In 1997, in his first letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, wrote that it was still “Day 1” for his firm. Day 2, he later explained, would mean stasis, followed by irrelevance. His rousing call to avoid complacency seems apt today. Silicon Valley’s five big tech giants, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft, have long been the bedrock of America’s stockmarket and economy, miraculously combining reliable growth and profitability. But after a torrid third quarter their market capitalisations have now collectively dropped by 37% so far this year. About $3.7trn of value has evaporated.

The law of large numbers made it inevitable that the tech giants would mature. Sales growth in the last quarter slowed to 9%—barely above inflation. As they have grown bigger, they have become tied to the economic cycle; a fact which the digital surge during the pandemic only temporarily masked. Penetration rates for smartphones, digital advertising and streaming are plateauing. With slowing core businesses, the giants are venturing onto each other’s turf, increasing competition.

Meanwhile, they are threatened by “conglomeritis”. The symptoms of this disease are bloating and egomania. Consider the recent orgy of spending on hiring, experimental ventures, vanity projects and building data centres. In March the five firms’ combined annual expenses reached $1trn for the first time, and the value of the physical plant of these supposedly asset-light businesses has reached $600bn, over triple the level of five years ago. Swollen costs and balance-sheets mean returns on capital have fallen from over 60% five years ago to 26%. Three of the five do not deign to pay dividends.

Read it all.

Facebook and the conglomerate curse. Do we have the collective courage and will to actively govern, challenge and question Big Tech? #systemicchange https://t.co/Bnur7Ev2ke

— Karen Hand PhD (@karenmhand) November 3, 2022

All this (being interpreted) means that presbyter-bishops will engage not only in the teaching of the truth, but also in the repudiation of error… Both our Lord and his apostles did not shrink when necessary from the task of exposing and overthrowing false teaching ….If we sit idly by and do nothing, or if we turn tail and flee, we shall earn for ourselves the terrible epithet ‘hirelings,’ who care nothing for the sheep. Are we to abandon God’s flock to the wolves, as defenceless sheep without a shepherd? Is it to be said of the Church of God today: ‘so they were scattered because there was no shepherd: and so they became food for all the wild beasts’ (Ezekiel 34:5)? ’ [2]

For bishops in the Church of England today what the calling to be a faithful shepherd protecting the flock from the wolves involves is combatting all form of teaching which are contrary to: ‘the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds and to which the historic formularies of the Church of England bear witness.’[3]

There are many forms of such erroneous teaching, but there are three forms which have become particularly prominent in the Church of England in recent years and which there is strong pressure for the Church of England to officially adopt. These are:

–The teaching that men and women can rightly adopt a form of personal identity that is not in accordance with their biological sex;
–The teaching that it is legitimate for people to have sexual intercourse with members of their own sex;
–The teaching that marriage can be between two people of the same sex.

These teachings are erroneous because they go against the teaching of both Scripture and the universal tradition of the Christian Church that people’s identity as either male or female is determined by their biological sex, that marriage has been ordained by God to be between two people of the opposite sex and that sexual intercourse should only take place with marriage.

Given that this is the case, what should the Bishops decide to do in their forthcoming meetings? I have given an answer to this question in my book Bishops Past, Present and Future which was published earlier this year…and in the rest of this paper I repeat what I said there and what I still think is the right approach for the bishops to take.

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A new post by Martin Davie – Reflections of an Anglican Theologian. https://t.co/UDM8XqkVxL pic.twitter.com/eDKkqx87An

— Latimer Trust (@LatimerTrust) October 19, 2022

The Bishop of Oxford has said Church of England clergy should be able to bless and marry [same-sex] couples.

The Right Reverend Dr Steven Croft said he was sorry his views on same-sex marriage were “slow to change” and had “caused genuine hurt, disagreement and pain”.

In an essay, he said clergy should also be allowed to marry a same-sex partner if they wished.

By law no Church of England minister can bless or marry [same-sex] couples.

Read it all.

Bishop of Oxford says church should marry gay couples https://t.co/7bEPqPQEkZ

— BBC Radio Oxford (@BBCOxford) November 3, 2022

But I am besides my purpose when I fall to bewail the cold affection which we bear towards that whereby we should be saved, my purpose being only to set down what the ground of salvation is. The doctrine of the Gospel proposeth salvation as the end, and doth it not teach the way of attaining thereunto? Yes, the damsel possessed with a spirit of divination spake the truth: “These men are the servants of the most high God who show unto us the way of salvation” [Acts 16:17] — “a new and living way which Christ hath prepared for us through the veil, that is, his flesh,” [Heb 10:20] salvation purchased by the death of Christ.

