[Jeff] Fisher was elected to that position at Christ Church Cathedral in Houston on June 2.
He will be based in Tyler and will serve congregations in the Diocese of Texas, which covers the eastern and central portion of Texas, which includes an area that spreads from Waco to Austin to Galveston and east to Louisiana.
Several recent incidents in Berlin have escalated tensions between Muslims, Jews, and the city’s secular majority. Over a month ago, a rabbi wearing a kippa, or yarmulke, was beaten by four “Arab-looking” youths after being asked if he and his daughter were Jewish. Public outcry led to a large demonstration in support of Berlin’s Jews, including a flash mob of Jews and non-Jews wearing kippot. Tensions escalated days later when a second incident, in which Jewish school girls were harassed by a group of youths that included a girl wearing a head scarf, led to an exchange of harsh words between Jewish and Muslim leaders, though in neither case were the attackers caught or identified definitively. After being advised to urge greater religious tolerance, Muslim leaders denied responsibility for the attacks and pointed out their own experiences of intolerance in the city.
Then on Yom Kippur, two more anti-Semitic incidents took place””the first when a young white man threatened a local Jewish leader and told him to go back where he came from, and the second when a mother and her daughter were forced out of a taxi after telling the “German” driver they were going to synagogue. Diedre Berger of the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee has now intervened, asking the German government to develop an action plan to combat anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, a contrasting alliance between Jews and Muslims has formed in the aftermath of a regional court ruling against circumcision.
In acknowledging this year’s theme “Depression: A Global Crisis”, [Dr. Ermine Belle]… pointed out that there is no other theme which could be more appreciate, given the global recession in recent years.
“Through the recession we hear the news from other countries where people have lost their homes, jobs and in some cases people have decided they cannot go on living. These are true problems of a sad situation impacting.”
Dr Belle told the congregation that there is a need for society to acknowledge and appreciate what depression is all about, as depression is a killer.
His functions, include but are not limited to:
i) Issuing of Pastoral Letters in his own person as well as with members of the Episcopal Synod
ii) Speaking God’s word to the Church and to the world as a representative of the CPWA in its corporate capacity
iii) Exercising the spiritual and temporal leadership of the CPWA
iv) Visiting officially the dioceses within the CPWA whether at the invitation of the local Bishop, or of his own initiative
As biblical orthodoxy puts it, you cannot serve both God and mammon. Twenty-five years ago, having chosen to serve God and study theology, Justin Welby gave up an 11-year finance career that had seen him rise to the ranks of group treasurer with a major U.K. company, Enterprise Oil. Ordained as a priest in 1992, he was appointed Bishop of Durham just last year.
He is now the current front-runner to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury: the most senior cleric in the Church of England….
Williams did however say in his interview that, because of growing demands, “I suspect it will be necessary, in the next 10 to 15 years, to think about how that load is spread; to think whether in addition to the Archbishop of Canterbury there needs to be some more presidential figure who can travel more readily”, who “has the support of the primates of the Anglican Communion” and “would have an executive role to implement what they decide”.
There are echoes of the controversial Covenant he had pushed for which would have bolstered the power of the primates over provinces other than their own, threatening “relational consequences” for those which failed to obey. This was rejected by the majority of dioceses in the Church of England and elsewhere, but it would appear that another drive for ‘unity’ is planned.
However, most of the overseas archbishops who have pushed hardest for disciplinary structures would be highly resistant to any interference in their own provinces, a recipe for further splits if any ‘president’ did not entirely do their bidding. Having an international leader could also be disastrous for the Church of England, already facing a sizeable drop in involvement in recent decades.
In his last presidential speech before retirement, Dr Jensen said society’s shift towards ”deadly individualism” had been driven by material wealth and technological mastery.
The cost of individualism, and the shift to self-love, had consequences for the quality of our community, family life and how we treat death. That was evident in the choice of ”our swan song of this generation”, Frank Sinatra’s classic I Did It My Way, Dr Jensen said in his speech, titled ”Last Words”.
