I will sing of thy steadfast love, O LORD, for ever; with my mouth I will proclaim thy faithfulness to all generations. For thy steadfast love was established for ever, thy faithfulness is firm as the heavens.

–Psalm 89:1-2

The Bishop of North West Australia has warned that if the state or federal governments legalize same-sex marriage, Anglican clergy in his diocese would no longer serve as marriage registrars.

The statement by the Rt. Rev. Gary Nelson follows the decision last month by the Australian Capital Territory to legalize same-sex marriage ”“ a move that has been challenged by the federal government as being unconstitutional.

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A motion is going before this week’s Synod in London calling for a review of the ‘parliamentarian’ way in which its debates are conducted. The Daily Telegraph’s religious affairs editor, John Bingham, reports that the critical views of the revisionist Bishop of Salisbury, the Right Revd Nicholas Holtam, about the style of Synod have inspired those pushing for a review.

Ironic that, given that Bishop Holtam recently likened opponents of gay marriage to supporters of apartheid. Now the Holtam brigade apparently want to extinguish the fires of odium theologicum with a pile of indaba-daba-doo.
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If every member of the General Synod were an orthodox Anglican who upheld the biblical doctrine of the Church of England as expressed in our Book of Common Prayer, 39 Articles of Religion and Ordinal, then there would be no false teachers to oppose.

Without false teachers getting up to trumpet revisionist views sanctioning immoral life-styles, General Synod would be a much better decision-making body than it currently is and its disagreements, inevitable in any council of sinful human beings, would be much more agreeable.

But that is not the present reality of Synod. So parliamentary has got to be a lot better than indaba-daba-doo, otherwise it really would be ‘win-win’ for the false teachers.

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… members are also being asked to debate a motion calling for a review of how the Synod itself operates including the parliamentarian way debates are conducted and whether the complex system of electing members is now “fit for purpose”.

An official Synod briefing paper warns that members are now seen by many outside the Church seen as “rude and poor examples of Christians”.

The motion also questions whether the Synod should meet just once a year, instead of two or three times as at present, to encourage younger people with busy careers and families to stand for election.

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ORANGEBURG, SC ”” A nonprofit Christian ministry is working to improve the lives of young people and adults through a mission that involves a mix of horses and skills training.

Cope couple Dan and Jan White started God It Made Ranch a year ago as the 41st mission station of Columbia-based Christ Central Ministries Inc., which was founded in 1992 by Pastor Jimmy Jones and had a food ministry as its first mission. Women and children’s shelters, men’s shelters, veterans’ transitional housing and clothing distribution are among CCM’s other missions.

“But we’re the first horse ranch. They had been praying for one of these for a very long time. I moved to Lexington where my dad lives a year ago, and that’s how I found Christ Central,” Jan White said. “I started volunteering for the children’s shelter, the women’s shelter and the homeless shelter. They also have a GED program and a rehab center.”

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Four female priests with strong resumes are running for election to be the next Vancouver-area Anglican bishop.

The women are among eight candidates seeking to replace outgoing Bishop Michael Ingham, who became the focus of a storm in the 60-million-member global Anglican communion when he approved the blessing of homosexual relationships.

The women who have been nominated to run for bishop are Rev. Ellen Clark-King, vicar of Vancouver’s Christ Church Cathedral; Rev. Dawn Davis, who is based in Toronto; Rev. Lynne McNaughton, a former Vancouver School of Theology instructor now at St. Clement’s Church in North Vancouver and Rev. Melissa Skelton, an Episcopalian priest and church educator in Seattle, Wash.

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Following the action of a retired bishop to conduct a same-gender ceremony in violation of church law, the United Methodist Council of Bishops took a series of actions to address the issue during their annual meeting this week in Lake Junaluska, N.C.

The Council requested that Bishop Rosemarie Wenner, president of the Council, and Bishop Debra Wallace-Padgett of the North Alabama Conference file a complaint regarding Bishop Melvin Talbert’s action, for “undermining the ministry of a colleague and conducting a ceremony to celebrate the marriage of a same gender couple.”

“When there are violations of the Book of Discipline, a response is required,” the bishops said in a statement.

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With the help of thousands of volunteers, San Francisco transformed itself into Gotham City to grant a special wish to a 5-year-old boy. NBC’s Joe Fryer reports.

Watch it all–makes the heart glad.

The Absolutely Stunning Dance of the Peacock Spider! from DAFTEK on Vimeo.

Watch it all (Hat tip: Selimah Harmon)

Already, in the hours since the death of Doris Lessing was announced, many people will have watched a widely circulated video, filmed on her doorstep in 2007. In it, she has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the news of which is relayed to her by reporters who greet her as she alights from a London taxi. “Oh Christ,” she says in apparent irritation, and puts down her shopping bags. Watching, you think she must have heard it wrong. But no. Pausing to check whether she or her companion have left anything behind in the cab, she turns to the assembled camera crews and sighs. “I’m sure you’d like some uplifting remarks of some kind,” she says.

