When is Presidents Day 2014? The correct answer to that question is “never.” When it comes to federal holidays, there is no such thing as Presidents Day. We’ve been saying this for years, but shockingly, the charade continues.

The official name for the holiday celebrated Feb. 17, 2014, is Washington’s Birthday. If you don’t believe us, look at the Office of Personnel Management’s list of 2014 holidays for federal workers.

There it is, Washington’s Birthday, right between Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and Memorial Day. There are an asterisk and a helpful note at the bottom of the page, which says that the holiday in question is specified as Washington’s Birthday under Section 6103(a) of Title 5 of the United States Code.

Read it all and note well the earlier article also.

The elderly would be denied new drugs under “hard-nosed” plans by ministers that prioritise patients who contribute to the economy, the NHS treatments adviser has warned.

In a blunt rebuke to the Government, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has rejected plans to take “wider societal benefit” into account when considering whether to pay for a drug, The Times has learnt.

Sir Andrew Dillon, the head of NICE, said that he was uncomfortable with a “fair-innings approach” that would tilt funding away from the old because younger patients had more to gain from treatment and more to give back.

Read it all (subscription required).

In Uganda, during the eight years in the 1970’s when Idi Amin and his men slaughtered probably half a million Ugandans, “We live today and are gone tomorrow” was the common phrase.

We learned that living in danger, when the Lord Jesus is the focus of your life, can be liberating. For one thing, you are no longer imprisoned by your own security, because there is none. So the important security that people sought was to be anchored in God.

As we testified to the safe place we had in Jesus, many people who had been pagan, or were on the fringes of Christianity, flocked to the church or to individuals, asking earnestly, “How do you prepare yourself for death?” Churches all over the country were packed both with members and seekers. This was no comfort to President Amin, who was making wild promises to Libya and other Arab nations that Uganda would soon be a Muslim country. (It is actually 80 per cent Christian)….

It became clear to us through the Scriptures that our resistance was to be that of overcoming evil with good. This included refusing to cooperate with anything that dehumanizes people, but we reaffirmed that we can never be involved in using force or weapons.

…we knew, of course, that the accusation against our beloved brother, Archbishop Janani Luwum, that he was hiding weapons for an armed rebellion, was untrue, a frame-up to justify his murder.

The archbishop’s arrest, and the news of his death, was a blow from the Enemy calculated to send us reeling. That was on February 16, 1977. The truth of the matter is that it boomeranged on Idi Amin himself. Through it he lost respect in the world and, as we see it now, it was the beginning of the end for him.

For us, the effect can best be expressed in the words of the little lady who came to arrange flowers, as she walked through the cathedral with several despondent bishops who were preparing for Archbishop Luwum’s Memorial Service. She said, “This is going to put us twenty times forward, isn’t it?” And as a matter of fact, it did.

More than four thousand people walked, unintimidated, past Idi Amin’s guards to pack St. Paul’s Cathedral in Kampala on February 20. They repeatedly sang the “Martyr’s Song,” which had been sung by the young Ugandan martyrs in 1885. Those young lads had only recently come to know the Lord, but they loved Him so much that they could refuse the evil thing demanded of them by King Mwanga. They died in the flames singing, “Oh that I had wings such as angels have, I would fly away and be with the Lord.” They were given wings, and the singing of those thousands at the Memorial Service had wings too.

–Festo Kivengere, Revolutionary Love, Chapter Nine

[See here for further information, and, through the wonders of the modern world, you may also find a copy online there].

O God, whose Son the Good Shepherd laid down his life for the sheep: We give thee thanks for thy faithful shepherd, Janani Luwum, who after his Savior’s example gave up his life for the people of Uganda. Grant us to be so inspired by his witness that we make no peace with oppression, but live as those who are sealed with the cross of Christ, who died and rose again, and now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Almighty and eternal God, who in thy Son Jesus Christ hast revealed thy nature as Love: We humbly pray thee to shed thy love abroad in our hearts by thy Holy Spirit; that so by thy grace we may evermore abide in thee, and thou in us, with all joyfulness, and free from fear or mistrust; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

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

Proverbs 9:10a (NLT)
Fear of the Lord is the foundation of wisdom.

