Right now the remains of about 100 people are lined up neatly in small white boxes, waiting for their turn to be buried. Finegan says it’s basic, but it helps to keep costs down, allowing his funeral home and the county to afford the things they think are far more important, like the grave site and the memorial service. This is something Pamela Hirst, who couldn’t pay for a friend’s burial, says she doesn’t take for granted.

“It is a great burden when you can’t properly do what you want to do in your heart for someone that you’ve loved so much,” she says.

For Hirst, that someone was Joe Speer. He was a poet who lived his life performing and traveling the country in a green Volkswagen van. Hirst still has trouble talking about Speer. Two years ago, he died from pancreatic cancer. And for a while, Hirst says she carried around a lot of guilt because she couldn’t afford to give him a proper burial.

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In its passion to pursue a progressive theological paradigm embracing cultural sensitivity (inclusiveness) and intellectual freedom, TEC cast aside fundamental Christian doctrines, professing, among other things:

* Jesus was not born of a virgin, was not God incarnate, and his resurrection is questionable at best;

* Man needs enlightenment, not salvation; we are to reconcile ourselves with one another, not with God;

* Scripture is not authoritative nor the revealed word of God, but rather metaphorical.

Simply put, Anglicans left TEC because of their faithfulness to the fundamental and historical Christian foundation that the Holy Scriptures are the final authority of its faith.

The tragic fallout of this split is multifaceted. A lady I have known and worshipped with for 30 years approached me, saying homosexuals were not welcome at St. Paul’s. I was taken aback by her misconception. I reminded her that on every Sunday, the priest who is celebrating Holy Communion invites “all baptized Christians as being welcome here at the Lord’s table.” Not blessing same sex unions is an unrelated issue.

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For the second time in recent months, U.S. District Judge C. Weston Houck is weighing whether issues arising from the acrimonious Episcopal schism in eastern South Carolina belong in federal court.

As two bishops sat with their attorneys on either side of his Charleston courtroom, Houck heard about an hour of arguments Thursday on one bishop’s request for an injunction against the other.

Charles vonRosenberg, the bishop of parishes remaining with the national Episcopal Church, wants the court to block Mark Lawrence, the bishop of churches that left last year, from using the name and the symbols of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina.

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The Anglican Church of Canada has asked clergy for its support in a plea to Ontario pension fund regulators to give it a three year extension of time to address a cash crunch in the church’s pension plan.

In a July 2013 letter to the 1,600 active members and 2,600 retirees covered by the church pension programme the plan administrators told the clergy their approval was needed before the government would grant the plea for more time. “With funding relief, we will have three years to try to improve our plan’s funding level,” they wrote. “At the end of three years, we will do another valuation of the plan. If there is still a solvency funding shortfall, we will likely have no choice but to cut benefits.”

The average age of plan participants is 52.5….

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The Archbishop of Canterbury said this week that he felt “encouraged and uplifted by all traditions” in the Church. He was speaking after a week-long tour of the country, during which he spoke to Pentecostal, Evangelical, and Anglo-Catholic gatherings.

Archbishop Welby spoke at Hillsong, a Pentecostal Church, at the O2 Arena, in London; HTB Focus, a week away for members of Holy Trinity, Brompton, and its plants, in Lincolnshire; New Wine, a Charismatic Evangelical festival in Somerset…and the Youth Pilgrimage to the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Writing on his blog on Sunday, Archbishop Welby admitted that, during mass and Benediction at Walsingham, on Wednesday of last week, “My first thought was ‘What a contrast with the past few days.’ But my next thought was: ‘What’s the problem?'”

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It was nighttime and 10,000 Islamists were marching down the most heavily Christian street in this ancient Egyptian city, chanting “Islamic, Islamic, despite the Christians.” A half-dozen kids were spray-painting “Boycott the Christians” on walls, supervised by an adult.

While Islamists are on the defensive in Cairo following the military coup that ousted President Mohammed Morsi, in Assiut and elsewhere in Egypt’s deep south they are waging a stepped-up hate campaign, claiming the country’s Christian minority somehow engineered Morsi’s downfall.

“Tawadros is a dog,” says a spray-painted insult, referring to Pope Tawadros II, patriarch of the Copts, as Egypt’s Christians are called. Christian homes, stores and places of worship have been marked with large painted crosses.

