the blast on a “bearded man” who left behind a bag shortly before the detonation.

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Not only did Egypt pull off its first democratic presidential election in the country’s history last week, but it managed to make it a relatively clean vote. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter told journalists in Cairo over the weekend that international monitors working for the Carter Center had noted minor violations during the election, but nothing so serious as to impact the result. Enthusiasm seemed high: Egypt’s electoral commission reported a relatively strong turnout.

And yet the results are not what anyone expected. Neither of the two initial front runners for the June 16 and 17 runoff vote qualified for that round of voting. Instead, the two men who are now expected to come out on top are the two most polarizing candidates on the ballot: the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsy and ousted President Hosni Mubarak’s former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik. “It’s a charade,” says Adel al-Sobki, who owns a Cairo supermarket and says he voted for the Arab nationalist candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi. “We’re now stuck with either the old regime or the Muslim Brotherhood.”

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…at the center””indispensable to the rest””is the service marriage does to the bond between a child and its natural parents. “Sex makes babies, and babies need a mother and a father,” as Maggie Gallagher (an indefatigable champion) likes to say. Marriage is designed to make it more likely that children will have and keep their parents.

Same-sex marriage proponents, for their part, are forced to set aside this concern. On their view, the parent-child bond lies beyond the immediate purview of marriage, as does the particular sexual act that produces children. Marriage is simply the formalization of an intimate relationship between adults. If those adults happen to produce or obtain children, well, that is another matter. Moreover, their bond with those children does not require any particular family structure to support it; good outcomes can be had from diverse family structures….

The champions of marriage respond that they are very much in favor of adult bonding, which the institution is indeed meant to serve. That bonding, though good in itself, is for a purpose beyond itself, however. It is for a purpose of public as well as private interest, the purpose of procreation and child-rearing. It is not necessary, they point out, to hold that procreation constitutes the only good of marriage in order to recognize that procreation is an essential good of marriage. Nor, for that matter, is it necessary to hold that a childless marriage is not a marriage, at least where the childlessness is not deliberate””a matter rightly shielded from public scrutiny. But they insist that to exclude procreation as an essential or defining good makes nonsense of marriage.

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Almighty and everliving God, whose servant Thomas Cranmer, with others, did restore the language of the people in the prayers of thy Church: Make us always thankful for this heritage; and help us so to pray in the Spirit and with the understanding, that we may worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Almighty and most merciful God, who hast given thy Son to die for our sins and to obtain eternal redemption for us through his own blood: Let the merit of his spotless sacrifice, we beseech thee, purge our consciences from dead works to serve thee, the living God, that we may receive the promise of eternal inheritance in Christ Jesus our Lord; to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be honour and glory, world without end.

–German Reformed Church

O LORD, I love the habitation of thy house, and the place where thy glory dwells.

–Psalm 26:8

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up””for you the flag is flung””for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths””for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

–Walt Whitman (1819”“1892)

What a wonderful ministry–watch it all.

Watch and listen to it all.

I walk down the garden-paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jeweled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden-paths.
My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whalebone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime-tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.
And the splashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden-paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover.
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon–
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
“Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday se’nnight.”
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
“Any answer, Madam,” said my footman.
“No,” I told him.
“See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer.”
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, “It shall be as you have said.”
Now he is dead.

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

–Amy Lowell (1874 – 1925)

“My Fellow Americans:

“Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

“And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

“Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

“They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
“They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest — until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

“For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.&

“Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

“And for us at home — fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them — help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

“Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

“Give us strength, too — strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

“And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

“And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment — let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

“With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace — a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

“Thy will be done, Almighty God.

“Amen.”

You can listen to the actual audio if you want here.