“Last week’s article on falling patterns of membership and church attendance in Scotland’s churches gave the other side of other story. Secularisation is merciless in its effect on churches. It will erode to vanishing point churches which operate in traditional ways and cannot adapt. It challenges the mindset of ”˜as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be.’ But I believe that secularisation also presents a positive challenge for churches. It encourages us to develop church communities of new quality – disciples who are deeply engaged with their faith and not just of members who belong. It will be good for churches and good for faith.

“Let me surprise you first by saying that I am a supporter of secular society. My family roots are in the beginnings of what has become the Irish Republic. In the early years of the last century, Ireland was what some have called a confessional or theocratic state. The Catholic Church exercised an undue influence on the way in which government approached matters of social and moral legislation. The modern secular state is a safer place – it allows space for a proper separation of legislature, judiciary and church. In my view, there is then room for a proper relationship between church and state. The state should be the guardian and protector of religious freedom but it should not defer to religion.

“Last week’s article treated secularisation as if it was a single phenomenon. But it’s much more subtle and complex than that. It is actually a sort of ”˜double whammy’ – let me explain what I mean.

Read it all.

Listen to it all–wonderful and heart lifting.

On a gray and drizzly day, a horse-drawn gun carriage bore the coffin of Margaret Thatcher, draped in the Union flag, to St. Paul’s Cathedral for a ceremonial funeral that has divided British opinion, much as the former prime minister stirred passions during her lifetime.

A hearse had taken the coffin from Parliament as far as the church of St. Clement Danes near the head of Fleet Street where a military guard placed it on the gun carriage for the solemn cortege to St. Paul’s. Crowds of mostly silent people lined the streets near Parliament Square and along Whitehall ”” one of several major thoroughfares closed to traffic ”” as the hearse passed by with a display of white flowers.

Some 700 military personnel from three services ”” the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force ”” lined Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill leading to St. Paul’s. The honor guard included guardsmen in scarlet tunics and distinctive black bearskin hats on the 24 cathedral steps. Military bands played Bells tolled. Crowds lined the street as the gun carriage passed slowly by, some applauding. The procession moved at 70 paces per minute. Well-wishers threw flowers into the road.

Read it all.

At first, Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., could see itself as exempt from the economic forces shaking seminaries and theological schools nationwide. Luther is the biggest seminary for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States. Among its peers, it had a reputation for being innovative. Individual donors continued to give, and its local area — in one of the country’s most Lutheran states — was supportive.

Last fall, though, it all came crashing down. Enrollments were dropping. The seminary found it was running multimillion-dollar deficits, spending down its endowment and relying on loans. In December, its president, the Rev. Dr. Richard Bliese, resigned, as the seminary’s board began to look at options to trim at least $4 million from the seminary’s $27 million annual budget.

The results were announced…[not long ago]: layoffs for 18 of its 125 staff members, many effective within a few weeks; the voluntary departure of 8 of 44 faculty members at the end of the academic year, who will not be replaced; the termination of a master’s program in sacred music; and the decision to no longer admit Ph.D students for at least three years.

Read it all.

…I do love this city. I love its atrocious accent, its inferiority complex in terms of New York, its nut-job drivers, the insane logic of its street system. I get a perverse pleasure every time I take the T in the winter and the air-conditioning is on in the subway car, or when I take it in the summer and the heat is blasting. Bostonians don’t love easy things, they love hard things ”” blizzards, the bleachers in Fenway Park, a good brawl over a contested parking space. Two different friends texted me the identical message yesterday: They messed with the wrong city. This wasn’t a macho sentiment. It wasn’t “Bring it on” or a similarly insipid bit of posturing. The point wasn’t how we were going to mass in the coffee shops of the South End to figure out how to retaliate. Law enforcement will take care of that, thank you. No, what a Bostonian means when he or she says “They messed with the wrong city” is “You don’t think this changes anything, do you?”

Trust me, we won’t be giving up any civil liberties to keep ourselves safe because of this. We won’t cancel next year’s marathon. We won’t drive to New Hampshire and stockpile weapons. When the authorities find the weak and terminally maladjusted culprit or culprits, we’ll roll our eyes at whatever backward ideology they embrace and move on with our lives.

Read it all.

