I will have a fuller analysis of the rest of the opinion up later today at StandFirm, and will integrate that analysis with my other Quincy posts at this blog in due course. For now, this represents a great legal victory (albeit at the trial level) for those dioceses of ECUSA who are facing lawsuits over their actions to remove themselves from membership in Quincy. And for that reason, ECUSA will almost certainly appeal the ruling. But as Bishop Iker reminded 815 following the decision in favor of his diocese in Texas, it is never too late for 815 to come to its senses, and stop this endless warfare in which Christians everywhere lose.

Read it all and follow the link and please read the ruling.

Update
Allan Haley’s fuller analysis ‘The Importance of the Quincy Decision’ is now posted on StandFirm here

and watch the interview he has just given to Kevin Kallsen at Anglican TV below:

A federal judge ruled Monday (Sept. 9) that the Abercrombie and Fitch clothing chain violated federal anti-employment discrimination guidelines when it fired a Muslim employee in 2010 for not removing her religious headscarf, or hijab, for work.

Abercrombie asserted that as part of its business plan, it not only employed sales-floor personnel, but “models,” had a “look policy” that gave employees certain grooming and appearance guidelines, and sought to give customers an “in-store experience.”

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On the mid-August day that Egyptian security forces killed hundreds of Islamist protesters, throwing the country into deeper turmoil, the ultraconservative religious Salafist Nour Party released a statement positioning itself as the sole voice of reason.

“We warned a long time ago against the danger of bloodshed and against mobilization and counter-mobilization,” the group said.

Nour called on both the nation’s military rulers and the Muslim Brotherhood that had been ousted from power to stop the violence, saying that the only option for peace was a political solution.

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Over the last year, La Iglesia de San Juan (the Hispanic ministry of the Diocese of South Carolina) has been in transition. This summer the church changed direction in its witness to the Hispanic people of Sea Islands. Instead of the traditional “open our doors and they will come” model, worship and pastoral care are now taken to the people where they live. Each Sunday evening the “Church on the Move” can be found at one of the many work camps on Johns Island.

The ministry is a mission church of the Diocese of South Carolina under Bishop Lawrence. It was supported for most of its existence by St. John’s Church and other churches in the Charleston area. In its current form the people involved in leadership are from many churches including a number of parishes in the Diocese and Presbyterian churches as well. The list of volunteers from other denominations is growing.

Our goal is simply to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in Spanish, to the people of the Sea Islands.

Read it all.

Rafael Nadal defeated Novak Djokovic 6-2, 3-6, 6-4, 6-1 on Monday to win his second U.S. Open title. Here are three thoughts after the 27-year-old Spaniard collected his 13th Grand Slam title while improving to 22-0 on hard courts and 60-3 overall this year:

All hail Rafael Nadal, the king of clay hard courts. A day after the top two women played a match of can-you-top-this, the men followed suit. For more than three hours, as afternoon transitioned to evening, Nadal and Djokovic played a dazzling match.

They split the first two sets (of course they did), and then Nadal went into beast mode. He hit forehands that veered on brutal. He turned defense into offense. He zinged winners off his back feet. He unsheathed a few new weapons. He sliced to brilliant effect, changing pace and frustrating Djokovic. He altered his court positioning, making a conscious effort not to be pinned deep, especially on the backhand side. He returned well, breaking Djokovic seven times. When Nadal declared himself “very hoppy,” I think he means that literally — spry, springy and absent of knee trouble.

Read it all.

In a surprising turnabout on Monday, Syria welcomed a Russian plan to turn its chemical weapons over to the international community for destruction. The US said it would take a hard look at the idea, first floated by Secretary of State John Kerry in an offhand comment.

The swift moves raised the possibility that the Syria crisis could be resolved via diplomacy. But the international situation was fluid and it remained possible the nascent plan could fall apart.

The US would look at the proposal with “serious skepticism,” said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, because Syria had consistently refused to destroy its chemical weapons in the past.

Read it all.

Their latest annual report is there and their website is here.

All this may be fascinating enough, but what Wilson completely misses out is any recognition of what is by far the most glaring difference between humans and ants. What marks out humankind as unique is the degree to which we have broken free from the dictates of instinct. We may in terms of our individual ”˜ego-instincts’, such as our urges to eat, sleep, live in social groups and reproduce our species, be just as much governed by instinct as other creatures. But in all the ways in which we give expression to those urges, how we build our shelters, obtain our food, organise our societies. we are no longer guided entirely by instinct. Unlike any other species, we have become free to imagine how all these things can be done differently. Whereas one ant colony is structured exactly like another, the forms of human organisation may vary as widely as a North Korean dictatorship and a village cricket club.

