Crude’s down 28% since its February high. Corn’s down about 17%. Gold’s down 12%.

This slide in commodities, though, is a reaction to slowing economies, which makes for a curious leap of logic when one tries to argue that falling commodity prices will help boost those same economies.

“It makes little sense to expect a fall in the oil price to kick-start global growth if it is weak demand which pushed prices down in the first place,” Capital Economics economist Andrew Kenningham wrote. While cheaper gas prices do act as a transfer of income from oil producers ”“ think Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips ”“ to consumers, it’s likely to have only a small effect on global GDP, “depending on the propensities to spend and save among producers and consumers.”

Read it all.

The recent religious comedies of the Carrel/Carrey ilk aren’t hostile to religion, per se. Nor do they question the existence of the divine or suggest that believers are suckers.

But they do deliver a vastly diminished deity. The God portrayed by Morgan Freeman in “Bruce Almighty” is not an awe-inspiring lawgiver and judge but a warm, if occasionally demanding, friend of the people. God tells Bruce that the problem with human beings is that they keep looking up to God for help rather than looking to one another.

Maybe these literal representations of man’s interactions with God aren’t the most interesting divine comedies being made today.

Read it all.

All too often, Cristiano Ronaldo stuns the world with his fine footwork. On Thursday, the Portugal superstar used the determination of a raging bull to make the difference.

Ronaldo used his head to score the lone goal against the Czech Republic and send his team into the European Championship semifinals with a 1-0 victory.

Read it all.

“So, you felt 40 yesterday,” one reporter said, drawing a large smile from Pettitte.

Upon reaching the mid-life milestone, Pettitte listed his three main priorities in life. Baseball came in last. A 17-year career marked by three All-Star games, eight 15-win seasons and five World Series rings ranked behind his strong faith and his relationship with his family.

“That’s just what it’s all about. I try to show humility in everything I do” he said. “I felt like God gave me the ability to do this, so why should I be arrogant about this?”

Read it all.

Lefty see, lefty do.

Hours after he watched senior left-hander Michael Roth’s two-hitter against Kent State keep South Carolina’s season alive, freshman lefty Jordan Montgomery did his best imitation of the Gamecocks’ undisputed team leader when he got his turn against Arkansas on Thursday night.

Montgomery held the Razorbacks to three singles over eight innings, and the two-time defending national champions won 2-0 to force a rematch Friday night that will decide which team goes to the best-of-three College World Series finals against Arizona.

Read it all.

Post-recession America is beginning to open its wallet to charities again, but is not giving as generously to religious institutions.

While charitable donations from individuals rose nearly four percent overall in 2011, according to the annual “Giving USA” report, donations to houses of worship and other religious bodies dropped by 1.7 percent — a decrease for the second year in a row, Religion News Service reports.

Read it all.

Read it all (29 page pdf).

When asked by Episcopal News Service, the Rev. Canon Gregory Straub, General Convention secretary and the church’s executive officer, said that to his knowledge this was the first time a presiding bishop had proposed a budget after Executive Council had sent its draft budget to the Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance.

“I didn’t know that Bishop Katharine was preparing her own budget,” House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson said via email June 21.

Read it all.

Following the end of the consultation period on the draft Reorganisation Scheme for the dioceses of Bradford, Ripon & Leeds and Wakefield, the Dioceses Commission has met to consider over 100 submissions made to it. It also heard oral evidence from representatives of the diocesan synods of the three dioceses. It is grateful to all those who took the trouble to write in, and to meet with it.

The Commission has had an initial discussion about these submissions and will be giving further consideration to them over the summer.

The Commission has decided to proceed with a scheme which will be published later this year, as planned. The details of that scheme will be worked out over the next few months.

Read it all.

The Bishop of Bath & Wells, Peter Price has commended Partnership for Change – a new strategy paper from Christian Aid, launched at Lambeth Palace last week.

Following the launch, Bishop Peter said, “I hope that churches across Bath & Wells can harness this renewed energy around aid issues, as heralded in the paper, as an opportunity for grassroots action.”

Read it all.

For many people in the country, the great countdown was to the Olympic Games, the Secretary Gen­eral to the General Synod, William Fittall, said at a press briefing last Friday.
For many in the Church, however, an important countdown was to the final vote on women bishops at the General Synod, when it meets in York from 6 to 10 July.

“It is the first time in 20 years when the Church of England has to face so significant a two-thirds vote. Some will go away rejoicing, while others will be disappointed.”

The Church had long been trying to work out a position where there were not just winners and losers, Mr Fittall said, but a way forward that could deliver good news to as many people as possible.

Read it all.

Joining a move toward nonsectarian prayer, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department has asked its chaplains to stop including Jesus in their invocations at official department ceremonies.

The change, which applies to such events as police graduations, promotions and memorials, took place about a month ago, said Maj. John Diggs, who heads the department’s volunteer chaplain program. The goal: greater sensitivity to all religions practiced by the more than 2,000 police employees.