Hebrews 10:26-31 (ESV)
For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Our Father in heaven,
You are a holy God, and You cannot share Your glory with lies. Your mercy is for those who fear You and reverence You and obey You, from generation to generation. We humbly ask You to pour down upon the Church of England, and especially upon her bishops, the spirit of the fear of the Lord. Amen.
Luke 1:50

Read it all and there are more prayers for the Church of England here

Last October, in between arguments over the debt ceiling, the federal government somehow found time to send me an email. My student loan payment was 70 days past due, the message read, so the government had negatively reported me to each major credit bureau and would continue to report me until my account was brought current.

I’m betting the government sent out a lot of those letters to people like me: college graduates from middle-class families who didn’t qualify for much in the way of scholarship aid and had parents who couldn’t afford to pay for their schooling.

Research published last month in the journal Sociology of Education shows that students from middle-class families are bearing the brunt of the student loan crisis. Jason Houle, a sociologist at Dartmouth College, analyzed the student loan debt of about 9,000 men and women, focusing on how socioeconomics, including family income and parents’ educational background, influenced student debt.

Read it all.

[Today] like every Sunday, Anglican vicar the Rev Graeme Buttery will celebrate a Eucharistic service in his parish church in Hartlepool. If he’s very lucky, the congregation might be nudging 40, in a church built to seat 800 ”“ and four of those present will be his wife Gillian and their three children. Afterwards, the family will go back to their 1980s breeze-block vicarage next door to the church, where the glass in the front door was recently kicked in by a would-be intruder. All the windows have bars on them after the wife of Buttery’s predecessor was attacked in her garden.

It’s not what you might call an idyllic parish. But is being its priest the dregs of life in the Church of England or the 21st-century Christian missionary frontier? That’s the question the Anglican church has been asking itself over the last few days, after a survey in the Church Times revealed that, while in London it takes around four-and-a-half months to fill a vacancy for a parish priest, with an average of three names on the final shortlist, in areas including the north-east many parishes are without a priest for two years or more, and shortlists are virtually unknown. Most priests, it turns out, simply don’t want to work in places like Hartlepool; St Cuthbert’s, another Anglican parish in the city, has just taken two-and-a-half years to appoint a new vicar. Of 75 names on the Lee List, a confidential list of clerical job-seekers, 54 were looking for a parish in the south-east.

The losers are parishes like that of St Cuthbert and another of Buttery’s neighbours, Holy Trinity with St Marks. As with St Cuthbert’s, it took two-and-a-half years to find a new priest for Holy Trinity after its last incumbent, the Rev Philip North, left in 2009; the Rev Roz Hall, its current vicar, was eventually appointed in 2011.
Read it all.

Check it out.

Not many Orthodox rabbis, especially not ones immersed in Jewish hubs of the Northeast, raise their hands to serve small communities such as the Lowcountry, where a kosher deli is harder to find than a snowball or skyscraper.

But Rabbi Michael Davies did.

At 31, he was installed last week as the first rabbi of Dor Tikvah, a new modern Orthodox synagogue in West Ashley.

His installation brings to five the number of rabbis in town leading Jewish entities, remarkable given the area’s Jewish population barely numbers 7,000, most of whom aren’t even affiliated with a synagogue.

Read it all.

Uncertainty remained Sunday, February 16, over the future of one of Hungary’s main evangelical denominations after it lost its church status and the government rejected an expert opinion about its “religious legitimacy.”

The Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship (HEF), known for outreach to Gypsies, or Roma, and aid programs among homeless and elderly, was among hundreds of groups losing recognition under controversial religious legislation imposed by the center-right government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

In January, the Ministry of Human Resources warned students attending HEF’s John Wesley Theological College that they would no longer receive state scholarships, despite reports that Minister Zoltan Balog was a former faculty member.

Read it all.

