My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

–Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

Moreover as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD by ceasing to pray for you; and I will instruct you in the good and the right way.

Only fear the LORD, and serve him faithfully with all your heart; for consider what great things he has done for you.

–1 Samuel 12: 23-24

Mohamed Morsi woke up today as President of the Arab Republic of Egypt. By nightfall, if the opposition have their way, he may have been toppled in a coup d’état.

At about 3pm tomorrow afternoon, a 48-hour ultimatum announced by the military will come to a head. It called on the President to solve the deepening national crisis or face an army intervention. Reports said the military intends to establish an interim council to rule while the constitution is redrafted. It would then call presidential elections within months.

The President’s office responded to the army’s statement obliquely by saying Mr Morsi was “going forward” with his own plans “regardless of any statements that deepen divisions between citizens”.

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Baxter told diocese officials he has continued to deal with migraine headaches, vertigo and fatigue, the website reported, and he felt these ailments would interfere with his ability to execute his duties fully. Baxter has served as bishop for eight years. Most bishops in the Episcopal Church serve an average of 10 years before retirement, the website said.

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The Egyptian military has leaked details of its draft “roadmap” for the country’s future, which includes new presidential elections.

According to details given to the BBC, the plan would see the suspension of the new constitution and the dissolution of parliament.

Clashes in Cairo between opponents and supporters of President Morsi killed seven people on Tuesday, officials say.

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“If true, the allegations that have emerged in recent days would show beyond doubt that we are not just hearing the revelation that some police officers behaved appallingly to the family and friends of a murder victim 20 years ago. In the light of what has been alleged, many people are now concluding that significant numbers of police officers, including some at senior level, knew of, and approved of, what was happening. The belief that this was not just a few bad apples but a rottenness at the core of UK policing needs to be tested by a full, open and independent investigation, now.

“If it is indeed the case that a cohort of officers has been complicit in a prolonged cover up, hiding the truth from the Macpherson enquiry and from the groups both within the Home Office and UK Policing that were set up in the wake of Stephen Lawrence’s murder and which sought to address the structural failings in how we police our society, then the integrity of all that well intentioned work is called into question, and we would be forced to conclude that a conspiracy of silence has continued until 2013 to prevent the full truth from emerging.

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Jesse Zink’s “Why Provinces Matter” and the responses from William G. Witt and Colin Podmore [TLC, May 26] illustrate the range of opinions on what South Carolina’s ultimate ecclesial structure should be, from standalone province to joining the Anglican Church in North America. One thing in common to all of the initial essays, however, was the recognition that any decision on ultimate structure might still be some time away.

This recognition has also been the starting point of the Anglican Communion Institute in our work on this issue in the last several months. We believe that South Carolina’s current status does not necessarily present a problem in need of immediate resolution, but rather inheres in the nature of this dispute. Taking our cue both from Bishop Mark Lawrence and the Instruments of Communion, we have proposed that the guiding principle of the next season for South Carolina is “provisionality.” During this period ultimate decisions are deferred precisely because they are premature. Bishop Lawrence has stressed this on many occasions. The rupture with the Episcopal Church is too fresh with many unresolved issues; the ensuing litigation is only beginning, not nearing an end. This is not the time to make such a momentous decision as that regarding the ultimate future of this diocese, which predates the formation of the Episcopal Church.

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Steve Bass, the North American Mission Board’s vice president for the West region, echoed Wilson’s concerns and promised the prayers of Southern Baptists.

“Many of these are younger men who represent families,” said Bass, who lives in Phoenix and served for 15 years as the executive director of the Arizona convention before coming to NAMB in 2011. “We lost 19 great people, but we have immediately impacted families as well. Those children are never going to get away from this. That’s when your heart goes out to them. Obviously our prayers are for them. I’m sure our churches in the area will be reaching out to those families the best they can.”

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As they enact a marriage for their kids and their neighbors, their “real” lives as spies sometimes require actions incompatible with their cover. They are meant to have an understanding, for instance, that each will use sex with other people as a tool for their missions, but this arrangement creates inevitable problems for their relationship. A hidden identity is a hard thing to nourish, and an identity embodied in habit and practice is a harder thing to disavow.

The storyline plays with the tensions created when there is a difference between identity and self-presentation, between hidden purpose and what one shows to the world. The house, the marriage and the kids may be meant as a cover, but it turns out that when you live with someone for years on end, when you care for children from diapers to braces, your daily life will threaten to become your real life.