It is our ability to escape from the rigid frame of instinct which explains almost everything that distinguishes human beings from any other form of life. But one looks in vain to Wilson to recognise this, let alone to explain how it could have come about in terms of Darwinian evolutionary theory. No attribute of Darwinians is more marked than their inability to grasp just how much their theory cannot account for, from all those evolutionary leaps which require a host of interdependent things to develop more or less simultaneously to be workable, that peculiarity of human consciousness which has allowed us to step outside the instinctive frame and to ”˜conquer the Earth’ far more comprehensively than ants.

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To bury or not to bury the dead on Sunday is the latest bone of contention in a little known Anglican church in Amolatar district.

Fed up with the constant interruption of his Sunday church routine by one funeral after another, Rev. Levi Okello of St. Luke’s Church of Uganda, Chakwara in Awelo Archdeaconry in Lira Diocese has said he will no longer preside over funerals on Sunday.

This announcement in effect bans the practice in the cleric’s area of jurisdiction.

Read it all.

Almighty and everlasting God, we thank thee for thy servant Alexander Crummell, whom thou didst call to preach the Gospel to those who were far off and to those who were near. Raise up, we beseech thee, in this and every land evangelists and heralds of thy kingdom, that thy Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

O God our Father, let us find grace in thy sight so as to have grace to serve thee acceptably with reverence and godly fear; and further grace not to receive thy grace in vain, nor to neglect it and fall from it, but to stir it up and grow in it, and to persevere in it unto the end of our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Lancelot Andrewes

I want you to know, brethren, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole praetorian guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ;and most of the brethren have been made confident in the Lord because of my imprisonment, and are much more bold to speak the word of God without fear.

Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel; the former proclaim Christ out of partisanship, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in that I rejoice.

–Philippians 1:12-18

President Obama on Monday called a Russian proposal for Syria to turn over control of its chemical weapons to international monitors in order to avoid a military strike a “potentially positive development,” that could represent a “significant breakthrough,” but he said he remains skeptical the Syrian government would follow through on its obligations based on its recent track record.

“Between the statements that we saw from the Russians ”” the statement today from the Syrians ”” this represents a potentially positive development,” Obama said in an interview with NBC News, according to a transcript provided by the network. “We are going to run this to ground. [Secretary of State] John Kerry will be talking to his Russian counterpart. We’re going to make sure that we see how serious these proposals are.”

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Senior leaders of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) will still meet for their bi-annual Standing Committee, despite the kidnapping of their Provincial Dean.

The second most senior cleric in the Church of Nigeria, Dean of the Province and Archbishop of Niger Delta Province, the Most Revd Ignatius Kattey, was kidnapped by armed men late on Friday evening.

Provincial Communciations Director, Canon Taiwo Faluso, said, “We are praying that God in His infinite mercy will grant us, very quickly, the Dean’s release from the hoodlums that took him”.

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Read it all.

The Episcopal Church Joint Nominating Committee for the Presiding Bishop (JNCPB) has issued a survey and is inviting responses from all Episcopalians.

“In the summer of 2015, the Church will again assume the responsibility for electing the next Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church,” explained Sally Johnson, co-chair of the Committee. “To assist us in that work, the Joint Nominating Committee for the Election of the Presiding Bishop has issued a survey seeking data that will be helpful in our process of developing the profile of the type of leader the Church is seeking.”

Recently, at the request of the Committee, the Secretary of General Convention, the Canon Rev. Michael Barlowe, sent an email to all bishops, deputies, alternate deputies and members of Executive Council informing them of the upcoming survey. That message contained a very brief description of the duties of the Presiding Bishop which may be helpful to anyone who wishes to complete the survey.

Read it all.

If the drop is mainly driven by demographics — aging baby boomers retiring — then the lower unemployment rate gives a true picture of the amount of slack left in the labor market. If the contraction instead is caused by discouraged job-seekers giving up their search, then the jobless rate doesn’t reflect the true state of the market….

Central bank economists are divided over how much of the fall in the workforce is structural and thus not likely to be reversed.

“There is disagreement within the system,” said Geoffrey Tootell, senior vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Read it all.