“It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t perfect, but it was us,” said John Harbaugh, who took the Lombardi Trophy from owner Steve Bisciotti and held it aloft. “The final series of Ray Lewis’ career was a goal line stand to win the Lombardi Trophy. As Ray said on the podium, how could it be any better than that?”

But it wasn’t easy, especially after a 34-minute power outage in the Superdome cost the Ravens the momentum they had gained in the first half and from Jacoby Jones’ 108-yard kickoff return to start the second half. Following the stoppage in the third quarter, the 49ers scored 17 straight points to cut the Ravens’ lead to 28-23.

“I just knew that with Jim Harbaugh on the other sideline and all those years being together, that those guys were going to come back,” John Harbaugh said. “Those guys handled [the delay] better than we did.”

Read it all.

Update: Here are three front page pictures on different final print editions.

Two congressmen, two Christians and two very different views of the man who in 1859 published “On the Origin of Species.” A century and a half after the publication of the book that changed our understanding of the living world, “this amazingly creative man,” as Mr. Holt called Darwin in an interview this week, still gets a whupping from politicians trying to scare up the votes of conservative Christians.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Broun’s wife told a room of surprised onlookers that her husband would be running for the Senate in 2014.

Mr. Holt says he is a Christian whose spiritual home is the Quaker meeting in Princeton, N.J. Mr. Broun, whose spokeswoman said he was expected to make an announcement about his possible candidacy in the next week, attends a Baptist church in Athens, Ga., and is a member of the Gideons, the group that places Bibles in hotel rooms.

Read it all.

Almighty and everlasting God, who didst send thy servant Anskar as an apostle to the people of Scandinavia, and dist enable him to lay a firm foundation for their conversion, though he did not see the results of his labors: Keep thy Church from discouragement in the day of small things, knowing that when thou hast begun a good work thou wilt bring it to a faithful conclusion; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

O Lord, who art Master of the stormy winds and alone canst order them to be still: Be with us in all the voyage of our life; for our boat is small and the ocean is wide. When the winds are contrary, give us to know that thou rulest the raging of the sea; and when our faith is little and we cry to thee out of the midst of our fears, hear thou our prayer and grant us thy peace; for the glory of thy great name.

When I am afraid, I put my trust in thee. In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust without a fear. What can flesh do to me?

–Psalm 56:3-4

I was thankful it ended up being such a good game.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s new book, co-authored with a former State Department superstar named Jared Cohen, doesn’t come out until April. But The Wall Street Journal’s Tom Gara got a hold of an advance copy and has been going through some of its ideas about the future of the Web. Particularly interesting are Schmidt’s comments on China, which, according to Gara’s reading, seem to portray the country as a rising threat not just to Web freedom but to the Internet itself.

Schmidt and Cohen write that China is the world’s “most sophisticated and prolific” hacker, according to Gara. Their book reads, ”It’s fair to say we’re already living in an age of state-led cyber war, even if most of us aren’t aware of it.” But their predictions for where that might lead the Internet, according to the Journal’s report, include the dark possibility that it could split apart entirely.

China’s willingness to use aggressive, sophisticated hacking to get ahead, Schmidt seems to argue, will grant the country and its state-linked firms a significant advantage in the global economy.

Read it all.

Watch it all.

Canberra’s Anglican Diocese has begun preparing historic and contemporary church documents which may be useful to the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

In a pastoral letter to the Anglican congregations and people of Canberra and Goulburn, Bishop Stuart Robinson said the diocese was entering into a new phase of ministry and care as the royal commission got under way.

”As your bishop I am calling us all to prayer; justice, compassion, transparency, truth and Christ’s honour must be front and centre in all we do,” Bishop Robinson wrote.

Read it all.

It was billed as the moral equivalent of an Ali v Foreman title fight. The world’s best known atheist arguing with the man who until a few weeks ago was the Archbishop of Canterbury. Last night, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, took on Rowan Williams, the new master of Magdalene College, in a debate on religion at the Cambridge Union. And Williams emerged triumphant.

The motion for debate was big enough to attract the very best speakers to the Cambridge Union: Religion has no place in the 21st century.

But the key factor in persuading Professor Richard Dawkins to agree to take part in last night’s setpiece was something else ”“ an admiration for his principal opponent.

“I normally turn down formal debates,” he said. “But the charming Rowan Williams was too good to miss.”

Read it all.