There are still many things to love about Argentina, from the glorious wilds of Patagonia to the world’s best footballer, Lionel Messi. The Argentines remain perhaps the best-looking people on the planet. But their country is a wreck. Harrods closed in 1998. Argentina is once again at the centre of an emerging-market crisis. This one can be blamed on the incompetence of the president, Cristina Fernández, but she is merely the latest in a succession of economically illiterate populists, stretching back to Juan and Eva (Evita) Perón, and before. Forget about competing with the Germans. The Chileans and Uruguayans, the locals Argentines used to look down on, are now richer. Children from both those countries””and Brazil and Mexico too””do better in international education tests.

Why dwell on a single national tragedy? When people consider the worst that could happen to their country, they think of totalitarianism. Given communism’s failure, that fate no longer seems likely. If Indonesia were to boil over, its citizens would hardly turn to North Korea as a model; the governments in Madrid or Athens are not citing Lenin as the answer to their euro travails. The real danger is inadvertently becoming the Argentina of the 21st century. Slipping casually into steady decline would not be hard. Extremism is not a necessary ingredient, at least not much of it: weak institutions, nativist politicians, lazy dependence on a few assets and a persistent refusal to confront reality will do the trick.

Read it all.

Is Edward Snowden a hero for revealing government wrongdoing, or a traitor for leaking classified information? “I don’t think anybody acts and says to themselves, ”˜What I’m doing is immoral, but I’m going to do it.’ People always rationalize,” according to former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow. Correspondent Lucky Severson reports on the debate over the morality of Snowden’s actions.

Read or watch and listen to it all.

Robert Flemming saw it first.

He was standing bow watch on the USS Housatonic, scanning the water between his ship and the dark silhouette of the South Carolina coastline….

It was nearly 8:45 p.m. when Flemming spotted something on the water about 500 feet away. The object was about 22 feet long, he estimated, and only its ends were visible. He called out to a deck officer.

“There is something that looks like a log,” Flemming said. “It looks very suspicious.”

Read it all.

[Donald Margulies’s play “Dinner With Friends'”]…underlying subject is the mysterious way in which all relationships ”” friendships as much as romances ”” can evolve on a deep level as people grow and change, while, on the surface, things appear to remain stable. Life is sailing smoothly by, then one day the familiar face on the other side of the bed, or across the dinner table, or maybe even in the mirror, looks utterly strange.

–Charles Isherwood in his NYT review of the play in Friday’s print edition, quoted by yours truly in Adult Sunday School class this morning on Revelation 2:1-7

“When I saw ”˜All My Sons,’ I was changed ”” permanently changed ”” by that experience….It was like a miracle to me. But that deep kind of love comes at a price: for me, acting is torturous, and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great ”” well, that’s absolutely torturous.”

–Philip Seymour Hoffman as quoted in the New York Times.

Watch and listen to it all.

The Final Achievement of The Law: Transformative Life-Giving Grace

Sermon given by Dr Christopher Seitz at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Dallas from the Sermon on the Mount

Matthew 5:17-37 and Deuteronomy 30:15-20

You may know the joke about God giving the commandments from Mt. Sinai. First he offers them to the Canaanites. They look them over and say, “actually, adultery is one of our favorite activities, no thanks.” So he goes next to the Hittites, and they say, “no thanks, you know stealing is one of our main occupations.” At last he comes to the children of Israel and says “I’ve got some commandments.” “Are they free?” they ask. “Yes,” God says. “Great, we’ll take ten.”

It’s a good joke but it also has some deeper truth inside it. God gave Israel the commandments freely and out of love. Israel received them as a gift, like a ring on a solemn wedding day. Binding Israel and God together. Indicating love and limit, compassion and constraint, both.

The ”˜until death do us part’ character of the law Jesus underscores today. Michael thought we ought to hear it twice, this Sunday and last, and I agree. Not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, not one comma or dot over the ”˜I’, will pass away. God gave the law. Jesus is its embodied guarantor, its best man, now standing before you and me who were not Israel but were always where God was headed through them, to us here this Sunday, February 16, at Good Shepherd, Dallas. Straight into that place inside of us where we decide, and choose, where we love and hate, where we envy and brood and plan and worry and hope.