Bids for popularity were not Doris Lessing’s thing. Of course, in many ways that made her more appealing. You might call her misunderstood, or reappropriated, or simply taken to heart ”” in any case she was popular in ways she never meant to be. Take her best known work, The Golden Notebook, which Margaret Drabble described as “a novel of shocking power and blistering honesty”. I

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The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops last week elected Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Kentucky to be their new president as they grapple with changing priorities under Pope Francis.

Kurtz, who leads the Archdiocese of Louisville, won just over half the votes in a field of 10 candidates during a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

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In 2007, members of Evangel Ministries in northwest Detroit went out into the surrounding neighborhoods to share the gospel in a summer-long program called Dare to Share. They came back with reports of new connections and conversions””and new questions. Many of their neighbors had voiced powerful objections to the faith.

Senior pastor Christopher Brooks realized that the apologetics he had studied at Biola University, and later at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, needed to be placed in a new context. “We realized that we needed to respond to not just the historic topics of theology and philosophy, but also to the pressing, present question: ‘Does the Lord see what’s happening in the hood?'”

Brooks’s forthcoming book, Urban Apologetics (Kregel Publications), tells the story of how Evangel enthusiastically embraced that challenge. The newly appointed campus dean of Moody Theological Seminary”“Michigan recently spoke with CT executive editor Andy Crouch.

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O Eternal God, our heavenly Father, who hast given to us thy children an abiding citizenship in heaven, and, in the days of our pilgrimage, a citizenship also upon earth: Give us thine aid, as we journey to that heavenly city, so faithfully to perform the duties which befall us on our way, that at the last we may be found worthy to enter into thy rest; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal habitations. “He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and he who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own? No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”

–Luke 16:9-13

Are you kidding me? Wow.

Behind the updating and revising of the OED is another, much bigger story: the inexorable growth of English itself. At a conservative estimate, 1bn people now speak it as a second or foreign language, while the 375m for whom it is a mother tongue continue to mould their own varieties in ways that the dictionary’s original compilers could never have imagined. As such, the OED finds itself in the curious position of being a national institution called upon, almost by default, to assume the role of a global one.

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As Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block marched toward the U.S. Capitol Building on a cloudy afternoon this October, he said he felt “a little nervousness.” Walking arm-in-arm with dozens of other faith leaders and surrounded by thousands of chanting protestors””some holding signs that read “People of faith for immigrant justice!”””Kimelman-Block suddenly realized he might be arrested for the first time in his life.

“I’d never done this before,” Kimelman-Block said. “People were cheering and chanting, and it felt like folks were making a big sacrifice for the larger cause. It felt very powerful.”

His inaugural act of civil disobedience was part of the “Camino Americano: March for Immigrant Dignity and Respect,” a massive day of action that gathered thousands in Washington, D.C. to pressure Congress into passing sweeping immigration reform that would create a viable pathway to citizenship for America’s more than 11 million undocumented immigrants.

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Granada was of course, in 1492, the last Moorish city to surrender to the “Catholic Kings”. The return of Islam today has loud historical resonances. The Grand Mosque of Granada, as it calls itself, is now celebrating the 10th anniversary of its controversial opening.

It is the brainchild of Abdalqadir as-Sufi, born in Scotland in 1930 and christened Ian Dallas. He became a Muslim in 1967 and spent years seeking permission from the city council of Granada to build a mosque here.

What I had not realised, until I read a fascinating chapter in In the Light of Medieval Spain (Palgrave, £61), is that, down the hill, a mosque had long been functioning in Granada that is more open to the mainstream of Islam than the cliquish Albaicín mosque. Near the Plaza Nueva, next to the Oasis Backpackers’ Hostel, stands the al-Taqua mosque. It has been there since the 1980s.

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More and more atheist groups are replacing antagonism with civility, motivated by human reason to do charitable work rather than spite against all things religious, said Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard University and author of “Good without God.”

“We’re really not that interested in tearing people down anymore. We’re trying to tear down bad beliefs, but not the people who believe them,” he said. “What’s going to emerge from this is a more powerful and influential secular humanist community. There really are millions and millions of us. It was easier to dismiss us when they pigeon-holed us as anti-religious. We’re not. We’re millions of good people, working to build a better society for everyone.”

Declining membership and the graduations of Atheist Agenda leaders last semester precipitated the change, Schmidt said. Former leaders did not return repeated requests for comment. But former members, now active with the Secular Student Alliance, said the old guard encountered resistance last semester to its over-the-top methods.