As [Arif] Ahmed recited figures on Anglicanism’s decline Rowan Williams grew restless, causing Ahmed to ask the master of Magdalene pointedly: “Do you want a point of information?” The room broke out in laughter as Williams responded by motioning for Ahmed to ”˜bring it on’.

The Spectator columnist Douglas Murray, arguing for the relevance of religion in the 21st century despite the “awkward position” of being an atheist, finished the debate by declaring that “no rational person could agree with this motion”. Religion, alongside humanism and secularism, has “a contribution to make”, Murray argued, telling students that without religion you may end up “with something like a perpetual version of The Only Way is Essex”.

Priyanka Kulkarni, Pembroke first year, said: “Tonight’s debate was highly anticipated, the queue spanning for what seemed to be miles was an indicator that this was going to be a highlight of the union this term.”

Read it all.

You may find the preliminary video here (it lasts a little over 1 1/2 hours).

This Bill, for the first time in British history, fundamentally seeks to break the existing legal link between the institution of marriage and sexual exclusivity, loyalty, and responsibility for the children of the marriage. If the Bill passes, several previously foundational aspects of the law of marriage will be changed to accommodate same sex
couples: the common law presumption that a child born to a mother during her marriage is also the child of her partner will not apply in same sex marriages (Schedule 4, para. 2); the existing provisions on divorce will be altered so that sexual infidelity by one of the parties in a same sex marriage with another same sex partner will not constitute adultery (Schedule 4, para. 3); and nonconsummation will not be a ground on which a same sex marriage is voidable (Schedule 4, para. 4).

Marriage thus becomes an institution in which openness to children, and with it the responsibility on fathers and mothers to remain together to care for children born into their family unit, is no longer central to society’s understanding of that institution (as reflected in the law). The fundamental problem with the Bill is that changing the legal understanding of marriage to accommodate same sex partnerships threatens subtly, but radically, to alter the meaning of marriage over time for everyone. This is the heart of our argument in principle against same sex marriage….

Read it all.

The Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma recently gathered for the installation of the new leader of a prominent downtown Oklahoma City church.

The Rev. Justin Lindstrom was installed as the dean of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on Jan. 26 in a ceremony that highlighted the diversity of the diocese, among other things.

Read it all.

The Episcopal Diocese of New York has installed a new bishop in an elaborate ceremony at a cathedral in Manhattan.

The Rev. Andrew Dietsche became the 16th bishop of the diocese Saturday in a service at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in Morningside Heights.

Read it all.

The Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Mississippi announced Friday that he will allow some congregations to bless same- sex unions.

The Right Reverend Duncan M. Gray III made the announcement in his opening address to the 186th Annual Council of the Diocese of Mississippi in Jackson.

Read it all.

Update: We are told the bishop will use his address to the annual council tonight at 8:00pm to announce that he will allow same-sex blessings under a plan similar to the one in the Diocese of Texas. Parishes wishing to perform same-sex blessings will need their vestries to pass a resolution, which the rector may present to the bishop, who will have the final decision.

Read it all.

…unlike other holdups, this robber isn’t after cash. He wants painkillers, primarily oxycodone, and the pharmacist is the only one who can access it.

Unprepared for such a threatening scenario, the pharmacist complies, and the robber flees with hundreds, if not thousands, of pills.

This scenario happened at least 13 times at Lowcountry pharmacies in 2012, up from about four in 2011. It’s a trend that’s been spreading across the country over the past few years, and it’s indicative of just how addictive these drugs can be and the profits thieves stand to make by stealing them.

Read it all.

O Lord, who alone canst cast out the evil passions and desires of the soul: Come among us, we pray thee, and by thy mighty power subdue our spiritual enemies, and set us free from the tyranny of sin. We ask it in thy name and for thy glory.

–Henry Alford

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was to go.

–Hebrews 11:8

Why is Facebook such a repeatedly bad actor in its relationship to its users, constantly testing and probing for ways to quietly or secretly breach the privacy constraints that most of its users expect and demand, strategems to invade their carefully maintained social networks? Because it has to. That’s Facebook’s version of the Red Queen’s race, its bargain with investment capital. Facebook will keep coming back and back again with various schemes and interface trickery because if it stops, it will be the LiveJournal or BBS of 2020, a trivia answer and nostalgic memory.

That is not the inevitable fate of all social media. It is a distinctive consequence of the intersection of massive slops of surplus investment capital looking desperately for somewhere to come to rest; the character of Facebook’s niche in the ecology of social media; and the path-dependent evolution of Facebook’s interface.