”It seems that we do not need each other as once we did. Nor do we need God. To think that a person is so proud of the phrase ‘I did it my way’ that they would use it as a summary of their life’s achievement reveals an astounding moral ineptitude, a sort of vulgar egotism.”
Almighty God, who art the author of all spiritual gifts: Bestow upon thy Church in this our day the grace of knowledge, to apprehend the fullness of divine truth, and of utterance to declare that truth to others; that the testimony of Christ may be confirmed among us, and in everything we may be enriched in him, even thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
—-Frank Colquhoun (1909-1997)
Woe to those who devise wickedness and work evil upon their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in the power of their hand. They covet fields, and seize them; and houses, and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance. Therefore thus says the LORD: Behold, against this family I am devising evil, from which you cannot remove your necks; and you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be an evil time. In that day they shall take up a taunt song against you, and wail with bitter lamentation, and say, “We are utterly ruined; he changes the portion of my people; how he removes it from me! Among our captors he divides our fields.” Therefore you will have none to cast the line by lot in the assembly of the LORD. “Do not preach” –thus they preach–“one should not preach of such things; disgrace will not overtake us.” Should this be said, O house of Jacob? Is the Spirit of the LORD impatient? Are these his doings? Do not my words do good to him who walks uprightly? But you rise against my people as an enemy; you strip the robe from the peaceful, from those who pass by trustingly with no thought of war. The women of my people you drive out from their pleasant houses; from their young children you take away my glory for ever. Arise and go, for this is no place to rest; because of uncleanness that destroys with a grievous destruction. If a man should go about and utter wind and lies, saying, “I will preach to you of wine and strong drink,” he would be the preacher for this people! I will surely gather all of you, O Jacob, I will gather the remnant of Israel; I will set them together like sheep in a fold, like a flock in its pasture, a noisy multitude of men. He who opens the breach will go up before them; they will break through and pass the gate, going out by it. Their king will pass on before them, the LORD at their head.
–Micah 2:1-13
”˜At the beginning of the 21st century, does Christianity have a view about an ideal human society?’ Responding to this question, Bishop George Browning, past convenor of the Anglican Communion Environmental Network, reflects that such a society must ”˜address rapidly growing inequity and … confront an economic system which operates as if resources are infinite and that humanity can somehow exist as if it is not part of an unfolding ecological crisis.’
In a new series of reflections, Bishop Browning explores the roots and meaning of Sabbath and how a fresh understanding and practice of this biblical concept can reconnect economics to ethics, and shape human society in a manner that is consistent with the creation upon which it depends.
In an experiment apparently aimed at keeping down the cost of health-care reform, Orlando-based Darden Restaurants has stopped offering full-time schedules to many hourly workers in at least a few Olive Gardens, Red Lobsters and LongHorn Steakhouses…In an emailed statement, Darden said staffing changes are “just one of the many things we are evaluating to help us address the cost implications health care reform will have on our business. There are still many unanswered questions regarding the health care regulations and we simply do not have enough information to make any decisions at this time.”
The social transformation work of the Anglican Church of Kenya is in the process of rebranding from Christian Community Services (CCS) to Anglican Development Services, Kenya (ADSK).
Regional directors, programme managers and other staff of the Anglican Church of Kenya development arm attended a workshop to discuss the way forward of the proposed identity.
The workshop held on 25th and 26th Septem-ber 2012 in Nakuru, was facilitated by Dr. William Ogara from Christian Organizations Research and Advisory Trust of Africa (CORAT).
We are in a place and time of growing evangelistic opportunity and obligation….Our secure, wealthy and beautiful region is alive with people, especially new people. Many of these people know nothing about Jesus and they need to hear about the way to eternal life. We are here for them. It is as simple as that….
You could say [after looking at the statistic profile of Australia’s spiritual landscape], don’t fret: Our business is to look after the religious needs of the descendants of the English. We are a declining chaplaincy church. Christianity is a religion of consolation rather than salvation.