Scripture speaks of the way domestic life shapes who we are and how we worship when the Lord commands Israel not to “enter into marriage” with those who “will surely incline your heart to follow their gods’” (1 Kings 11:2). When King Solomon flouts this command and clings to his foreign wives in love, his “heart is turned” and he is “not true to the Lord his God” (1 Kings 11:4)….

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The more I realize God’s love in thought and practice, the more I am transformed into his holiness, putting away childish rationalizations and hyperboles of justice, wrath, guilt, and fear. In our holy God’s economy, there is no counterpoint or equal to love. Everything that is truth comes down to love and is measured by it””everything! There is not a single piece of Scripture or theology that should be understood without the context of God’s love.
It should sadden us deeply that we Christians can be so prone to distrust love””to respond, “Well yes, love, but . . .”
If Christianity is not all about love, it is nothing but another impotent human religious construct: a loud and annoyingly cymbal. Because love is not rude, it cannot roll its eyes against the persistent pleas of a prodigal’s mother. Neither is it self-seeking, prioritizing the protection of those within from those without. And love keeps no record of wrongs, even of daughters who are unrepentantly living in God’s wrath.
For grown-up Christian thinking, there can be no alternative. There is no “but” to God’s love.

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In our current era, as the saying goes, we take that which is lower to be more real. We generally believe that soldiers under the gritty harshness of war are not thinking about high ideals like gallantry. They are just trying to get through the day or protect their buddies. Since World War I, as Hemingway famously put it, abstract words like “honor” and “glory” and “courage” often seem obscene and pretentious. Studies of letters sent home by soldiers in World War II suggest that grand ideas were remote from their daily concerns.

But Civil War soldiers were different. In his 1997 book “For Cause and Comrades,” James M. McPherson looked at the private letters Civil War soldiers sent to their loved ones. As McPherson noted, they ring with “patriotism, ideology, concepts of duty, honor, manhood and community.”

The soldiers were intensely political. Newspapers were desperately sought after in camp. Between battles, several regiments held formal debates on subjects like the constitutional issues raised by the war. “Ideological motifs almost leap from many pages of these documents,” McPherson reports. “It is government against anarchy, law against disorder,” a Philadelphia printer wrote, explaining his desire to fight.

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“The tradition of forgiving was central to the civil rights movement, and it’s grounded in two things,” said the Rev. Jonathan L. Walton, a professor of Christian morals at Harvard and minister of its Memorial Church. “One cannot be held accountable for how others treat us, but we can be held accountable by God for how we treat others. So forgiveness and reconciliation are central to us. Particularly for Martin Luther King, it was not about defeating an enemy but defeating injustice by bringing people from opposing sides into beloved community.”

Some of those moments of reconciliation have been soul-stirring in their force. One thinks of former Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama rolling his wheelchair into a reunion of Selma marchers in 1995 to renounce the segregationist beliefs that had defined his political career. Yet even if the offender never apologizes at all, black Christianity has repeatedly offered God’s grace in the all-too-real world.

“Forgiveness is just expected,” said the Rev. Douglas A. Slaughter, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Aiken, S.C. “Even as a child, we were not allowed to hate the racist but to hate racism, and to fight against it. We were taught ways to understand that the racist is more in need of understanding than we were. It’s just how you were raised.”

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Parish incomes continue to increase, passing £900 million for first time at £916 million, up £20 million on 2010, according to the latest parish finance statistics published by the Church of England.

Income from giving in 2011 increased by 1.3% to £546 million, with planned giving exceeding £10 per subscriber each week for the first time and tax-efficient giving reaching £10.70 a week. At £46.40 a month, this is more than double the average donation to the charitable sector of £17.00 a month.

Dr John Preston, National Stewardship Officer, said, “2011 saw another year of increased parish incomes and giving, in large part due to the faith and commitment of regular givers. Although overall growth in income was lower than inflation, it is encouraging to note that the average weekly gift from our planned givers has risen by a further 3%.”

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Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi says he was not consulted by the army before it set a 48-hour ultimatum to resolve the country’s deadly crisis.

Mr Morsi said a part of the statement “may cause confusion in the complex national scene”. He vowed to stick to his “national reconciliation” plan.

The army has warned it will intervene if the government and its opponents fail to heed “the will of the people”.

However, it denies that the ultimatum amounts to a coup.

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Healthy consumers could see insurance rates double or even triple when they look for individual coverage under the federal health law later this year, while the premiums paid by sicker people are set to become more affordable, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of coverage to be sold on the law’s new exchanges.

