The North American Lutheran Church (NALC) has chosen to partner with Trinity School for Ministry to create a “Seminary Center” for the training of future NALC pastors. In a nearly unanimous vote on August 8, 2013, the Convocation of the NALC took action to establish a new North American Lutheran Seminary (NALS). This seminary will not be a degree granting institution, rather, it will partner with existing accredited seminaries to provide sound theological education for NALC students. Trinity will soon welcome a new NALS Seminary Director to its Ambridge, PA campus to oversee the formation of NALC students, whether at Trinity or at one of the Houses of Study that will be developed throughout North America.

Lutheran students will earn a degree from Trinity School for Ministry, taking the core courses required in the Master of Divinity (MDiv) curriculum. For some courses they will take Lutheran alternatives taught by NALC professors to ensure a solid foundation in confessional Lutheranism.

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The Rev. vonRosenberg presently heads the Episcopal Church in South Carolina, the name given to those Episcopalians in the Diocese who want to remain with the national church. VonRosenberg has sued Lawrence over usage of the title of bishop, arguing that Lawrence renounced this title when he opted to leave The Episcopal Church in January.

After hearing about an hour of arguments, Houck stated that he should have a decision as to the fate of the suit sometime in the next seven to ten days.

Joy Hunter, director of Communications for the Diocese of South Carolina, told The Christian Post that Lawrence argued for the suit to be dismissed. “In his Motion, Bishop Lawrence asked that Judge Houck either dismiss the federal lawsuit, or stay it until the pending state court litigation is resolved,” said Hunter.

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Beth Glover was a juror on the trial of former Goldman Sachs trader Fabrice Tourre. When the lawyers were discussing the mortgages tied to the securities at the center of the case, Glover realized that, for all intents and purposes, they were talking about her mortgage.

“When they were looking at the subprime mortgage groupings, I think I would have been in one of those,” Glover told me. “I didn’t have as great as FICO score at that time.”

Glover’s an Episcopal priest. She says she saw the devastation the financial crisis caused to her parishioners. They lost homes and jobs. Church programs had to be cut for lack of funds.

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The Episcopal Church in Maryland celebrated the life of its 11th bishop with all the formality and ceremony of a cathedral funeral Saturday, while remembering a man known as a fierce champion for society’s outsiders.

“Bishop David Leighton knew the burden of being a shepherd,” said the Right Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, the current bishop. “He experienced many times the hatred, bitterness and rejection that comes with the office whenever he stood up for those whom society wanted to neglect, or keep outside of the power structures in the church.”

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Almost four years ago, the Spy took an interest in the special challenges facing the Episcopal Church. The Spy did so because those challenges highlighted in very local terms the social changes that faced the country at the time, including the blessing of same sex relationships and the relevancy of Christianity with a quickly growing secular population.

As a consequence of this interest, the Spy sponsored a forum in the fall of 2009 to discuss the state of the Church with the rectors of Kent, Queen Anne’s and Talbot Counties. As our coverage clearly shows, the Episcopal Church, at least locally, was still very much in transition….

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We fear being sued, finishing last, going broke; we fear the mole on the back, the new kid on the block, the sound of the clock as it ticks us closer to the grave. We sophisticate investment plans, create elaborate security systems, and legislate stronger military, yet we depend on mood altering drugs more than any other generation in history. Moreover, “ordinary children today are more fearful than psychiatric patients were in the 1950s.”

Fear, it seems, has taken a hundred-year lease on the building next door and set up shop. Oversize and rude, fear is unwilling to share the heart with happiness. Happiness complies and leaves. Do you ever see the two together? Can one be happy and afraid at the same time? Clear thinking and afraid? Confident and afraid? Merciful and afraid? No. Fear is the big bully in the high school hallway: brash, loud, and unproductive. For all the noise fear makes and room it takes, fear does little good.