You had better say: The gospel itself utterly forbids us to think like that. The gospel addresses all men and women without exception in the same tone of voice, with the same demands and the same promises, the same Lord and the same Saviour. It is a matter of salvation, not consolation: of salvation, not of growing our numbers. Any gospel church is aptly described as One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, universal words which embrace all nations and peoples and languages. If our denomination, will not accept the challenge posed by the new and increasingly different world which has come to us, we are not being faithful to the gospel which has formed our churches and saved our souls.
JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Community activist Nat Turner is surveying a site people rarely see in the battered Ninth Ward of New Orleans. His community garden provides fruits and vegetables to people hard pressed to find fresh produce in these parts.
[NAT] TURNER: Anybody in the neighborhood can come by and some time this morning somebody’s going to stop by and say, “You got any okra? You got any Creole tomatoes? You got some bell peppers? You got whatever?” And some people just come by the garden and if they want to pick it themselves, they can pick it themselves.
VALENTE: New Orleans’ Ninth Ward is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls a “food desert.” Food deserts are communities with little or no access to healthy food. For the urban poor, here and elsewhere, grocery shopping is often limited to places like this: higher-priced local convenience stores that are short on fresh healthy food and long on snacks and liquor. The problem extends well beyond New Orleans.
The Pentagon says cyberspace is an operational domain on par with land, sea, air and outer space, and there is little doubt that a global cyberarms race is getting underway. The United States is already well engaged in this race, as evidenced by reports of the computer worm Stuxnet, used to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment equipment. But so far these efforts have largely been kept secret and conducted as intelligence operations.
DARPA’s workshop points again to the need for more transparency. The United States still has no open, overarching doctrine to govern a cyberweapons program. A good place to start would be a declaratory policy that would lay out when and under what circumstances offensive weapons such as Stuxnet might be used. After that, an open discussion is needed about rules of engagement for this complex new field, along with additional study of such issues as how and whether the military should protect non-military assets in government and the private sector.
n a surprising move that promises to transform Mormon social and spiritual dynamics, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Saturday (Oct. 6) announced that it is lowering the age of full-time missionary service to age 18 for men (down from 19) and 19 for women (down from 21).
“The Lord is hastening this work,” LDS apostle Jeffrey R. Holland said at a news conference, “and he needs more and more willing missionaries.”
The church is counting on this change to dramatically increase the ranks of its full-time missionaries, currently more than 58,000 worldwide.
As for example found here, there, there, or there. Tom Chivers reluctantly tries to defend Lord Carey in today’s Telegraph:
Lord Carey, to his credit ”“ and I really, really hate giving Lord Carey credit, because most of the things he says make my skin crawl and/or my toes curl ”“ is rejecting the opportunity to paint his opponents as bigots; he is warning against hurling abusive terms around, including by his own side. In fact, taking the analogy he draws at face value, the “Jews” are advocates of gay marriage, and the “Nazis” are opponents who call them “the true bigots”. He is calling for polite debate. We should be encouraging this, not decrying him.
I don’t want to be too effusive. Flippant Godwin’s Law invocations aside, it’s still hugely insensitive to compare any sort of name-calling to the horrors of the Holocaust; and as a longstanding public figure, Lord Carey should know how incredibly careful he has to be to use any analogy involving the Nazis and the Jews. And, of course, he’s still wrong about so many other things, including his bizarre suggestion that gay marriage will encourage polygamy, or undermine heterosexual marriage.
But he’s not doing what he’s being accused of doing. In fact he’s trying, in the section quoted, to encourage civility. Now’s not the time to shout him down.
For myself, I think a corollary to Godwin’s law applies, you have already lost your point when you invoke this analogy, no matter for what you are trying to argue. It is simply too unusual and important a historical reference to use in debate, especially today (given how much time would be necessary to qualify any such remark and try to set it in proper context). Lord Carey had other ways of making his point–KSH.