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Heroin use in the U.S. is soaring, especially in rural areas, amid ample supply and a shift away from costlier prescription narcotics that are becoming tougher to acquire. The number of people who say they have used heroin in the past year jumped 53.5% to 620,000 between 2002 to 2011, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. There were 3,094 overdose deaths in 2010, a 55% increase from 2000, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Much of the heroin that reaches smaller towns such as Ellensburg, [Washington,] comes from Mexico, where producers have ramped up production in recent years, drug officials say. Heroin seizures at the Southwest border, from Texas to California, ballooned to 1,989 kilograms in fiscal 2012 from 487 kilograms in 2008, according to figures from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The heroin scourge has been driven largely by a law-enforcement crackdown on illicit use of prescription painkillers such as oxycodone and drug-company reformulations that make the pills harder to crush and snort, drug officials say.

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The Anglican Communion on Sunday 4th August 2013 finally completed the processes of “Ordaining and Consecrating a new Episcopal Bishop in the person of His Grace the Rt. Rev. Thomas Arnold Ikunika Wilson as the 3rd Bishop of the Diocese of Freetown, (which also includes the North and interestingly, Bonthe) as successor to His Grace the Rt. Rev. Julius O P Lynch, whose 17 years Episcopacy ended on 24th July sharp, upon his attaining the mandatory retirement age of 70 years.

It was all pomp and pageantry complimented by four and half hours of High Mass at the Cathedral of St George in Freetown, second in perfection perhaps just perhaps ”“ to an Episcopal Ordination at the West Minister Abbey, whence the tradition originated. It was a well attended service that saw worshippers overflowing into nearby streets as far as blocks away from the Church premises, thus belying the previously discomforting perception that our Anglican Communion was dying.

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We give thee humble and hearty thanks, O most merciful Father, for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men, for the blessings of this life and for the promise of everlasting happiness. And as we are bound, we especially thank thee for the mercies which we have received: for health and strength and the manifold enjoyments of our daily life; for the opportunities of learning, for the knowledge of thy will, for the means of serving thee in thy Church, and for the love thou hast revealed to us in thy Son, our Saviour; to whom with thee and the Holy Spirit be praise and glory for ever and ever.

–B. F. Westcott (1825-1901)

Dost thou work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise thee?…Is thy steadfast love declared in the grave, or thy faithfulness in Abaddon? Are thy wonders known in the darkness, or thy saving help in the land of forgetfulness?

–Psalm 88:10-12

Whatever the future outcome for Protestant Christianity in America””and no matter how murky the present landscape””one would be remiss to overlook the unique legacy of evangelist Billy Graham, whom Scheussler invokes to illustrate the mobilization of evangelicals against mainline-endorsed leftist causes in the 1950s; Graham comes off the page as little more than a firebrand polemicist.

Quite to the contrary, Graham’s impact on American Protestantism has been one of inclusion””building bridges of understanding to unite ecumenicals and evangelicals and, in latter years even Catholics””in evangelism. Using a football metaphor, if leaders of diverse Christian confessions were perceived to be playing between the ten-yard-line and the goal at either end of the field, Graham brought them mid-field between the two forties.

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St. Aidan’s used to be looked down upon. Just 10 years ago it was in danger of having its doors shut for good, and now it’s being lauded as an example of what’s possible.

“We proved that we could do it,” Wheeler said. “The bishop kept our doors open, and we are thriving now.”

That focus on volunteering and service has grown from seeds planted by Sifers almost nine years ago. Now, service is the cornerstone of the St. Aidan’s community.

Read it all. For those interested, a graph of some of the statistics for this parish over the last decade may be found there.

At 83, Carl Smith found himself facing quadruple-bypass surgery and the real possibility that he might not survive.

Within hours on this spring morning, Dr. Mark Pool would temporarily bring Smith’s heart to a stop in an attempt to circumvent its blocked passages.

And to help his patient confront the uncertainty, Pool did something unusual in his profession: He prayed with him.

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One of the last of a clutch of deans to be nominated directly by the Crown Appointments’ Office in Downing Street (before Gordon Brown’s reforms rendered such positions subject to a dogmatic “human resources” process), Jukes’s preferment to Ripon was widely hailed as an inspired choice. For he had established a reputation as a troubleshooter during a ministry in Cannock and Selby, and the situation he inherited at Ripon was in need of urgent attention.

His predecessor, the Very Rev John Methuen, had resigned in 2005 rather than face 21 charges of “conduct unbecoming in the office of a clerk in holy orders”. The Cathedral community was divided and the finances and fabric were in a parlous state, running up annual deficits in the region of £300,000.

For some years, the Chapter had remained solvent only by selling properties and when Jukes, prior to taking up the post, asked to inspect the deanery, he was told that it was uninhabitable with the exception of a well-appointed wine cellar. He and his family therefore took up temporary accommodation in what was little more than a cottage with no office and little or no administrative support….