God did not give Israel ten laws only but in fact more than 600. 613 to be specific. Jesus picks out 6 of them to make a point in the Sermon on the Mount, and four of the six he refers to today. Two are familiar from the top ten list Israel freely received. Thou shalt do no murder. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Two others are less so. A certificate of divorce you shall write (from Deuteronomy 24). And this is how vows are made (from Leviticus and Numbers).

Why does Jesus revisit these laws and insist our righteousness must exceed that of the legal experts of the day?….
Michael has reminded us of the context. Jesus is setting apart a people for himself just as God did secretly through him at Mt. Sinai in days of old. He has us climb a mountain and listen to him as did Israel with Moses of old. He begins this solemn discourse””covering 3 chapters of Matthew’s Gospel””with the beatitudes. God’s kingdom is for those who mourn, who long, who hurt, who suffer indignity. In other words, those of us who come in need. Not legal experts who know a lot but don’t know what it means to come to the end of themselves.

A church father once said, “I have listened to all the wise philosophers and poets and from them I learned much. But not one of them ever said, come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” This is the new law-giver offering us new life, a start-over, new kind of life.

A quest for higher righteousness, you might well think, does not seem restful, but sounds like hard work. So here the question properly arises, what is hard about it? What makes it hard?

The answer is found in the contrasts Jesus makes. The old law regulated murder. That lets most of us here off the hook, and thank God for that. But God sees into the deeper places, the hateful triggers that fester and if unchecked could go, and do go for some, all the way to taking life. Murder is the final place where hate and ”˜you fool’ started. Adultery is the final step for a heart that lusts and prefers the other woman over the one solemnly chosen. The law was given so that we might be exposed before God and a new life in him given, as was Israel of old released from bondage in Egypt and given a fresh start. That reality, that law of new life, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will ever pass away. It belongs to God’s deepest purpose for us.

Divorce and vow-making are realities that already assume something is broken or threatens to be. But God never so intended it. Our Yes should be our Yes, and our No our No. So what is it that has gone wrong in us that it is not simply so? How can we find the higher righteousness that Jesus insists is to be ours in him? He is raising the stakes by turning on a searchlight that shows us all in need of some higher remedy and saying that is what God was doing at Mt Sinai and today, this morning, here and now.

The Law is not a set of 613 rules to obey, for which we get a grade depending on how many we get right, but a searching out of us at our deepest parts where we live and wrestle to follow God and find life in him.

The story is told about the man driving through rural West Virginia. Every barn he sees has a shooting target on its side; the dead middle, the bull’s eye, has been hit solidly and the rest untouched. He saw a farmer, stopped, and remarked at what good marksmen the men of the area must be. He said, “that’s easy, we shoot first and draw the target afterwards.”

The lower righteousness, the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees is something like this. It consists of congratulating ourselves that we have hit the target because a lot of God’s laws we know we faithfully follow and so take our reassurance that we are getting a good deal right in the end. On balance, we are trying hard or intend to shortly. But the not one letter, not one stroke of a letter that will not pass away is the law’s intention to give us life, not give us a way to justify ourselves. That is not the life Christ died to give us with God.

In the portion of scripture from Deuteronomy chosen for today, Israel is called to choose life. Yet if we read on, into the chapters that follow, we learn that the law of God asks us to choose life but also foresees that we will fail at that.

The thing that is hard about the higher righteousness is that we cannot actually choose it or will it. It must be given to us by the law-giver himself. And that path of that gift runs straight to the cross of Christ and another mountain called Calvary. In the Sermon on the Mount Christ takes his Cross inside the deepest places of our individual lives before him. We do in fact hate, and speak improperly, and judge, and lust in our heart, and make complex plans and vows when a simple Yes or No ought to do. This is who we are. This is what the scribe and Pharisee believe we can target and through hard work succeed at eliminating. But that is what makes their righteousness incomplete. It is shooting first and drawing the target after.