David Cameron’s plan to legalise gay marriage risks fuelling “Nazi” persecution of groups who disagree over the reforms, a former Archbishop of Canterbury has said.
Lord Carey of Clifton urged the Prime Minister to have “the courage to back down” and abandon moves to legalise same-sex marriages by 2015.
He called for “a sensible debate” on the government’s proposals and warned against name calling by either supporters or critics of reform.
In the past, the Church has divided along the tribal lines of evangelicals, liberals and Anglo-Catholics. The totemic issues which mark its dividing lines ”“ over the acceptability of gay relationships, women priests and now women bishops ”“ are completely settled for the vast majority of the population. Interestingly, there are suggestions that they are now being settled in the Church too; though conservative evangelicals remain implacably opposed to modern views on gender and sexuality, the terms in which they debate have subtly shifted in ways which suggest that it is only a matter of time before liberal tolerance prevails.
Instead, there is a new division inside the Church. It is between those who want a safe pair of hands to keep Anglicans together long enough for the old differences to dissolve and those who want someone who will reimagine the institution for the modern age with a bolder vision of purpose. The choice has significant implications for the rest of society….
….stalemate seems to have been reached in successive secret ballots. Welby is seen as too inexperienced and possibly too conservative and James as too liberal and a bit uninspiring. It may be time for a caretaker until the qualities of the new generation of bishops have become more clear. In the circumstances, the Church should consider the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones…..
As all children and many adults know, there’s something deeply enticing about playing on the road.
But a growing number of international cities have leveraged the allure of that normally prohibited behaviour to create hugely popular festivals that allow tens of thousands of residents to literally take to the streets with their bikes, blades, boards, wheelchairs and strollers.
During a trip last winter to Guadalajara, Mexico, which played host to the 2011 PanAm Games, downtown councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam found herself swept up in one such event ”“ the Via RecreActiva ”“ that involves closing more than 60 kilometres of roads to vehicular traffic on Sunday mornings, when traffic in the city of 4.3 million is light.
Dr. Alvin Rajkomar was doing rounds with his team at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center when he came upon a puzzling case: a frail, elderly patient with a dangerously low sodium level.
As a third-year resident in internal medicine, Dr. Rajkomar was the senior member of the team, and the others looked to him for guidance. An infusion of saline was the answer, but the tricky part lay in the details. Concentration? Volume? Improper treatment could lead to brain swelling, seizures or even death.
Dr. Rajkomar had been on call for 24 hours and was exhausted, but the clinical uncertainty was “like a shot of adrenaline,” he said. He reached into a deep pocket of his white coat and produced not a well-thumbed handbook but his iPhone….
[The] Rev. Eileen Lindner, a Presbyterian pastor and editor of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, observes, “We are still twice as likely to be affiliated with a religion than Europeans, but there is strong evidence that our religious institutions, as we configured them in past centuries, are playing a less significant role in American life.”
Rev. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptists Theological Seminary in Louisville, saw a welcome clarity in the report, even if he didn’t like the new picture in focus.
“Today, there’s no shame in saying you’re an unbeliever, no cultural pressure to claim a religious affiliation, no matter how remote or loose,” Mohler says. “This is a wake-up call. We have an incredible challenge ahead for committed Christians.”
One wonders why Brad Gregory felt compelled to add to our stock of historical fables. He is obviously dissatisfied with the way we live now and despairs that things will only get worse. I share his dissatisfaction and, in my worst moments, his despair. But it enlightens me not at all to think that “medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity is failing,” as if each of these were self-conscious “projects” the annual reports of which are available for consultation. Life does not work that way; history does not work that way. Nor does it help me to imagine that the peak of Western civilization was reached in the decades just before the Reformation, or to imagine that we might rejoin The Road Not Taken by taking the next exit off the autobahn, which is the vague hope this book wants to plant in readers’ minds.
