When computerized stock trading runs amok, as it did this week on Wall Street, the firm responsible typically can jump in and hit a kill switch.

But as a torrent of faulty trades spewed Wednesday morning from a Knight Capital Group trading program, no one at the firm managed to stop it for more than a half-hour….

Several market insiders said that they were bewildered, because in a market where trading losses can pile up in seconds, executives typically have a simple command that can immediately halt trading.

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Would it be a bad thing if the Church of England were disestablished?

It would be a very bad thing. I don’t think that we always appreciate as a society the role that the Church of England plays in being there for us all. Being the spiritual glue that cements the social fabric of our society. It’s not just about the important role that Bishops play in the House of Lords or on state occasions, the Church of England has a far wider role than that.

Did you know that more people volunteer for church organisations than any other organisation or group in the country? Up and down the country the Church of England is present in every community, in the North and in the South, in rural and urban settings, everywhere ”“ it has a unique role to play in maintaining and promoting community.

It’s not just about tradition, it’s about recognising that even on a basic societal level the Church of England by Law Established is looking out for those in need. As Archbishop William Temple once said, the Church is the only organisation that exists for the wellbeing of its non-members….

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[This one story illustrates the]…crisis facing the custodians of the 12,000 listed Anglican parish churches around the country, two thirds of which are in rural areas with tiny and dwindling congregations struggling to pay maintenance bills. The desperation caused by this funding shortfall has been brought into sharp relief this week by the news that thousands of homeowners living near ancient churches potentially face large bills for the upkeep of their fabric, even if they never set foot inside them.

The Anglican authorities are currently writing to parochial church councils to encourage them to register what are called “chancel repair liabilities”. These date back more than 500 years to the Reformation period and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Those who took over what had been monks’ land took on the responsibility for repairing the chancel (the area around the altar) in the local church. These remain on the statute book, even though they have fallen into abeyance.

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The religious aspect of the violence, the report says, is reinforced by radical Islamist groups like Boko Haram which, the task force believes, exploits the secular issues, and the revenge killings by Christians and Muslims.

The report states: ”˜The joint delegation believes that the primary causes of the current tension and conflict in Nigeria are not inherently based in religion but rather, rooted in a complex matrix of political, social, ethnic, economic, and legal problems, among which the issue of justice””or the lack of it””looms large as a common factor. Nevertheless, the joint delegation acknowledges that there is a possibility that the current tension and conflict might become subsumed by its religious dimension (especially along geographical ”˜religious fault”“lines’) and so particularly warns against letting this idea””through misperception and simplification”” become a self”“ fulfilling prediction.’

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[MARK] LEWIS (St. Luke’s Parish): We left the Episcopal Church not because we were running away from the issues of the Episcopal Church. We left the Episcopal Church because we were running to the Catholic Church. We came to the point where we realized the theology of the Episcopal Church is what was lacking. The theology of Rome, the authority of Rome, the unity in the Holy See and in the bishops: that was appealing to us.

[BOB] FAW: Former Episcopal priest, Father Scott Hurd, married with three children, also found the move to Catholicism seamless. He was ordained into the Catholic Church in 2000 and acted as the chaplain here while Father Lewis waited to be ordained.

FATHER SCOTT HURD (US Ordinariate): There is a real hunger amongst some Episcopalians and Anglicans for authority. It was the question of where can true Christian authority be found that was a key element in this community’s journey.

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In a statement issued Tuesday, the National Association of Evangelicals said that when it surveyed selected evangelical leaders about whether the United States was a Christian nation, 68 percent said no.

“Much of the world refers to America as a Christian nation, but most of our Christian leaders don’t think so,” said Leith Anderson, the association’s president. “The Bible only uses the word ‘Christian’ to describe people and not countries. Even those who say America is a Christian nation admit that there are lots of non-Christians and even anti-Christian beliefs and behaviors.”

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The Church of England took a significant step towards choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury… [in late July] when the 16-person committee responsible for the decision met in secret to draw up a shortlist.

Candidates have been interviewed for the first time as the Crown Nominations Commission tries to find someone who can succeed Rowan Williams and bring peace to the Church’s warring parties in battles over homosexuals and women bishops, while helping the Church in its fight against “militant secularism”.

Among those in the running are the Bishop of Coventry, the Right Rev Christopher Cocksworth ”” the favourite ”” the Bishop of Norwich, the Right Rev Graham James, and the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu. Also in contention are the Bishop of Liverpool, the Right Rev James Jones, and the Bishop of Durham, the Right Rev Justin Welby. Bishop Welby was recently appointed to the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards to help to investigate the Libor rate-fixing scandal, a move that is thought to have increased his chances of taking the top job.

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South Africa’s Oscar Pistorius made history by becoming the first amputee sprinter to compete at the Olympics.
The four-time Paralympic champion, 25, whose legs were amputated below the knee as a baby, finished second in his 400m heat in a time of 45.44 seconds to reach Sunday’s semi-final.
“I didn’t know if I should cry or be happy. It was such a mix of emotions,” Pistorius told BBC Sport.