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So, why do we have In the Living Room? Why should artists get their own joint in the body of the church? I asked myself these questions, too. Was this some sort of team-building, Kumbayah camp exercise?

For some, it was a time to heal and be built up. To contemplate the God-endued honor in what some people in their past labeled “frivolous”. To be with others whose day job is one thing while their mind- and heart-life is occupied elsewhere. To be challenged by the fact that God can be in the process of our work, when the work itself doesn’t have a hard outline.

We discussed the notion of liminality, the “here, but not yet” place that Christians can live in. (e.g. Our marriages are a “here, but not yet” version of our status as Bride of Christ.) For people in the creative arts, we walk into this shifting place in our work lives, too, and it can be unnerving. There is no such thing as “finished” in art. But we’re all working toward some imagined plateau before the next climb. The target is wavering and the fruit of our labor is not always in measure with the amount we have sown.

For me, this was the benefit of In the Living Room: to communicate and have communicated to me the blessedness of our “at work” state.

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The number of over-sixties divorcing their partners has hit a 40-year high as men seek a new life of adventure after years of marriage, according to figures published yesterday.

“Silver splitter” divorces are continuing to rise at a time when the overall number of marriage failures is in decline. Unlike other age groups where women are more likely to file for divorce, among the over-sixties men are as likely as women to want to end a marriage.

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It was a Saturday morning and the Rev. Jaman Iseminger had just dropped by to help some volunteers as they cleaned up the cemetery next door to the Bethel Community Church in Southport, south of Indianapolis.

Then a homeless woman entered the church and confronted him. She pulled a gun and killed the 29-year-old pastor, leaving behind a wife and a 2-year-old daughter.

“There are all kinds of tragic details … but here’s what’s really haunting about that case,” said Jimmy Meeks, a Hurst, Texas, patrolman who is also a licensed Southern Baptist preacher. “When they looked on his desk they discovered that his sermon that Sunday was going to be about the rising number of pastors around the world who were dying for their faith. There’s no way he could have known that he was next in line.”

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Every human being enjoys a basic right to be respected, not because of any title, position, prestige, or accomplishment but first of all because we are created in the image and likeness of God. From an ethical and moral perspective we embrace the exhortation of St. Paul “to anticipate one another in showing honor” (Rom 12:10). Today’s competitive culture challenges us to strive for victory and advantage, but for St. Paul the challenge is to build each other up and honor one another’s innate dignity.

Labor Day is an opportunity to take stock of the ways workers are honored and respected. Earlier this year, Pope Francis pointed out, “Work is fundamental to the dignity of a person. . . . It gives one the ability to maintain oneself, one’s family, to contribute to the growth of one’s own nation.” Unfortunately, millions of workers today are denied this honor and respect as a result of unemployment, underemployment, unjust wages, wage theft, abuse, and exploitation.

Even with new indicators of some modest progress in recovery, the economy still has not improved the standard of living for many people, especially for the poor and the working poor, many of whom are unemployed or underemployed.

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Archbishop Justin has spoken of the “joyful” work of building Christian-Muslim relationships in his first annual message to Muslims on Eid Al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan.

He encouraged the “hard” but also “joyful” work of building “deep and long-lasting relationships” between the two faith communities, which he said he had experienced during his time working in Nigeria.
– See more at: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/5117/archbishop-on-eid-al-fitr-let-us-build-deep-and-lasting-ties-with-each-other#sthash.NfFu4T7M.dpuf

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Public relations agencies now incorporate blogs into their overall marketing plans for clients; networks of bloggers help identify the most appropriate ones to recruit for those marketing efforts; and then bloggers, aware of the value they bring to the deal, consider how they want to be rewarded.

Five years ago, paying a blogger wasn’t something that came up often, said Caroline Friedman, senior associate at Burson-Marsteller. Now, she said, many more are responding to promotional inquiries with explanations of the rates that they charge for their time and access to their reader base.

“It’s a very noticeable shift every few months,” said Ms. Friedman, who works on various programs involving bloggers, including an ongoing project with Hormel Foods.

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Former U.S. Senator Harry Byrd, Jr. was buried on Saturday in Winchester Virginia after a brief funeral at Christ Episcopal Church, with which the Byrd dynasty was long associated. Presiding at the funeral was his former colleague retired U.S. Senator John Danforth, an ordained Episcopal clergyman who also presided at President Reagan’s funeral….