Analysts and observers who are content with cliches characterize Facebook as sitting on a treasure trove of potentially valuable data about its users, which is true enough. The cliched view is that what’s valuable about that data is names associated with locations associated with jobs associated with social networks, in a very granular way. That’s not it.

Read it all.

As the 49ers and Ravens take the field in New Orleans’ Super Dome for Super Bowl XLVII, a man very familiar with that field, Chris Reis, will be watching the game with his family.

It was only three years ago that Reis was playing in the big game for the New Orleans Saints. He burst into the national spotlight with one unusual, but game-changing play, an onside kick recovery that surprised the opposition and many say paved the path for the Saints’ 31-17 victory over the Indianapolis Colts.

It was an unlikely position for a kid who grew up in a broken family, with a father who was in and out of his life and addicted to sex and alcohol. Reis broke through the obstacles to succeed, he says, in part by finding God in high school. He went on to play for Georgia Tech where he served as president of the school’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He was briefly signed as a free agent by the Atlanta Falcons, but the team cut him loose before he even saw field time. The Saints then signed him as a free agent, but sent him to play in the NFL Europe league. Later that year the team called him back to New Orleans where he played the next four years with the Saints.

Read it all.

See what you think.

Many theologians and some scientists are now ready to proclaim that the nineteenth century “conflict between science and religion” is over and done with. But even if this is true, it is a truth known only to real theologians and real scientists-that is, to a few highly educated men. To the man in the street the conflict is still perfectly real, and in his mind it takes a form which the learned hardly dream of.

The ordinary man is not thinking of particular dogmas and particular scientific discoveries. What troubles him is an all-pervading difference of atmosphere between what he believes Christianity to be and that general picture of the universe which he has picked up from living in a scientific age. He gathers from the Creed that God has a “Son” (just as if God were a god, like Odin or Jupiter): that this Son “came down” (like a parachutist) from “Heaven,” first to earth and later to some land of the dead situated beneath the earth’s surface: that, still later, He ascended into the sky and took His seat in a decorated chair placed a little to the right of His Father’s throne. The whole thing seems to imply a local and material heaven-a palace in the stratosphere-a flat earth and all the rest of those archaic misconceptions.
The ordinary man is well aware that we should deny all the beliefs he attributes to us and interpret our creed in a different sense. But this by no means satisfies him. “No doubt,” he thinks, “once those articles of belief are there, they can be allegorized or spiritualized away to any extent you please. But is it not plain that they would never have been there at all if the first generation of Christians had had any notion of what the real universe is like? A historian who has based his work on the misreading of a document may afterwards (when his mistake has been exposed) exercise great ingenuity in showing that his account of a certain battle can still be reconciled with what the document records. But the point is that none of these ingenious explanations would ever have come into existence if he had read his documents correctly at the outset. They are therefore really a waste of labor; it would be manlier of him to admit his mistake and begin all over again.”

I think there are two things that Christians must do if they wish to convince this “ordinary” modern man. In the first place, they must make it quite clear that what will remain of the Creed after all their explanations and reinterpretations will still be something quite unambiguously supernatural, miraculous, and shocking. We may not believe in a flat earth and a sky palace. But we must insist from the beginning that we believe, as firmly as any savage or theosophist, in a spirit world which can, and does, invade the natural or phenomenal universe. For the plain man suspects that when we start explaining, we are going to explain away: that we have mythology for our ignorant hearers and are ready, when cornered by educated hearers, to reduce it to innocuous moral platitudes which no one ever dreamed of denying. And there are theologians who justify this suspicion. From them we must part company absolutely. If nothing remains except what could be equally well stated without Christian formulae, then the honest thing is to admit that Christianity is untrue and to begin over again without it.

–”˜Horrid Red Things’ in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), pp. 68-69 (originally from the Church of England Newspaper, October 6, 1944, pp.1-2) [emphasis mine]

It was an excellent game at Craven Cottage today with lots of chances at both ends–KSH. Read it all.

…attentiveness has a complicated relationship with memory. While the brain can’t store all of the city’s potential information at the level of instant accessibility, we realize as we navigate neighbourhoods that we’ve held onto knowledge we didn’t realize we had ”“ the location of a dry cleaner en route to work, the eerie feeling that a certain street is coming up on the right.