“This is not in any way an effort to demean anybody’s Christian beliefs,” Diggs said. “It’s to show respect for all the religious practices in our organization. CMPD is not anybody’s church.”

Read it all.

This post was set up to stay at the top for a little while but has now gone back to its place in the chronological line, so if you are still looking for it or the discussion about it you can find it there.

The threat to freedom of information in Poland, with attempts to limit the broadcasts of the country’s only Catholic television station, is a little known issue in the rest of the world.

On Dec. 19, 2011, the National Council of Polish Radio and Television (KRRiT in Polish) did not grant the country’s only Catholic television station space on the new digital platform, which from 2013 will ensure Poles free access to a series of TV broadcasts.

Read it all.

If Mitt Romney wins the presidential election this fall, he’ll have Harry Reid partly to thank.

The Republican presidential nominee and the Senate Democratic leader don’t have much in common politically. But they’re both members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ”” that is, they’re both Mormons.

So whenever officials of the LDS church are asked about the once-common concern that a Mormon president might take orders from Salt Lake City, they have a ready answer: Just look at Harry Reid. Only last month, Reid endorsed President Obama’s decision to support gay marriage, a position that conflicts with the church’s views.

Read it all.

Almighty God, by whose grace and power thy holy martyr Alban triumphed over suffering and was faithful even unto death: Grant to us, who now remember him with thanksgiving, to be so faithful in our witness to thee in this world, that we may receive with him the crown of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

We beseech thee, O Lord, to guide thy Church with thy perpetual governance; that it may walk warily in times of quiet, and boldly in times of trouble; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Franciscan Breviary

Dost thou work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise thee?…Is thy steadfast love declared in the grave, or thy faithfulness in Abaddon? Are thy wonders known in the darkness, or thy saving help in the land of forgetfulness?

–Psalm 88:10-12

The Pope spoke of the situation at the end of the general audience, saying he is following the news with “deep concern,” as “acts of terrorism directed especially against Christian faithful continue.”

Read it all.

As financial markets slide toward disaster, scarcely pausing to celebrate the “success” of the Greek election or the deal to recapitalize Spanish banks, the euro project is finally revealing its fatal flaw. One country poses an existential threat to Europe ”“ and it is not Greece, Italy or Spain. Every serious proposal to resolve the euro crisis since 2009 ”“ haircuts for bank bondholders, more realistic fiscal consolidation targets, jointly guaranteed eurobonds, a pan-European bailout fund, quantitative easing by the European Central Bank ”“ has been vetoed by Germany, and this pattern looks likely to be repeated next week.

Nobody should be surprised that Germany has become the greatest threat to Europe. After all, this has happened twice before since 1914. To state this unmentionable fact is not to impugn Germans with original sin, but merely to note Germany’s unusual geopolitical situation….

Read it all.

The French, as usual, insist on being different. As independent bookstores crash and burn in the United States and Britain, the book market in France is doing just fine. France boasts 2,500 bookstores, and for every neighborhood bookstore that closes, another seems to open. From 2003 to 2011 book sales in France increased by 6.5 percent.

E-books account for only 1.8 percent of the general consumer publishing market here, compared with 6.4 percent in the United States. The French have a centuries-old reverence for the printed page.

“There are two things you don’t throw out in France ”” bread and books,” said Bernard Fixot, owner and publisher of XO, a small publishing house dedicated to churning out best sellers. “In Germany the most important creative social status is given to the musician. In Italy it’s the painter. Who’s the most important creator in France? It’s the writer.”

Read it all.

No, I didn’t make it up. Read it all.

Is that an unintentionally funny headline or what?

According to the Pew Center on the States, 2.7 million U.S. children have a parent behind bars. Most face multiple challenges, ranging from extreme poverty to lack of a stable adult presence in their lives. Yet the country produces nowhere near 2.7 million volunteer mentors.

“A shortage of mentors is always the most difficult problem,” said Ann Adalist-Estrin, director of the National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.

Boys with incarcerated parents are especially hard to match. According to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, they constitute the vast majority on waiting lists, and only 30 percent of mentors for children of prisoners are men.

–G. Jeffrey MacDonald in the June 13, 2012, Christian Century, page 12

In interpreting the state equal protection guarantee, Illinois courts follow federal precedents interpreting the Equal Protection Clause. But there is no Supreme Court decision subjecting classifications based on sexual orientation to the standards that apply to classifications based on race (strict scrutiny) or gender (intermediate scrutiny). In Romer v. Evans (1996), the Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s Amendment 2, which barred special legislation protecting gays and lesbians, under the rational basis standard of review. But the narrow and focused prohibition of same-sex marriage cannot be equated with the breadth and scope of Amendment 2. And every federal court of appeals to have considered the issue has concluded that classifications based on one’s sexual orientation are subject only to the “rational basis” standard of review.