We have no way of knowing how this all ends. One problem is that the smartest solution””having Germany and perhaps a handful of other northern countries leave the euro for a new currency (the Deutche Mark 2.0, or a “neuro” for northern Europe)””would make life easier in the south. The south based euro would fall in value, but since debts and contracts are denominated in that currency, the adjustment would be the same as in a normal devaluation. This course would likely lead quickly to a new burst of growth in the south, though inflation and other problems would take a toll over time.

But the euro’s break up day would cause a lot of problems for Germany and its northern friends….

So we’re in an interesting situation. The crisis is crippling the south, but the south has no power to resolve the crisis. The crisis isn’t comfortable for the north but still looks less painful than the solution. So the north, which has the ability to resolve the crisis, doesn’t have the will to do it and the south, which has the will, lacks the ability.

Read it all (and please note that the Financial Times article by Wolfgang Münchau which is mentioned, entitled “The riddle of Europe’s single currency with many values,” is indeed a must read as Mr. Read says).

While a number of lawsuits between dioceses and parishes have gone to state supreme courts, with the diocese prevailing in many of them, in South Carolina the state supreme court ruled the other way and held the church’s national property rules, called the Dennis Canon, were of no legal effect in South Carolina. In other words, if a parish has clear title to its property in South Carolina, it can take it with it if it leaves its diocese or denomination. Omitting this crucial legal precedent in the story was most unfortunate.

It should also be added that the appellate courts have not adjudicated the issue of whether a diocese may withdraw from the national church. Attorneys for the national church have argued the legal precedents from outside South Carolina governing the relationship of the parish to the diocese should govern the relationship of the diocese to the national church. The diocese’s lawyers in South Carolina have argued this relationship is not comparable.

One might also add, contrary to the assertion in the article about declining membership, that until these lawsuits erupted the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina was one of the few Episcopal diocese to see a growth in membership over the past decade.

Read it all.

The start of hurricane season is 6 weeks away, and four independent forecast outlets unanimously agree it will be a busy one.

Colorado State’s Bill Gray and protege Philip Klotzbach, the pioneers of seasonal hurricane forecasting, predict a blockbuster hurricane season, with 18 named storms, 9 hurricanes and 4 major hurricanes. (The 1981-2010 30-year averages are 12.1 named storms, 6.4 hurricanes, and 2.7 major hurricanes.)

“We anticipate an above-average Atlantic basin hurricane season due to the combination of an anomalously warm tropical Atlantic and a relatively low likelihood of El Niño,” Klotzbach and Gray write in their outlook, released last week.

Ugh–read it all.

Somewhere behind Feser’s argument slouches the specter of what is often called “two-tier Thomism”: a philosophical sect notable in part for the particularly impermeable partitions it erects between nature and grace, or nature and supernature, or natural reason and revelation, or philosophy and theology (and so on). To its adherents, it is the solution to the contradictions of modernity. To those of a more “integralist” bent (like me), it is a neo-scholastic deformation of Christian metaphysics that, far from offering an alternative to secular reason, is one of its chief theological accomplices. It also produces an approach to moral philosophy that must ultimately fail.

Before completing that thought, however, it might help to rehearse just a few of the conceptual obstacles our age erects in the path of natural law theory. So:

First. Finality’s fortuity. Most traditional accounts of natural law require a picture of nature as governed by final causality: For every substance, there are logically prior ends””proximate, remote, or transcendent””that guide its existence and unite it to the greater totality of a single cosmic, physical, moral, social continuum embraced within the providential finality of the divine. They assume, then, that from the “is” of a thing legitimate conclusions regarding its “ought” can be discerned, because nature herself””through her evident forms””instructs us in the elements of moral fulfillment. In our age, however, final causality is a concept confined within an ever more beleaguered and porous intellectual redoubt. One can easily enough demonstrate the reality of finality within nature, but modern scientific culture refuses to view it as in any sense a cause rather than the accidental consequence of an immanent material process….

Read it all.

May God the Father Almighty bless me with his Holy Spirit this day; guard me in my going out and coming in; keep me ever steadfast in his faith, free from sin and safe from danger; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Do not forsake me, O LORD! O my God, be not far from me! Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salvation!

–Psalm 38:21-22

Pat Summerall was the calm alongside John Madden’s storm.