“There are arguments in cognitive literature that we encode sequence information virtually for free ”“ that it’s almost automatic even if it’s of no immediate use to you,” says [University of Waterloo] Prof. [Colin] MacLeod.

In this sense, our brains are hungry for what a city provides. “Humans enjoy being engaged,” says Prof. Pratt. “We don’t like living in sparse environments.”

Read it all.

Imagine you were forced to leave your home? Given no option but to pack everything into one bag and to leave Northern Ireland.
That is exactly the situation that more than 500,000 Syrians have been forced into.

Into Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan they continue to pour, in search of safety and shelter from the bombs and bullets that have killed 60,000 people. Three-and-a-half thousand crossed into Jordan last Wednesday alone.

Read it all.

Sermon given at Choral Evensong on Thursday January 24, at 5 pm – thank you to Kevin Kallsen at Anglican TV for recording this video – the rough transcript below, and any mistakes in it are by the Elves.

Thank you so much for your welcome. Acts 22 and 2 Corinthians 5 are going to be the focus of our attention tonight.

One man standing on the steps of an impressive building in the capital city of his own nation, one man addressing a crowd, and delivering a speech which will effectively set the course of his life for the next four years – these might be references to Monday’s inaugural event at Capitol Hill, but they in fact describe the event described in our first lesson. Paul the Apostle, standing on the steps of the Antonia Fortress, the Roman army barracks overlooking the Temple in Jerusalem. I can’t find many other points of comparison between Monday’s speech and that delivered here by St Paul, but I thought at least that it would grab your attention, if only perhaps to help us to detect and to see afresh the incredible significance of what Paul is doing here. He is indeed on his final visit to the capital city of his own Jewish nation, Jerusalem. And he has just been arrested and will as a result spend at least the next four years as a prisoner, both in Caesarea and then in Rome.

And what he does here is extraordinarily brave. The angry mob is baying for his blood but Paul rather than gratefully being ushered into the safety of the Antonia Fortress, turns and asks permission to address the crowd. Why? What made him do it? Why did he risk it?

The answer we will discover shortly has to do with some settled convictions about the person and the work of Jesus Christ, the theme of our gathering here in Mere Anglicanism.

The answer however also has to do with the significance of the geographical place in which Paul uniquely found himself at just that moment. In his speech as you look down it, summarised here by Luke in Acts 22, Paul makes several intriguing references to events in his own life which had taken place within five hundred yards of those steps on which he was now standing. His education in Jerusalem’s torah academy under professor Gamaliel, his consultations with the High Priest and the Sanhedrin in the Temple enclosure; procuring extradition warrants on those blaspheming messianic believers in Jesus; his own part with assisting in the stoning of Stephen probably two hundred yards to his right, just outside the city’s Northern Gate; and then his time of prayer some four or five years later after conversion to Christ, when he was back from a brief visit to Jerusalem meeting the apostles and was praying in the Temple just two hundred yards to his left, when the risen Jesus warned him to leave the city.

Paul is back amongst his old haunts. Jerusalem university was his alma mater, and this was the place where he knew he was persona non grata. This was the place where he deeply wanted to speak of Jesus, risking all, so that his own countrymen, caught up as he had once been in Jerusalem’s mad religious and political agendas might hear of God’s will for them in Messiah Jesus.

But there is another event in Jerusalem’s recent past which also took place nearby. I was in Jerusalem over New Year and standing overlooking the model of ancient Jerusalem in the Israel Museum, and I got my students there to look at these steps of the Antonia Fortress which face West and I asked them the question: ”˜As Paul stood there, what was directly in front of him, just two hundred yards away, albeit on the other side of the city wall?’ And the answer ”“ Golgotha, the place where twenty seven years earlier his Lord Jesus had died for him, so maybe as Paul turned and faced the crowd he was also looking beyond them and seeing the cross of Jesus in his mind’s eye. And maybe that is precisely why he turned and faced them and faced their hostility, even his own death, because he knew that just over there his Lord Jesus had risked everything for him. Jesus had died in Jerusalem. Stephen had died in Jerusalem, and now Paul had to risk the same fate himself. He could do no less. In fact we know this pattern of thought was indeed in Paul’s mind, because when others are trying to dissuade him from going up to Jerusalem, he rebuts them quite plainly Acts 21 verse 13 ”˜Why are you breaking my heart, I am willing not only to be imprisoned but even to die in Jerusalem for the sake of the name of the Lord Jesus’.