At the funeral at Christ Episcopal, Danforth, who said Byrd invited him to conduct his funeral several years ago, hailed Byrd for his “cheerfulness and civility.” The old Episcopal elite is largely fading from the scene, as that denomination becomes marginal, and its historic ethos, once rooted in Virginia’s socially stratified agrarian Tidewater, is mostly forgotten in the modern world of suburbs and megachurches.

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Issues arising from the Episcopal schism in eastern South Carolina are going back before a federal judge.

U.S. District Judge C. Weston Houck holds a hearing in Charleston on Thursday on a motion filed by a churches remaining with the national church. It asks that only those churches be allowed to use the name and symbols of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina.

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So let’s talk reality. Today’s young adults go through their own glory days with crushing student loan debt and a severe recession that continues to affect those entering the job market for the first time. Those from every generation can affirm we are living in a time of unprecedented technological and social change, but millennials are doing so in the midst of the formative years when they build their adult lives. While some boomers unfortunately find themselves forced onto the employment exit ramp, millennials trying to launch their career may discover that no clear “on ramp” into the workforce exists at all for them, save for the merry-go-round of low-paying, part-time jobs (or worse, internships!).

I have watched my own 20-something children and some of my young adult friends struggle to find the kinds of mobile, sustainable careers we boomers have had. Some young workers don’t crave those kinds of jobs, choosing instead to make a living through nontraditional outlets that rely on creativity, connectivity, and entrepreneurship.

Either way, we can’t regard the employment issues of millennials as character issues. Many of my peers have tried. When they complain about the slacker, selfie-selfish ways of an entire generation of young adults, there is an implication that boomers have been blessed (if you measure blessing in terms of material possessions) because we did something right.

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Almighty God, whose servant Dominic grew in knowledge of thy truth and formed an order of preachers to proclaim the good news of Christ: Give to all thy people a hunger for your Word and an urgent longing to share the Gospel, that the whole world may come to know thee as thou art revealed in thy Son Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

O God, renew our spirits by thy Holy Spirit, and draw our hearts this morning unto thyself, that our work may not be a burden, but a delight; and give us such a mighty love to thee as may sweeten all our obedience. Let us not serve with the spirit of bondage as slaves, but with cheerfulness and gladness, as children, delighting ourselves in thee and rejoicing in thy wishes for the sake of Jesus Christ.

–The Pastor’s Prayerbook

And God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them. Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to pronounce the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches.” Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. But the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?” And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, mastered all of them, and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. And this became known to all residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks; and fear fell upon them all; and the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled. Many also of those who were now believers came, confessing and divulging their practices. And a number of those who practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all; and they counted the value of them and found it came to fifty thousand pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord grew and prevailed mightily.

–Acts 19:11-20

Dr Davies will be installed as Sydney’s 12th Anglican Archbishop in St Andrew’s Cathedral on 23 August. Archbishop Aspinall will attend the service.

“I’ve known Glenn for many years,” Archbishop Aspinall said. “I am sure I join the leaders of Australia’s other Anglican dioceses in welcoming Glenn, in praying for his leadership and in offering any practical help we can as he assumes these new responsibilities.

“Glenn is a well known and regarded contributor to the life of the national Church, having served on both the General Synod Standing Committee and the national Doctrine Commission for many years. He has demonstrated a commitment to listen, discuss and reflect upon issues that are sometimes painful and difficult, and to do so in a conciliatory way while holding on to his personal convictions. I see that as a hopeful sign for the future.

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[Sam Sturgeon, president of Demographic Intelligence, said:] “Partly because religious communities provide a family-friendly context to the women who attend them, religious women are more likely to have children and to bear a comparatively high share of the nation’s children, compared to their less religious or secular peers.”

Is anyone surprised? And yet, even as this report reveals that religious factors are in play in reproductive decisions, the influence of religion is explained only in terms of the fact that “religious communities provide a family-friendly context to the women who attend them.”

Missing from this analysis is the factor of religious belief. There appears to be little recognition of the fact that what we believe about sex, marriage, and children has a great deal to do with the decisions that individuals and couples make.

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Fans of a beloved contemporary Christian hymn won’t get any satisfaction in a new church hymnal.

The committee putting together a new hymnal for the Presbyterian Church (USA) dropped the popular hymn “In Christ Alone” because the song’s authors refused to change a phrase about the wrath of God.

The original lyrics say that “on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” The Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song wanted to substitute the words, “the love of God was magnified.”

The song’s authors, Stuart Townend and Nashville resident Keith Getty, objected. So the committee voted to drop the song.

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