Over four decades, Summerall described some of the biggest games in America in his deep, resonant voice. Simple, spare, he delivered the details on 16 Super Bowls, the Masters and the U.S. Open tennis tournament with a simple, understated style that was the perfect complement for the “booms!” and “bangs!” of Madden, his football partner for the last half of the NFL player-turned-broadcaster’s career.

Summerall died Tuesday at age 82 of cardiac arrest, said University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center spokesman Jeff Carlton, speaking on behalf of Summerall’s wife, Cheri.

Read it all.

In 2006, [Henry] Parsley was nominated for presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, coming in second in the General Convention balloting to the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, who was elected. He retired as bishop in 2012.

“The last 10 years have not been the easiest for the Anglican Communion or the Episcopal Church in America,” he said, with bitter debates over human sexuality and other issues. Nevertheless, he added, “I think we’ve turned a corner. We’re learning to live more comfortably with differences. The hallmark of Anglicanism is the way of comprehensiveness, to bring in as many people as possible.”

He hailed the installation of Justin Welby as the new archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, calling him “a reconciler.”

“For me,” he said, “the heart of the Gospel is reconciliation.”

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

You can read the names of nine nominees here and there. Also, for those interested, there are videos available there. Finally, you can get the whole election booklet in English there (a 28 page pdf). The walkabouts start next week and the election is May 4th.

The bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday was the end of more than a decade in which the United States experienced strikingly few terrorist attacks, in part because of far more aggressive law enforcement tactics in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In fact, Sept. 11 was an anomaly in an overall gradual decline in the number of terrorist attacks since the 1970s, according to one of the most authoritative sources of terrorism statistics, the Global Terrorism Database, maintained by a consortium of researchers and based at the University of Maryland.

Only in 2009, after 13 people were killed in a shooting spree at Fort Hood in Texas, did the number of fatalities in post-9/11 terrorism on American soil rise into double digits in a single year. That was a sharp contrast with the 1970s, by far the most violent decade since the tracking began in 1970, the database shows.

Read it all.

Shaken Bostonians and visitors in town for the marathon sought solace side-by-side Tuesday at the downtown Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Paul, where priests and a bishop led them in a vigil for victims, for healing and for peace.

More than 100 worshipers attended the hastily planned midday service. Following a burial rite, they prayed for the three killed in Monday’s bombings, sang hymns and received Communion.

Bishop Suffragan Gayle Harris, who presided at the service, said they wanted to respond with “some sense of hope and light.” She told those gathered, “We need to run another race to address the violence in our society, the hatred and the anger.”

Read it all.

As Britain’s youngest vicar you could say Jude Davis walked into the priesthood on something of a wing and a prayer.

But the real-life Vicar of Dibley is hoping her leap of faith helps bring the message of the church to a new generation of believers.

Preaching from her Doncaster Minster parish in Yorkshire, reverend Davis is finally realising a dream she has harboured since she was 17.

Read it all.

Read it all.

In those few paragraphs, John Calvin succinctly sums up election and holiness for the Christian. While there are several themes that come out of this quote and this passage, the one theme that I think springs from this text is holiness. Holiness is the consequence and evidence of our election. We are not holy to be accepted by God, but because Jesus is holy we are holy. God says, “you shall be holy, for I am holy”.

The idea of holiness is almost a peculiar doctrine for the new Reformed movement. I know many young and old in this tradition who feel no obligation to actively and passionately with their entire being, to pursue a life of holiness. They wouldn’t explicitly say this, but their lives wouldn’t reflect otherwise.

Read it all.

A prayer service with Holy Eucharist is being planned for Tuesday, April 16 at 12:15 p.m. at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul (138 Tremont Street) in Boston, with Bishop Gayle E. Harris presiding (assuming downtown conditions and transit have regularized). All are welcome.

Downtown church personnel reached so far report chaos in the Back Bay area and limited mobility.

Trinity Church in Copley Square was closed today for the Marathon; Marathon runners on Trinity Church’s charity team are reported safe….

Read it all.

Pope Francis has sent his “sympathy and closeness in prayer” to the people of Boston in a telegram sent on his behalf.
The telegram reads “In the aftermath of this senseless tragedy, His Holiness invokes God’s peace upon the dead, his consolation upon the suffering and his strength upon all those engaged in the continuing work of relief and response. At this time of mourning the Holy Father prays that all Bostonians will be united in a resolve not to be overcome by evil, but to combat evil with good (cf. Rom 12:21), working together to build an ever more just, free and secure society for generations yet to come.”