The righteousness that is higher is in fact too high for us in our flesh. Jesus will have to carve it out for us, and give it to us. And so he does. He will choose the hard and higher righteousness. He takes upon himself all that the law requires, and that we have failed at and will fail at. Nothing will be lessened or lowered. All that the law saw in us, he sees in us, and takes upon himself for us. And in turn he clothes us in his righteousness and makes us right in him. He hits the target at the dead middle, and gives us access to a life where we might follow in his victory.

It is here that the words of our collect for today strike home.

Mercifully accept our prayers, and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, clothe us in your higher righteousness, so that walking in your way we might keep your commandments and please you in will and in deed. And when we fail, teach us to return to you alone, the giver of all life that never fades away. Let us find in you a fresh start and a fresh hope and the life of your higher righteousness.

This isn’t just a nice piety we use to paper over our shortcomings, but one that takes seriously how deep the problem is that Christ has come to address in us, and how successfully and permanently he has done just that. We have the law’s obedient keeper as our Lord and giver of life. In him we are exposed and loved and set on a new path as new born children all at the same time. We are given the new clothes of his righteousness to put on. The old ones of the old Adam are to be put away, set on the curb. As we in turn receive his transforming, higher-righteousness, life-giving grace. That is the final accomplishment Jesus speaks of today as the law’s abiding purpose. For you and for me.

AMEN

The Rev. Canon Dr. Christopher Seitz serves as Canon Theologian in the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas and is senior research professor of biblical interpretation at Toronto School of Theology, Wycliffe College

O God, fountain of love, pour thy love into our souls, that we may love those whom thou lovest with the love thou givest us, and think and speak of them tenderly, meekly, lovingly; and so loving our brethren and sisters for thy sake, may grow in thy love, and dwelling in love may dwell in thee; for Jesus Christ’s sake.

–E. B. Pusey (1800-1882)

I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.

–1 Timothy 3:14-16

A small earthquake shook both states [Of South Carolina and Georgia] late Friday, shaking homes and rattling residents in three states.

The quake happened at 10:23 p.m. and had a preliminary magnitude of 4.1, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Web site. It was centered seven miles west of the town of Edgefield, S.C., and was felt as far west as Atlanta and as far north as Hickory, N.C., each about 150 miles away.

“It’s a large quake for that area,” said USGS geophysicist Dale Grant. “It was felt all over the place.”

Just another lowkey week here–NOT. Read it all–KSH

I just returned from a well-known (and well-heeled) Christian college, where roughly 100 demonstrators gathered on the chapel steps to protest my address on the grounds that my testimony was dangerous. Later that day, I sat down with these beloved students, to listen, to learn, and to grieve. Homosexuality is a sin, but so is homophobia; the snarled composition of our own sin and the sin of others weighs heavily on us all. I came away from that meeting realizing””again””how decisively our reading practices shape our worldview. This may seem a quirky observation, but I know too well the world these students inhabit. I recall its contours and crevices, risks and perils, reading lists and hermeneutical allegiances. You see, I’m culpable. The blood is on my hands. The world of LGBTQ activism on college campuses is the world that I helped create. I was unfaltering in fidelity: the umbrella of equality stretching to embrace my lesbian identity, and the world that emerged from it held salvific potential. I bet my life on it, and I lost.

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With no progress to report at the end of the second round of Syrian peace talks, U.N. Syria envoy Lakdhar Brahimi on Saturday adjourned the talks and set no date for the next round, calling instead for U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon to meet with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

“I think it is better that every side goes back and reflects on their responsibility: Do they want this process to take place or not?” Brahimi told reporters.

Brahimi blamed the impasse on the two sides’ disagreement over how to deal with the four points on an agenda that Brahimi said both the Syrian government and the opposition have agreed to: violence and terrorism, the appointment of a transitional governing body, what to do with current national institutions, such as the police and the army, and how to bring about national reconciliation and debate.

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Persistent attacks by Boko Haram militants in Nigeria’s Borno State have forced dozens of clinics to shut down and hundreds of doctors to flee, leaving many residents to seek medical attention across the border in Cameroon, health professionals and residents told a United Nations agency, Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN).