Well what would make Paul say such a thing? Indeed, how does anyone brace themselves for suffering? What makes anyone take a stand in the face of severe opposition? What causes anyone, rather than fleeing the enemy, to turn and face them willing to take the consequences?

Now I may be a British academic, and therefore prone to being a bit out of touch with realities here on the ground in the United States, but even I cannot miss the fact that Mere Anglicanism this year, meets at a critical time in the history of the life of the Diocese of South Carolina, where clergy and people are having to make tough decisions about how to turn and face those who are opposed to them; and about precisely where to take their stand. And when faced with tough decisions, we all need in the words of Psalm 77 which I was reading myself this morning to seek the Lord and for our spirits to make a diligent search, to be asking hard questions even of God himself; but then going back to find a bedrock of conviction on which we can take a firm stand, going back to God’s clear actions in redemption history in the past.

Well that hard bedrock of conviction I suggest for all of us can be found by looking together at our other New Testament reading from 2 Corinthians 5 where we see deep truths which Paul had been relying on during his earlier period of very fierce opposition in Ephesus, finishing in the Autumn of AD 55. These words were therefore written by Paul perhaps eighteen months or so before he was arrested in Jerusalem during that Pentecost May AD 57. They show us the convictions which had burned into him during that crucible of suffering in Ephesus and they explain why Paul decided to turn and face the hostile crowd in Jerusalem two years later, and they can inspire and strengthen us for any stands which we may too need to make in our own day. And to summarise what we shall find we will look briefly at Paul’s convictions about the person and work of Jesus from which we will see that Paul draws out two further related conclusions.

So then what were Paul’s convictions about the person and the work of Christ? I hope again that you have this in front of you, 2 Corinthians 5 and you can see where I am drawing these points.

Concerning the person of Christ ”“ well this is the passage where expressly in verse 16 Paul says we are not to regard Christ according to the flesh. Descriptions of Jesus in merely human categories are not sufficient and need to be abandoned. Jesus was an undeniable figure of recent history, but he is for more than just a figure of history, even a so-called ”˜historical Jesus’. He is the Christ, that is the Messiah of Israel, but boldly and amazingly this Christ is closely associated with two things which properly belonged uniquely to Yahweh, the God of Israel: he is involved with Creation verse 17 ”˜if anyone is in Christ, new creation’ and also with final judgement verse 10 just before our passage ”˜we must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ’. Above all Paul makes clear that what Christ did and achieved can be seen straightforwardly and completely as the work and activity of God, verse 18 ”˜All this is from God who through Christ reconciled us’; verse 19 ”˜In Christ God was reconciling the world’, verse 20 ”˜On behalf of Christ be reconciled to God’.

In these three verses Paul repeatedly brackets Christ and God together, deliberately, so that the work and the activity of the one is the work and the activity of the other, not 75% but 100%. There is no distinction; there is no hair’s breadth between them. This is Paul’s conviction about Jesus Christ. He is to be identified with the God of Israel. Yes, this is in some mysterious way which will take theologians several hundred years to hammer out into the Creeds, but here is the raw data for that later theological elucidation. God was working through Christ – in Christ, God.

Now this is normative New Testament Christology. By the way I always tell my students never to use that word Christology in their sermons but perhaps I can be forgiven for using it here as it is the theme of Mere Anglicanism. High Christology, an ugly word to describe a beautiful thing, does not appear only in a few places in the New Testament, perhaps in documents that are thought to be rather late in the first century after about 60 years during which Jesus’ status has gradually been elevated somewhere into the divine. No, it is there consistently and from the very beginning.

I was speaking at the bishop’s house last night with your keynote speakers, Paul Barnett and David Wenham and I quickly checked with these Pauline scholars whether they thought that Galatians was Paul’s first letter. Happily we all agreed, a rare event amongst scholars ”“ it must have been something to do with the Bishop’s food and drink I suppose – and if so, Galatians Chapter 1 verse 1 is the opening verse of the New Testament, written within twenty years of the Resurrection, and it categorically refers to Jesus as divine and not merely human. I quote: ”˜Paul, an apostle not through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father’. They are the opening words of the New Testament and do it straight away; Jesus is not on the human side of the line, he is on the divine side of the line. Paul is convinced about the divinity, the deity, the God-ness of Jesus: ”˜in Christ, God’.