Read it all.

There is a great graphic here and some comment there.

It is more reasonable to me, as it is to any atheist, to believe in things that are in accord with what we know are natural laws, than to believe in things that contradict them….[but] unless you’re raised atheist, people become atheists just as I did, by thinking about the same things Augustine thought about. Certainly one of the first things I thought about as a maturing child was “Why is there polio? Why are there diseases?” If there is a good God why are there these things? The answer of the religious person is “God has a plan we don’t understand.” That wasn’t enough for me. There are people who don’t know anything about science. One of the reasons I recommend Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, is that basically he explains the relationship between science and atheism. But I don’t think people are really persuaded into atheism by books or by debates or anything like that. I think people become atheists because they think about the world around them. They start to search out books because they ask questions. In general, people don’t become atheists at a late age, in their 50s. All of the atheists I know became atheists fairly early on. They became atheists in their adolescence or in their 20s because these are the ages at which you’re maturing, your brain is maturing, and you’re beginning to ask questions. If religion doesn’t do it for you, if, in fact, religion, as it does for me, contradicts any rational idea of how to live, then you become an atheist, or whatever you want to call it ”“ an agnostic, a freethinker.

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From the FBI to local police departments, law enforcement agencies have dramatically shifted their emphasis to counterterrorism over the past decade, gathering intelligence on both domestic and foreign extremist groups. The George W. Bush and Obama administrations have created an enormous global apparatus designed to track and target terrorists.

But officials have always warned that the United States cannot prevent every attempted strike on U.S. soil. In some recent plots, authorities have benefited as much from luck as investigative skill.

Read it all.

The powerful blasts at the Boston Marathon finish line Monday underscore why the Federal Bureau of Investigation has spent years refining its “tripwire” system for catching would-be bomb makers before they can build a deadly device.

For years, federal agents have asked businesses that sell materials useful in making bombs to alert authorities to any suspicious orders. The types of tripwires in place have shifted over the years. In the 1990s, law enforcement worried mostly about fertilizer-based bombs after such devices were used in the Oklahoma City attacks of April 1995. In the past decade, chemical-based bombs have come into focus as authorities adapt to the changing threat.

“The tripwires have certainly been successful in the past,” said Don Borelli, a former counterterrorism official at the FBI who now works for Soufan Group.

Read it all.

“I’d never imagined in my wildest dreams this would ­ever happen,” Norden said, sitting on a bench outside the Beth Israel Deaconess emergency room Monday night.

As she looked at her feet, with socks mismatched ­because she had dressed so quickly to leave the house, tears fell to the sidewalk.

“I feel sick,” she said. “I think I could pass out.”

She had yet to see either son, because doctors had not authorized visitors. Both are graduates of Stoneham High School and had been laid off recently from their jobs as roofers. The oldest, age 33, still lives in Stoneham, the younger in Wakefield. Both are avid fishermen.

Read it all.

If you can stomach it, there are photos that are (warning–contains some graphic images including one which requires you to click on it to see {I didn’t do so]) collected there.

O Blessed Lord, who didst promise thy disciples that through thy Easter victory their sorrow should be turned to joy, and their joy no man should take from them: Grant us, we pray thee, so to know thee in the power of thy resurrection, that we may be partakers of that joy which is unspeakable and full of glory; for thy holy name’s sake.

So we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

–1 John 4:16

“Leading the conversation” is how you end up with the major Sunday shows somehow neglecting to invite a single anti-amnesty politician on a weekend dominated by the immigration debate. It’s how you end up with officially nonideological anchors and journalists lecturing social conservatives for being out of step with modern values. And it’s how you end up with a press corps that went all-in for the supposed “war on women” having to be shamed and harassed ”” by two writers in particular, Kirsten Powers in USA Today and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway of GetReligion ”” into paying attention to the grisly case of a Philadelphia doctor whose methods of late-term abortion included snipping the spines of neonates after they were delivered.

As the last example suggests, the problem here isn’t that American journalists are too quick to go on crusades. Rather, it’s that the press’s ideological blinders limit the kinds of crusades mainstream outlets are willing to entertain, and the formal commitment to neutrality encourages self-deception about what counts as crusading.

The core weakness of the mainstream media, in this sense, is less liberalism than parochialism….

Read it all.