The reservation of marriage to opposite-sex couples easily passes that standard. Extending marriage to same-sex couples would not promote either of the two primary purposes for which society recognizes the institution of marriage””providing a stable environment for children procreated by heterosexual sexual activity and providing the benefits of dual-gender parenting for the children so procreated.

Read it all.

NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday.

Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ”˜death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.

He claimed there was often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway, a method of looking after terminally ill patients that is used in hospitals across the country.

Read it all.

(For the background on this, please see this earlier blog post)–KSH.

From here:

Aaron Edward Kimel, 32, died in the early hours of June 15, 2012, in Roanoke. Aaron lived most of his childhood in Highland, Md. He attended the Academic Magnet High School in Charleston, S.C., where he was the football team’s all-time leading rusher. He graduated from the University of Delaware in 2001, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy and Physics, and continued to study Philosophy for two years at the University of Washington. He later graduated from the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University in 2010, after which he moved to Roanoke. He was a lifelong scholar with a passion for Civil War history, comic books, and all the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, of which his knowledge was encyclopedic. From infancy, he celebrated a lifetime of love and loyalty for the Washington Redskins.
Aaron is survived by his parents, Alvin F. Kimel Jr. and Christine McKenna Kimel; his siblings, Alvin Kimel III, Bredon Kimel, and Taryn Kimel; his grandparents, Ninon Kimel and Georgene McKenna; his aunts, Ninon Koch, Kathleen Kelly, and Patricia McKenna; his uncles Richard and Joseph McKenna; close family member cousin Ninon Alexandra Kimel; and his three closest friends, Brian and Jill Barrett and Laura Hirshfield. Aaron was preceded in death by his grandparents, Alvin F. Kimel Sr. and Edward C. McKenna; his uncles, Edward and Lawrence McKenna; and his beloved cat, Jean-Luc.
The funeral will be held at St. Thomas of Canterbury Anglican Catholic Church in Roanoke at 11 a.m. on Friday, June 22, 2012.
In lieu of flowers, please send donations in Aaron’s name to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention at http://www.afsp.org/.

I am to talk about apologetics. Apologetics means of course defense. The first question is –What do you propose to defend? Christianity, of course: and Christianity as understood by the church in Wales. And here at the outset I must deal with an unpleasant business. It seems to the layman that in the Church of England we often hear from our priests doctrine which is not Anglican Christianity. It may depart from Anglican Christianity in either of two ways: (1) It may be so “broad” or “liberal” or “modern” that it in fact excludes any real supernaturalism and thus ceases to be Christian at all. (2) It may, on the other hand, be Roman. It is not, of course, for me to define to you what Anglican Christianity is–I am your pupil, not your teacher. But I insist that wherever you draw the lines, bounding lines must exist, beyond which your doctrine will cease to be Anglican or to be Christian: and I suggest also that the lines come a great deal sooner than many modern priest think. I think it is your duty to fix the lines clearly in your own minds: and if you wish to go beyond them you must change your profession.

This is your duty not specifically as Christians or as priests but as honest men. There is a danger here of the clergy developing a special professional conscience which obscures the very plain moral issue. Men who have passed beyond these boundary lines in either direction are apt to protest that they have come by their unorthodox opinions honestly. In defense of these opinions they are prepared to suffer obloquy and to forfeit professional advancement. They thus come to feel like martyrs. But this simply misses the point which so gravely scandalizes the layman. We never doubted that the unorthodox opinions were honestly held: what we complain of is your continuing you ministry after you have come to hold them. We always knew that a man who makes his living as a paid agent of the Conservative party may honestly change his views and honestly become a Communist. What we deny is that he can honestly continue to be a Conservative agent and to receive money from one party while he supports the policy of another.

Even when we have thus ruled out teaching which is in direct contradiction to our profession, we must define our task still further. We are to defend Christianity itself–the faith preached by the Apostles, attested by the Martyrs, embodied in the Creeds, expounded by the Fathers.

–C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), pp.89-90 (emphasis mine)

The Episcopal Church is struggling to redefine its order and mission in the face of rapidly declining membership amid a radically changing civil society. The role of bishops has always been central to our church ”” hence our church’s name ”” but this role is now itself a part of the struggle for the Episcopal Church’s faithful mission. What are bishops for? To what are they accountable? How should they engage in the oversight (episcope) of the Church and what role should they have in her councils and decision-making? General Convention is only one place, if a key one, where these questions arise. Without addressing particular issues before Convention that involve our bishops ”” their constitutional responsibilities, doctrinal authority, discipline, and role in the Communion ”” let me suggest, in the form of several theses, some foundational elements that ought to inform our church’s understanding of her bishops.

1. The full description of the episcopal office is given in the Holy Scriptures’ description of Jesus Christ. This is because this full description of Jesus Christ is the figure that the episcopal office represents (1 Pet. 2:25).

2. The office of the bishop is properly understood only within the contours of the whole Scriptures, for it is all the Scriptures that coherently describe Christ Jesus….

Read it all.