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If our behaviour patterns have shaped our consciousness towards money-domination, it is new behaviour patterns that will be the form of our resistance. Naming the idol and its power is a start. Insisting that our congregations see money as a spiritual issue, to be struggled with in Lent, for instance, is another step forward. Joining the Christian Council for Monetary Justice (www.ccmj.org) or other campaigns that help us to rehearse for a different world is next. Supporting actions that will rein in the debt explosion and restore to the people and their representatives control over the instruments of exchange is the aim.

When, last autumn, St Paul’s Institute published “Value and Values”, its survey of the ­attitudes of finance-sector ­professionals, one aspect was enormously striking. While the majority of those surveyed thought they were overpaid, they also admitted that it was the money that kept them in the work. And while they thought deregulation was vital, they also thought it lowered ethical standards. It is this sense of lived contradiction that tells us that we need to stop shouting “greed” and work with the professionals to understand this trap. After all, bankers reflect our values too.

Our slavery to the principalities and powers represented by what money has been allowed to become has to be broken. Among the blandishments of choice that money seems to offer, one choice is often hidden: “You cannot be slave to God and Mammon.”

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I don’t wish to diminish the psychological and economic impact of divorce. But if we truly are relational beings, then divorce is centrally an issue not of psychology nor of economics but of ontology””an issue of our very being. It therefore feels a little like being erased, like losing our being in the deep divide that separates our divorcing parents.

When a young person is informed of her parents’ divorce, it might be that her deepest questions are about her being: How can I be at all now that Mom and Dad aren’t together? Now that they are two, she is unavoidably divided. She has one room at Mom’s and another at Dad’s, one schedule at Dad’s and another at Mom’s. As philosopher Martin Heidegger said, we have our being in our practical way of living, in our actions. And now post-divorce, because this young person’s action and living is divided, so too is her very being. Her parents are seeking to reverse, to go back, to be as if the two never became one. But she can’t do this because she belongs (in the very material of her person that acts with and for them) to both of them.

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Most of the world was pessimistic about the job market last year, according to Gallup surveys conducted in 146 countries in 2011. Fifty-seven percent of adults worldwide, on average, said it was a bad time to find a job in their local communities, while 33% said it was a good time. Europeans were the most pessimistic, with 72% saying it was a bad time. Optimism was highest in the Americas, where a still dismal 38% said it was a good time.

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O Lord Jesus Christ, thou good shepherd of the sheep, who didst come to seek and to save that which was lost: Inspire us and thy whole Church, we beseech thee, with thine own compassion for those who have wandered from thy fold and are lost; help us to be witnesses to them of thy love; and teach us what thou wouldest have us to do towards leading them home to thee; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.

While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place. And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sum of money to the soldiers and said, “Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So they took the money and did as they were directed; and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day. Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

–Matthew 28:11-20

Wondering just who everyone is on Facebook? Well, wonder about 83 million fewer of them. Via Mashable, Facebook revealed in their 10-Q that 4.8 percent of the site’s worldwide monthly active user accounts are “duplicate,” meaning “an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account.” The rest are deemed “false” and fall under two headings ”” 1.5 percent are “undesirable,” used for terms of service violating activities like spamming, and 2.4 percent are “user-misclassified” meaning an account wherein “users have created personal profiles for a business, organization, or non-human entity such as a pet.” No matter how cute it is, little Fido’s profile might be deceiving people! So all told, 8.7 percent of Facebook’s users do not correspond to actual people. But considering it has 955 million users, that adds up fast.

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The report provides the latest evidence that the economy lacks the momentum to make a dent in the unemployment rate. It takes roughly 100,000 to 120,000 new jobs a month just to keep unemployment from rising, which the economy failed to do in July. That is because despite July’s impressive gains the U.S. economy has added an average of only 105,000 jobs a month over the past three months.

“We’re treading water,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpont Securities. “We’re not falling down, but we’re also not making up any ground. We’re not getting any closer to a normal type of employment reading.”

Read it all, and make sure to focus on the rate that matters, which is U-6 as we have discussed many times before, it ticked up to 15% this month; in March it was 14.5%–KSH.

The agitators chose a most improbable villain. Dan Cathy is the son of the 91-year-old founder of the company, S. Truett Cathy. Truett is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who is also a committed Christian. His fast-food chain is famous not only for tasty chicken sandwiches but also for being closed on Sundays. The Cathys don’t think of their company as a “Christian company,” but they have sought to run their business on “biblical principles.” This gives them a special interest in families.

“We are very much supportive of the family””the biblical definition of the family unit,” Mr. Cathy explained recently in an interview with the Baptist Press. “We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.”

In virtually every culture, marriage is an institution involving a public commitment between a man and a woman. The complementary nature of men and women points to the unique purpose of marriage: to bear and raise children. One can recognize this fact and so conclude that “same-sex marriage” is an oxymoron””without being “anti-gay.”

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The media really does influence adolescents’ behavior and early exposure to sexual content in the movies leads them to commence sexual activity at an earlier age and to take more risks.

This was the conclusion of a study just published in the journal Psychological Science, titled “Greater Exposure to Sexual Content in Popular Movies Predicts Earlier Sexual Debut and Increased Sexual Risk Taking.”