Paul also has convictions about the work of Christ. He is convinced about Jesus’ resurrection, verse 15 ”˜who for their sake died and was raised’. Paul is actually counting on this personally as the basis for his own hope of resurrection in the future. Earlier in Chapter 5 he has been trusting that when he dies and puts away his tent God will provide a building for him, a place where he will be at home with the Lord ”“ isn’t that a lovely phrase ”˜at home with the Lord’? But Paul in the verses of our second reading is focussed more especially on the cross, on Jesus’ death and crucifixion. Verse 14: ”˜we have concluded this’ he writes, so here we are going to hear one of those settled Pauline convictions. What is it? ”˜That one has died for all, therefore all have died’. ”˜He died for all,’ he repeats.

Paul is convinced that Jesus’ death was a dramatic and intentional act designed to benefit all people in the world. But it is more than just for the benefit of all. Many people in church today perhaps would subscribe to some such fuzzy notion as that: ”˜oh Jesus died for all’, they might say ”“ ”˜his death was an example of supreme love and it now means that God loves everybody regardless of whether they know it or want it’. That’s not how Paul finishes his sentence: ”˜One died for all, therefore all have died’. Jesus’ death reveals that every human being is effectively in God’s estimation in a state of death. Jesus’ death reveals God’s judgement, his verdict on sinful human beings, a verdict of death, one died for all that therefore we now know that in God’s sight, all have died.

And if this is only implicit in Verse 14, Paul makes this conviction quite explicit in verse 21: ”˜for our sake God made Christ to be sin’ ”“ his death was therefore a dying caused by God’s verdict on human sin. It was substitutionary ”“ Christ himself knew no sin but bore our sins, so that we [oh sweet exchange] might experience forgiveness and justification; that we might become the righteousness of God.

Here is Paul’s settled conviction about the work of Christ. Through his death and resurrection God has done the work of great salvation and redemption. He has dealt with the issue of human sin, ‘not counting our trespasses against us [verse 19]. One way of saying this is to say that God through Christ brought righteousness and forgiveness in the place of sin and judgement. Another way of saying the same thing: God in Christ brought life out of death, in the place of death.

Now, please note that those two different ways of my summarising that just now use two different background metaphors. One was using more legal terms, the language of the law court. God has brought righteousness and forgiveness in the place of sin and judgement ”“ that is legal, forensic terminology. The second one was using the language of the hospital, perhaps the maternity ward, or perhaps the morgue, the place where dead bodies are put. God has brought life in the place of death. These are Paul’s two parallel ways of summarising or concluding his convictions. His key word for the first one is reconciliation, or we might say re-conciliation; and his key word for the second is new creation, or we might say re-creation.

His use of the first term is clear and repeated several times. Verse 18 ”˜God reconciled us to himself’, God again ”˜was reconciling the world to himself’. Twice he speaks of Christians now being given a ministry or message of reconciliation, and so he appeals to us ”˜be reconciled to God’. Reconciliation for Paul has been accomplished and now it must be announced. The barriers between the holy God and sinful humanity have been bulldozed away by the sin-bearing death of Jesus Christ, and we must now invite people to avail themselves of that death, of that pathway which has been blown open for them, so that they can walk into God’s presence. The judge in the law court turns out to be a heavenly father. The sentence of judgement has been replaced by sentences of tender love.

And Paul’s use of the second term comes only once but it is powerful and pithy: ”˜If anyone in Christ, new creation.’ Yes the death of Jesus reveals that all have died, all are dead, but that is not the last word on the subject, because the crucifixion was decidedly not God’s last word about Jesus. Jesus was gloriously raised by God, dramatically and objectively, as a sure sign of God’s purposes, restoring his broken world in an eventual act of new creation. And that new creation can come and kick back into reality here and now, when men and women join themselves by faith to the death of Christ and so share in his resurrection. As Paul will develop this, perhaps about a year later, when writing Romans 6 verse 5: ”˜If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in his resurrection.’

So there ”“ reconciliation, re-creation ”“ two great words, two Gospel truths that Paul presents to us in 2 Corinthians 5.