The exchanges, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s health-care law, look likely to offer few if any of the cut-rate policies that healthy people can now buy, according to the Journal’s analysis. At the same time, the top prices look to be within reach for many people who previously faced sky-high premiums because of chronic illnesses or who couldn’t buy insurance at all.

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American women, who trail men when it comes to making money, leading companies and accumulating wealth, are closing the gap on at least one measure: cheating on their spouses.

The percentage of wives having affairs rose almost 40 percent during the last two decades to 14.7 percent in 2010, while the number of men admitting to extramarital affairs held constant at 21 percent, according to the latest data from the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey.

The narrowing gap, reported by a sociologist at Auburn University at Montgomery, reflects multiple trends. Wives with their own jobs have less to lose economically from a divorce, and social media have made it easier to engage in affairs.

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O Lord, whose way is perfect: Help us, we pray thee, always to trust in thy goodness; that walking with thee in faith, and following thee in all simplicity, we may possess quiet and contented minds, and cast all our care on thee, because thou carest for us; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

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 UK looks set to become the first country to allow the creation of babies using DNA from three people, after the government backed the IVF technique.

It will produce draft regulations later this year and the procedure could be offered within two years.

Experts say three-person IVF could eliminate debilitating and potentially fatal mitochondrial diseases that are passed on from mother to child.

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When Confederate soldiers bore down on Gettysburg, Pa., in 1863, a quiet seminary building atop a ridge was transformed ”” first into a Union lookout, then a field hospital for 600 wounded soldiers.

Now the structure that stood at the center of the Civil War’s bloodiest and most pivotal battle is being transformed once again.

On July 1, marking the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, Schmucker Hall, located on the campus of Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, will reopen as a museum reflecting on the epic battle, the costly war and the complex role of faith.

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The 48-hour ultimatum issued today by Egypt’s unelected military brass comes amid a wave of protests that appear to dwarf the popular uprising that drove Egypt’s military-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak from power 27 months ago.

While what happens next is anyone’s guess, Egypt is undoubtedly in its most dangerous moment since former President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in 2011. The military is front and center in Egypt’s politics once more; the Muslim Brotherhood feels cornered and threatened by what it deems to be counter-revolutionaries; and the crowds in Tahrir Square and elsewhere are demanding something different ”“ but what they want, exactly, is far from clear.

Today Egypt’s so-called democratic transition is a failure, with the strongest evidence of that the rapturous crowds chanting their love for the Army and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). In January and February 2011, a massive show of street power led SCAF to dump Mubarak overboard. Then came a period of ham-handed military rule, with show trials of activists, organized sexual assault on female protesters (what else to call the so-called “virginity tests” forced on them within weeks of the military takeover?) and the torture of democracy activists like Ramy Essam.

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Seven months pregnant, at a time when most expectant couples are stockpiling diapers and choosing car seats, Renée Martin was struggling with bigger purchases.

At a prenatal class in March, she was told about epidural anesthesia and was given the option of using a birthing tub during labor. To each offer, she had one gnawing question: “How much is that going to cost?”

Though Ms. Martin, 31, and her husband, Mark Willett, are both professionals with health insurance, her current policy does not cover maternity care. So the couple had to approach the nine months that led to the birth of their daughter in May like an extended shopping trip though the American health care bazaar, sorting through an array of maternity services that most often have no clear price and ”” with no insurer to haggle on their behalf ”” trying to negotiate discounts from hospitals and doctors.

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The Church of England is backing a bid for hundreds of branches being offloaded by Royal Bank of Scotland, raising the prospect of a new, ethical bank on the high street.

The Church Commissioners, who manage the Church’s investments, are helping to fund a consortium led by the former banker and trade minister Lord Davies looking to take control of 315 RBS branches.

With investment decisions by the Church Commissioners taking into account the advice of the Church of England’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group, this would suggest consumers will have a new, ethical banking option if the consortium is successful.

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Almost a third of 32 hospitals and health systems involved in an experiment aimed at changing the way medical providers are paid may exit the program, a potential threat to the Affordable Care Act’s ambitious cost-saving goals.

Depending on the number of patients involved, “it really shows a critical cost-containment approach in the Affordable Care Act is running into real problems,” said Robert Blendon, a health-policy professor at Harvard University’s School of Public Health, in a telephone interview today.