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To unpack the contemporary conception and experience of risk, [Deborah] Lupton relies heavily on the work of Mary Douglas, not only her Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory and Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (with Aaron Wildavsky), but Douglas’s earlier classic Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo….

One of Lupton’s most interesting chapters (8) is an excursion into the pleasures of risk. “Edgework” like sky-diving and rock-climbing and fight-clubbing bolsters a sense of masculinity for desk-chained men, and represents an effort to escape the control and predictability of modernity. Sexual transgression and shock have the same effect, producing not anxiety and fear but the carnivalesque exhilaration of breaking through settled boundaries. – See more at: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2013/11/14/risk/#sthash.qElp4YSO.dpuf

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At the cemetery of a former Minnesota mental hospital, hundreds of patients were buried in nameless graves marked only with numbers. But disability rights groups and family members are working to identify the graves and give these forgotten dead a respect and dignity they did not receive in life.

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Two local men have been added to the priesthood of the Anglican Church after an ordination ceremony that was held Nov. 9.

The ceremony, which took place at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on the U.S. 45 Bypass in Jackson, included the ordination of the new priests, the Rev. Wesley Adam Gristy and the Rev. Brian Patrick Larsen Wells.

The ordination ceremony was conducted by the Right Reverend Bill Atwood, bishop of the International Diocese of the Anglican Church in North America. Atwood lives with his wife, Susan, in Frisco, Texas.

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The Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, will be at Trinity Episcopal Church, 200 High St., Hampton, on Saturday, Nov. 16 to sign the recently adopted Shared Ministry Covenant between that church and Christ Episcopal Church in Portsmouth.

Holy Eucharist with the signing of the covenant will be held at Trinity Church at 5 p.m.; a celebration dinner will follow in the church’s Hobbs Hall at 7 p.m.

All are welcome as the two churches celebrate the culmination of many months’ work ”” and many years’ anticipation.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury isn’t exactly struggling to get the press to notice him at the moment. Of course it always helps to have a royal christening to preside over to gain a decent amount of media exposure. There’s nothing though to indicate that Justin Welby is deliberately trying to court journalists in the fashion of a D list celebrity, it’s more that he is doing what he believes he is called to and people are sitting up and taking notice. In the space of a week along with Prince George’s baptism, Justin Welby has repeatedly been in the papers, taking on the energy companies and bankers (again) as well as flagging up a concern over the proliferation of foodbanks. He also managed to squeeze in trips to Iceland and Kenya for the Global Anglican Future (GAFCON) Conference. Not bad for a week’s work.

The honeymoon period that Welby is enjoying shows little sign of fading any time soon. Even his opposition to the legalisation of gay marriage, which unsurprisingly failed to go down well in some quarters, appears not to have been held against him. Where his predecessor, Rowan Williams continually had the shadow of the Church of England’s attitude to gay relationships and women bishops clinging to him, Justin Welby has been able to avoid getting bogged down in the politics of the church so far.

Read it all (another from the long line of should have already been posted material).

This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the Sterling notebook in which Flannery O’Connor, just 20 years old, began a journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are “there is nothing left to say of me”) and not omitting a bit of musical notation floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and 1947, while O’Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them.

The complexity of O’Connor’s thinking, together with the largely flawless pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier drafts. Clearly O’Connor’s virtuosity makes her self-­conscious. Young as she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the writer’s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of honesty.

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O God, who didst call thy servant Margaret to an earthly throne that she might advance thy heavenly kingdom, and didst give her zeal for thy church and love for thy people: Mercifully grant that we who commemorate her this day may be fruitful in good works, and attain to the glorious crown of thy saints; though Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

O God, who, calling Abraham to go forth to a country which thou wouldest show him, didst promise that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed: Fulfill thy promise in us, we pray thee, giving us such faith in thee as thou shalt count unto us for righteousness; that in us and through us thy purpose may be fulfilled; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Church of South India

On the holy mount stands the city he founded; the LORD loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. Glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God.

–Psalm 87:1-3

Former chairman of the Conservative Party Baroness Warsi told a conference at the Churchill Archives in the University of Cambridge that “the Coalition is the most pro-faith government in the West” ”“ a claim disputed by Labour’s Vice Chairman for Faith Groups, Stephen Timms.

Lady Warsi said previous Conservative governments such as those of Sir Winston Churchill and Baroness Thatcher had considered faith as an essential part of government and Lady Thatcher had regarded “politics as second to Christianity in defining society”.

She added that Churchill and Thatcher would have welcomed the Coalition’s promise to protect the right of town halls to hold prayers and the creation of more faith schools under the Free Schools programme. It had, she went on, ruled out a ban on the full-face veil out of respect for religious liberty and welcomed a ruling that saw a British Airways worker win the right to wear a crucifix at work.

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