And as we close we inevitably should be asking these kinds of questions both to ourselves and to our churches as communities: ”˜How much do we really believe these things? Are these the bedrock on which we are willing to make our stand?’ As individuals it is easy for our hearts to wander, we know it well, for familiarity to weaken our grasp of these truths, for the trials and busyness of life to take us elsewhere. Fifteen months ago I was reading through 2 Corinthians, it was a particularly dark time in my life, one of those times when the lights just seemed to have gone out and God was, as it were, leading me through a dark underwater tunnel. And I was reading through this dark and painful text, 2 Corinthians, for it to be light in my darkness, on my own there in a hotel room in Sicily. And I found myself having to confront all my buried doubts about Christ, about death, about my hope of resurrection. And I had to simply recite these words of 2 Corinthians 5 out loud to myself on my own to get my heart to trust these words as true for me.

Is that something which you need to do this day in this conference of Mere Anglicanism or in this dark season in the life of the Diocese ”“ just to read these words to your own heart, to re-kindle the flame of your own personal faith and to trust in their truth? Jesus said to Martha: ”˜do you believe?’ ”“ and she found herself saying: ”˜yes Lord, I do believe.’ [John 11:25-27]

As for our communities and wider church life we could spend ages asking whether these great Gospel truths of God’s reconciliation and recreation in Christ are really at the center of what we do and proclaim in that community called the church. How often are there sermons on the atoning death of Jesus or on the resurrection power of God? How seriously are we beseeching people to be reconciled to God as they surely need to be? How clearly are we proclaiming to people that through the Gospel, God can unleash his resurrection power, in making them to be new creations, re-oriented now to live not for themselves but for the God who loves them? To often these messages get silenced and the Gospel truths get abandoned and other agendas so easily take center stage in the life of the church.

I have the joy each morning of travelling to work at Trinity Ambridge in the same car as your chaplain here, Leander Harding, chaplain at Mere Anglicanism, and on this Tuesday morning as we navigated through the Arctic conditions of West Pennsylvania, my senior colleague Leander came out with this telling phrase: ”˜some people are in the church for the purposes of faith in religion while others are there because the church is a useful place to pursue other agendas. Justin Terry and I just laughed and laughed until our lungs froze, but it is not a laughing matter. What are the other agendas which are sweeping through our church and effectively replacing the Gospel driven agenda set here by Paul?

So, are we willing to take our stand on these Gospel truths of divine reconciliation and divine recreation accomplished in Jesus Christ? Are these the convictions which are truly at the bedrock of our lives? On the eve of the conversion of St Paul we could do no better than to learn again these convictions held by Paul and to note how they strengthened him, they steadied him that day a few years later on that day in Jerusalem and caused him not to flee for cover but to turn and face the life-threatening opponents, as he was looking straight ahead of him to the very place where Jesus had died for him.

You know, we can almost imagine saying under his breath as he braces himself to speak: ”˜I have concluded that one has died for all, and therefore all have died. And he died for me, so that I who am alive today should not live for myself, but if need be, die ”“ for him who died for me ”“ and was raised.’ Amen.

The Reverend Dr Peter Walker is Professor of Biblical Studies at Trinity School for Ministry, Ambridge, Pennsylvania

[Bishop Mark] Lawrence spokeswoman Jan Pringle said in a statement that the injunction will remain in effect until the court rules on the property dispute “to protect the Diocese’s real, personal and intellectual property and that of its parishes from a TEC takeover.”

While Lawrence’s group viewed the decision as a validation, the TEC congregations noted, “This was done with the consent of all parties, and either side has the right to have a hearing on the matter with 14 days’ notice.”

“This is not an unusual development, and it signifies only that these issues remain to be decided at a future time,” said Holly Behre, communications director for The Episcopal Church in South Carolina.

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[Yesterday].. Netflix…release[d] a drama expressly designed to be consumed in one sitting: “House of Cards,” a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Rather than introducing one episode a week, as distributors have done since the days of black-and-white TVs, all 13 episodes will be streamed at the same time. “Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day,” the producer Beau Willimon said with a laugh.

“House of Cards,” which is the first show made specifically for Netflix, dispenses with some of the traditions that are so common on network TV, like flashbacks. There is less reason to remind viewers what happened in previous episodes, the producers say, because so many viewers will have just seen it. And if they don’t remember, Google is just a click away. The show “assumes you know what’s happening all the time, whereas television has to assume that a big chunk of the audience is always just tuning in,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer.

The producer Glen Mazzara took a similar approach to AMC’s “The Walking Dead” this year. In the second half of the season, which will start in mid-February after a two-month break, “we decided to pick up the action right away ”” to just jump right in,” Mr. Mazzara said. Fans of the show, he said, have little tolerance for recaps, since many of them will have just watched a marathon of the first half to prepare for the second.

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