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Sadly, it has become increasingly difficult for most Anglicans to recognize this quality in the Episcopal Church’s leadership, and Bishop Jefferts Schori’s somewhat freewheeling sermon serves to highlight why. Some years ago, the Yale theologian David Kelsey pointed out that it’s axiomatic to say that the Scriptures are authoritative for the Church, since that’s the very definition of what it means to say that a text is canonical Scripture. So long as many conservative Anglicans cannot see how the Episcopal Church is answerable to the authority of the Scriptures, it will remain difficult for them to see the Episcopal Church as a Church. This has a very great deal to do with the schisms of the past decade.

My title promised two sermons from the presiding bishop, and I’ve only mentioned one. The second was preached in January, this time in Charleston, South Carolina. The occasion was the secession of the conservative diocese from the Episcopal Church, and her audience was comprised of those who had decided to stay and form a continuing Episcopal diocese. The story of why the South Carolinians left is a long and sad one””the diocese was one of the Church’s founders, older than the United States itself, and was one of the few growth spots in a generally shrinking Church””but suffice it to say that they felt pushed out, and did not leave until their bishop, Mark Lawrence, was inhibited in his ministry by a disciplinary board for reasons the diocese held were unfair. The national Episcopal Church is now pursuing the diocese in court, as they’ve done in many similar cases (by now, they’ve spent over $22 million in legal costs), seeking to recover property and assets.

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The court’s storyline continues, with the mean old Congress trying to “demean” same-sex couples and “humiliate tens of thousands of children.” And it continues the Supreme Court defending New York’s “considered perspective on the historical roots of the institution of marriage and its evolving understanding of the meaning of equality.”
That “evolving” understanding, rhetorically speaking, puts yesterday’s decisions not as the culmination of “the meaning of equality” but on what same-sex marriage proponents repeatedly, unrelentingly, unmitigatingly, refer to as “the right side of history….”

The proper response to such arrogance and rhetorical triumphalism isn’t more arrogance and triumphalism, shouting, “We win in the end, so get with the program.” The better response is to meet those claims with humility and questions.
Thankfully, that’s what we’re seeing in the early Christian responses to yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions. Almost to a one, the Christian leaders we talked to yesterday disavowed easy lines of “Christians vs. gays and lesbians.”

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A culture based on the truth of marriage affirms that men and women are equally important, that they have equal dignity but are not the same. The recognition of the difference between a man and a woman is neither discrimination nor bigotry. It is a statement of reality, of fact.

What the court has determined demonstrates the limits of civil legislation. We all recognize that the word “marriage” is being used in many different ways. All that civil government can do is address the legal consequences of any specific union it has chosen to call marriage. While there are many other words to describe other human unions, “marriage,” in its intrinsic meaning and basic integrity, will continue to be understood by most people as the coming together of a man and woman committed to live together with the possibility to generate and raise children.

Far from settling the debate over the meaning of marriage, the Supreme Court decisions have simply reminded all of us that there is a great difference between what a law can decree and what God has created.

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[KIM} LAWTON: National Cathedral Dean Gary Hall announced in January that the cathedral would welcome the celebration of same-sex weddings.

[GARRY] HALL: I think there’s a good biblical case to be made that God made human beings in God’s image and blessed human beings and pronounced us good. So, whoever we are in our sexual orientation, we are good. And therefore the church needs also to make the same tools for living that have been historically available to heterosexual couples available to homosexual couples as well.

LAWTON: Hall acknowledges that many mainline Protestant denominations are still wrestling over the issue. Although his own denomination, The Episcopal Church has approved rites to bless same-sex unions that can be adapted to use in weddings, it officially still defines marriage as between a man and a woman. Meanwhile, religious opponents of gay marriage say no Court decision or poll numbers will sway their position.

[RUSSELL] MOORE: We don’t believe that the state created marriage. Marriage did not come about through a legislative act or through court edict, so no government bureaucrat or no Supreme Court justice has the authority to re-define marriage. Marriage is designed by God and embedded in nature and is beyond the reach of the state.

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Recent events in Afghanistan and Syria underscore the perilous times we live in. How to evaluate our options? Can we stand by as so many die in the Middle East? Should we negotiate with the Taleban? Where are the lessons in all of this? Who wins, who loses?

These are the dilemmas crystallised in the urgent need to better understand the countries of Asia, from the Gulf in the west to Japan in the east.

Asia offers colossal commercial potential but also seismic fault lines arising from unresolved sectarian and tribal conflicts and arbitrary colonial frontiers….

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