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Motherlessness and commodification of human life and the womb are concerning. According to the 2010 My Daddy’s Name Is Donor report (released by Blankenhorn’s colleagues at the Institute for American Values), the first large comparative study of young adults conceived via commercial conception, “Donor offspring are significantly more likely than those raised by their biological parents to struggle with serious, negative outcomes such as delinquency, substance abuse, and depression, even when controlling for socio-economic and other factors.”

Being raised by one’s biological parents is not only ideal according to social science research, but according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, it is a human right. My biggest fear is that the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples will strip children of the right to be raised by their natural parents, because law and culture will demand that we celebrate all the means by which same-sex couples become parents.

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At least 16 people have been wounded after Muslims attacked a church and Christian homes in a village near the Egyptian capital, Cairo, officials say.

The unrest in Dahshur, about 40km (25 miles) south of Cairo, started after a Muslim man died of wounds sustained in an earlier clash on Friday.

Violence frequently flares between Egypt’s Muslim majority and its Coptic Christian minority.

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An engineering student is killed for walking with his fiancee by men reportedly linked to a group called the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Women are harassed for not wearing veils, owners of liquor stores say they’re being threatened, and fundamentalists are calling for sex segregation on buses and in workplaces.

Egypt’s recent election of an Islamist president has rekindled a long-suppressed display of public piousness that has aroused both “moral vigilantism” and personal acts of faith, such as demands that police officers and flight attendants be allowed to grow beards. Scattered incidents of violence and intimidation do not appear to have been organized, but they represent a disturbing trend in Egypt’s transition to democracy.

Emerging from decades of secular rule, the country is unsteadily calibrating how deeply Islam should infuse public and private life….

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The growing intensity of the conflict in Syria, and the increasing signs of the rebels’ success, are leaving the country’s Christian minority in a doubly dangerous position. Like all civilians, they are caught in the crossfire; and they are also at risk from the way in which the rebels are being boosted by Islamic extremist fighters.

It is impossible to say how many Christians are among the 17,000 people who have been killed, or the 120,000 who have been forced to flee their homes, but there are indications that many thousands are being affected by the conflict.

The Barnabas Fund, which supports Christians where they are in a minority and suffer discrimination, says that “tens of thousands of Christians have been driven from their cities by threats and violence. Almost the entire Christian populations of Homs and Qusayr have fled to surrounding villages or further afield. . . They are in urgent need of food and other essentials.”

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Madrid–The newest Apple store in Spain, like its counterparts in other parts of the world, is designed to draw you in. Stone floors, glass doors, and rows of blond wood tables stocked with scores of gleaming iPhones, iPads and MacBooks as far as the eye can see.

On a recent weekday afternoon, the cavernous showroom was missing only one thing: customers.

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In 2009, Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberté paid $35-million for a round-trip ticket to the International Space Station, where he trained his lens on several of the Earth’s endangered water systems….There are nine pictures in all. Check them out.

With nearly three million Muslims living in Britain, the observance of Ramadan here is not generally a notable occurrence. Shops are open, businessmen go to work at the regular times and, to outsiders, life seems ordinary enough, save for the absence of eating or drinking from dawn until sunset.

But the Olympics have made this far from an ordinary summer in England, so the arrival of Islam’s holiest month has led to a variety of issues for the estimated 3,000 Muslim athletes and officials at the Games. Questions still linger about how athletes should deal with training, competing and fasting (or whether it is proper for Muslim athletes to fast at all).

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In the contemporary culture of sexual partnerships, both homosexual and heterosexual, it is considered intolerable that the Word of God should deny consenting adults the gratification of their emotional and erotic drives, which are identified as “civil rights”. To non-Christians, of course, the teaching of the Bible and the Christian tradition is irrelevant; but to many Christians the idea that the Word of God and the contemporary culture are in contradiction is simply too painful to contemplate. It must be explained away, or denied outright. The theological difficulties, however, remain and are not abstract unless the Word of God and the will of God are mere abstractions. To treat any of them as though they were is to be cut off from the doctrinal core of one’s religion.

That is not to say that there are not real difficulties in the current understanding and practice of Christian marriage, even among “conservatives”. The advance of a “liberal” moral agenda in matters sexual has been made on the basis of a persistent and unaddressed weakness in the understanding and practice of Christian marriage. A legalistic crackdown will get us nowhere. There will be no real progress on this front, and nothing to be expected but continuing impasse both in the churches and in society in general, until there is a theological and practical recovery of the institution.

–The Rev. Gavin Dunbar is rector Saint John’s, Savannah, and this appeared in a recent parish newsletter.

We beseech thee, O God, the God of truth, that what we know not of the things we ought to know, thou wilt teach us; that what we know, thou wilt keep us therein; that in what we are mistaken, thou wilt correct us; that at whatsoever truths we stumble, thou wilt stablish us; and that from all that is false, and all knowledge that would be hurtful, thou wilt evermore defend us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–After the thought of Saint Fulgentius (462-527)

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

–Acts 2:1-4