Musa Babakura, a surgeon at the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH) in Maiduguri, told IRIN: “There is a growing health crisis in northern Borno, where most doctors and medical personnel have left the area due to security threat[s] from Boko Haram, forcing thousands to seek medical services across the border into Cameroon.

“The whole healthcare system in northern Borno has collapsed.”

Read it all.

Roger Scruton is possibly the most important conservative philosopher alive today. His book Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England, is a must read, but then again, I say that about everything he writes. The man wrote an entire book on faces ”“ yes, faces ”“ and changed the way I look at the world….Anglicans Alister McGrath and John Lennox are well known for their apologetics and for going toe to toe with Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists. If you are restless and reformed you have probably heard the names of men like N.T. Wright and J.I. Packer, and if you really like to read, you may have heard of the political theologian Oliver O’Donovan.

So while many others and myself continue to lament the squishiness of Canterbury and the apostasy of the Episcopal Church, remember that reports of the Church’s death are greatly exaggerated.

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Belgian nurse Sonja Develter, who has cared for 200 children in the final stages of their lives since 1992, said she opposed the law.

“In my experience as a nurse, I never had a child asking to end their life,” Ms Develter said before the vote.

But requests for euthanasia did often come from parents who were emotionally exhausted after seeing their children fight for their lives for so long, she added.

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In the year 2000, scholars Suzanne M. Bianchi and Lynne M. Casper argued that by some measures, the late twentieth-century revolutions in the American family had slowed. There has been a recent “quieting of changes in the family, or at least of the pace of change,” they wrote…. “Whether the [1990s] slowing, and in some cases cessation, of change in family living arrangements is a temporary lull or part of a new, more sustained equilibrium will only be revealed in the first decades of the 21st century.”

Fourteen years after they wrote those words, it seems fair to say that the 1990s slowing of family change was just a temporary lull. The percent of births to unmarried women resumed its multi-decade increase in the 2000s, and the percent of adults that are married resumed its multi-decade fall. Family life has also continued to change on another less widely cited measure: cohabitation.

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I haven’t been around long enough to tell you what the centre of British evangelicalism was a generation ago. I’m sure any description of the movement would have included John Stott, Martin Lloyd-Jones, Dick Lucas and a few other well-known names, but there would have been sufficient practical, ecclesiological and missiological diversity to make pinning down a centre pretty difficult. Stott was probably the most widely respected figure, but an awful lot of those who read his books and admired his sermons would not have much wanted to join him on Sundays at All Souls, Langham Place, since although they shared his theology and respected his leadership, they were hardly influenced (if at all) by his style, methodology, philosophy of ministry and so on. In these days of mass communication, replicable courses and large conferences, however, it is far easier to identify the new centre of the evangelical movement (at least, the white evangelical movement) in Britain, to see how the channels of influence work, and to consider the implications. Because the new centre of British evangelicalism is Holy Trinity Brompton.

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While the Treasury and the IRS seek greater clarity by further restricting the types of permissible political activity of tax-exempt organizations, the commission would achieve greater clarity by allowing more freedom for tax-exempt organizations to engage in political speech ”“ while simultaneously preserving the long-held public policy of not allowing tax-exempt funds to be expended for political purposes.

Dan Busby, president of ECFA, offered four key comments on the proposed guidance:

“The Treasury and the IRS should proceed with great caution in applying the proposed ”˜candidate-related political activity’ test to 501(c)(3) organizations.”
“Replacing the ”˜facts and circumstances’ approach with a clear-cut definition of political activity would benefit charities and the IRS.”
“The proposed ”˜candidate-related political activity’ test would silence charities from speaking out on issues with political significance.”
“The Commission’s recommendations strike a necessary balance of permitting charities to engage in communications that are relevant to their exempt purposes while ensuring that they expend funds in a manner consistent with their tax-exempt purposes.”

Most concerning to ECFA is the further chilling effect that the proposed “candidate-related political activity” test would have on issue-oriented communications from churches and nonprofits. While this has been a problem for some time even under existing rules and the IRS’s approach to administering the law, the proposed regulations would compound the concern.

Read it all.