Perhaps it’s just that I align myself more closely with Augustine than Gregory does. Though a lapsed Catholic, I share his assumption that the detritus we leave behind in history is a symbol of our fallenness, revealing little more than that. And I see the wisdom of his view that if members of the Church wish to serve it, they must let the past bury itself and concentrate on spreading the Gospel by word and especially deed in the here and now. The Road Not Taken is an empty fantasy, distracting Christians from the only road that ever matters: the one in front of them. Remembering that makes all the difference.
The global economy risks skidding toward recession just three years after pulling out of the previous one, the International Monetary Fund warned, adding that fighting a renewed world-wide downturn will be much more complex than it was in 2009.
“Risks for a serious global slowdown are alarmingly high,” said the IMF’s World Economic Outlook report, which was released here Tuesday ahead of the fund’s annual fall meeting. It was its bleakest assessment of global growth prospects since the 2009 recession.
In this 1955 essay, [Vladimir] Lossky builds all of that around a very complex and very sophisticated analysis of how Christians, especially in the early centuries, talked about God as trinity and talked about the divine and the human in Jesus. If I had another three hours or so I would try to spell that out a bit further, but it might emerge a little later when we have some questions. The point I want to focus on here is that he is arguing for an essential mysteriousness about the notion of the person in the human world, an essential mysteriousness that one can’t simply deal with by listing it in a number of things that are true about us so that I am intelligent, loving, free and mysterious; which is something about the place I occupy in terms (as I said earlier) of being the point where the lines of relationship intersect. It’s because a person is that kind of reality, the point at which relationships intersect, where a difference may be made and new relations created. It’s in virtue of that that we are able as believers to look at any and every human individual and say that the same kind of mystery is true of all of them and therefore the same kind of reverence or attention is due to all of them. We can never say for example that such and such a person has the full set of required characteristics for being a human person and therefore deserves our respect, and that such and such another individual doesn’t have the full set and therefore doesn’t deserve our respect.
That of course is why – historically and at the present day – Christians worry about those kinds of human beings who may not tick all the boxes but whom we still believe to be worthy of respect, whether it’s those not yet born, those severely disabled, those dying, those in various ways marginal and forgotten. It’s why Christians conclude that attention is due to all of them. What that means, we may still argue a lot about. But the underlying point is quite simply that there is no way of, (as it were), presenting a human individual with an examination paper and according them the reward of our attention or respect only if they get above a certain percentage of marks. Any physical, tangible member of the human race deserves that respect, never mind how many boxes are ticked.
Give us grace, O God our Father, to keep this day and always the new commandment and the great commandment and all the commandments, by loving thee with all our mind and soul and strength, and one another for thy sake; in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.
A Song of Ascents. I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved, he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not smite you by day, nor the moon by night. The LORD will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and for evermore.
–Psalm 121
The greatest risk to US financial markets stems from other countries’ willingness (or lack thereof) to continue to hold dollar reserves as the value depreciates. If those nations suspect that the US cannot maintain the strength of our currency, they will begin to drain assets from American banks ”“ seeking safer havens for their wealth. That could entail trading US treasury bonds for perceived “safer” currencies such as those of New Zealand or Canada or even switching to an entirely different asset class such as gold or silver.
While there may not be any significant signs of capital flight yet, just look east. The Chinese are the largest, external holder of US debt. And they’re already heading down this path ”“ dropping the share of their portfolio comprised of US dollar assets from 74 to 54 percent in the last five years. It may very well be a harbinger of what’s to come.
Attempting to counter fears fanned by trends like this, Bernanke talks of a “soft landing…”
At each appearance throughout the day, there are questions about whether he will wear his dog collar after it was torn up on live television five years ago in protest at Robert Mugabe’s tyranny in Zimbabwe.
The answer is an emphatic and passionate one: this protest will continue until Mugabe no longer has any influence over his people, or has shown to repent.
The one subject off limits is the likelihood of Dr John Sentamu becoming the first black Archbishop of Canterbury.