Fear never wrote a symphony or poem, negotiated a peace treaty, or cured a disease. Fear never pulled a family out of poverty or a country out of bigotry. Fear never saved a marriage or a business. Courage did that. Faith did that. People who refused to consult or cower to their timidities did that. But fear itself? Fear herds us into a prison and slams the doors.

Wouldn’t it be great to walk out?

Imagine your life wholly untouched by angst. What if faith, not fear, was your default reaction to threats? If you could hover a fear magnet over your heart and extract every last shaving of dread, insecurity, and doubt, what would remain? Envision a day, just one day, absent the dread of failure, rejection, and calamity. Can you imagine a life with no fear? This is the possibility behind Jesus’ question.

“Why are you afraid?” he asks (Matt. 8:26 ncv).

–Max Luxado, Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear (Thomas Nelson, 2009), pp.5-6 ; quoted by yours truly in the morning sermon

As student Gerald Addison read the story last fall preparing for an assignment, however, his mind churned with questions unanswered in the text.

So, he tracked down [Lt. Col. Kevin] Jarrard.

“I needed more insight into events and people. And most of all, I needed to know Kevin Jarrard better,” Addison recalls. “I realized there was probably more to be learned about the Marine who was so intent on helping a child survive in a place where he could not be sure he himself would survive.”

Jarrard responded. The student and Marine commander struck up a friendship, trading emails and phone calls during the eight-week course last year. Now, they will meet in person when Jarrard comes to campus.

Read it all from the Faith and Values section of the local paper.

Almighty God, only giver of all mercies, whose Son, Jesus Christ, has taught us how to pray aright: Save us, we beseech thee, from all presumption in our prayer, and grant unto us the grace of humility and contrition; that we may, sharing the vision of thine apostle Saint Paul, know that it is by the grace of God alone that we are what we are, and that we can do nothing but through the strengthening of thy Son, Christ our Lord; who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end.

–Euchologium Anglicanum

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

–Romans 15:13

Foreign-owned banks, mines, and businesses have heard that, to fulfill a campaign promise made by Mugabe, their assets may be seized and restructured into a majority national ownership arrangement.

Now it appears the considerable property of the Anglican church in Zimbabwe, though it is mostly a black membership, may also be under renewed scrutiny by the unscrupulous.

The chief Anglican bishop in Zimbabwe, Chad Gandiya, this week accused a renegade clergyman and friend of Mugabe of restarting a campaign using brutality, the courts, and police to seize churches, orphanages, and missions owned by mainstream Anglicans.

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SEVERSON: For 12 agonizing years Kathleen was looking for an answer and recently got one from Dr. Ian Krantz at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who had sequenced [her son] Liam’s genome.

post01-genome-sequencing

DR. IAN KRANTZ (Medical Geneticist, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) And we not only found an answer in him, but we found the same answer in a number of other children, and we have a new diagnosis. We are understanding it, how to treat it better.

SEVERSON: The discovery of Liam’s genetic defect underscores how rapidly and how important the science of sequencing the human genome has become in modern medicine, especially when it comes to children. When researchers first mapped the human genome, it took almost 10 years and cost $3 billion. That was less than 10 years ago. Today the process takes three weeks, and the price tag is rapidly approaching $1,000.

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Every night at dusk, the streets of this desert town near the Israeli border empty out, and the chatter and thump of gunfire and explosives begin. Morning reveals the results: another dead soldier, another police checkpoint riddled with bullets, another kidnapping. In mid-July, the body of a local Christian shop owner was found near the town cemetery, his head severed, his torso in chains.

The northern Sinai Peninsula, long a relatively lawless zone, has become a dark harbinger of what could follow elsewhere in Egypt if the interim government cannot peacefully resolve its standoff with the Islamist protesters camped out in Cairo.

In the five weeks since Egypt’s military ousted the Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, the endemic violence here has spiraled into something like an insurgency, with mysterious gunmen attacking military and police facilities every night.

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