–Learned Discourse on Justification (my emphasis)

On the commemoration of Richard Hooker, words from his 'Discourse of Justification', suggestive of the root of his eirenic vision:

"the best of us are overtaken sometime through blindness, sometime through hastiness, sometime through impatience, sometime through other 1/3 pic.twitter.com/iUoGanjodU

— laudablePractice🇺🇦 (@cath_cov) November 3, 2022

O God of truth and peace, who didst raise up thy servant Richard Hooker in a day of bitter controversy to defend with sound reasoning and great charity the catholic and reformed religion: Grant that we may maintain that middle way, not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as a comprehension for the sake of truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Today the Church of England celebrates Richard Hooker, Priest, Anglican Apologist, Teacher of the Faith, 1600 https://t.co/yAjELdi5nx

Image: Window in @ChesterCath. Photo by Mum's taxi (Own work), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons pic.twitter.com/4cq19TG1re

— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) November 3, 2022

O Lord Jesus Christ, Wisdom and Word of God, fill our hearts, we beseech thee, with thy most Holy Spirit, that out of the abundance of our hearts our mouths may speak thy praise in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs; to thy everlasting glory.

He said therefore, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden; and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.”

And again he said, “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”
He went on his way through towns and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem. And some one said to him, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” And he said to them, “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. When once the householder has risen up and shut the door, you will begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ”˜Lord, open to us.’ He will answer you, ”˜I do not know where you come from.’ Then you will begin to say, ”˜We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will say, ”˜I tell you, I do not know where you come from; depart from me, all you workers of iniquity!’ There you will weep and gnash your teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and you yourselves thrust out. And men will come from east and west, and from north and south, and sit at table in the kingdom of God. And behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”

–Luke 13:18-30

LLF is an extensive dialogue taking place across the Church of England about marriage, gender, relationships and sexuality.

It has been underway since 2017 and parishes have spent the last two years in a process of discussion using a suite of resources prepared by the LLF team – a group formed of Anglicans from a wide spectrum of beliefs around these issues.

Feedback submitted by parishes and published in September found that comments in support of the acceptance of same-sex marriage outnumbered those against.

The College of Bishops is meeting this week to consider proposals for a way forward.

Read it all.

As the College of Bishops meets over the next three days I’m looking forward to fruitful, energising and honest conversations. I pray we may be open to the presence of the Holy Spirit, that we might listen and learn from each other, and hear God’s call for God's Church.

— Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) October 31, 2022

What if the truth of our lives lay not in our self-separation from the sheeple but in our embrace of the fact that the life we live with one another is the truest expression of who we really are: that there is as much weight to our kid brother kissing us, gently, in the middle of our existential crisis, as there is in the substance of the crisis itself?

Such a reading of our lives demands humility. It asks that we envision ourselves not as special or distinct but as ordinary human beings, those shepherds and butlers and housemaids, whose ordinary lives are as worthy of attention as those of tragedy’s kings and warriors. It insists, as a moral and philosophical duty, that we take ourselves not more seriously but less, that we learn to laugh at ourselves. It demands that, instead of aestheticizing our foibles—raising our sins to the substance of high art—we see ourselves as, well, a little bit silly, perhaps well intentioned, but constantly getting in our own way: Gilligans failing in every single episode to get off the island. To accept grace—the undeserved happy ending—demands that we see our lives as a comedy (as Dante indeed understood). In order to accept our lives as a comedy, we must accept that none of us are the heroes we imagine ourselves to be.

This is the truth understood by Dostoevsky’s Alyosha and by the wider Russian tradition of the “holy fool”: the innocent whose faith in God causes him to appear stupid, if not mad, in the eyes of the world. To hope is a kind of foolishness. It is, too, a kind of refusal of the aesthetic, at least of the sophisticated aesthetic stance that rejects such populist kitsch as Hollywood happy endings. To hope is, necessarily, to hope for a narratively unsatisfying ending: to hope for an unearned joy that changes the entire genre of our lives, that brings comedy from ruin. It is to refuse the red pill or the black pill, to refuse any narrative of ourselves as uniquely heroic or uniquely brave, because we can withstand the wickedness of the world. It is a quieter kind of bravery: the conviction that, one day, we might not have to. It may not be narrative. But it remains, instead, poetry.

Read it all.

“Hope is the awkward comic reversal,” writes @NotoriousTIB. Now out from the paywall: https://t.co/MCRGw2SmTc

— The Hedgehog Review (@hedgehogreview) November 1, 2022

Consider three dimensions of dependency. There’s everyday dependency. I rely on a laptop and a phone, but I’m powerless without the people who make and repair them. I go outside, and there’s a whole network that makes my life possible. When things go wrong there are doctors, opticians, dentists, and a host of systems that exist to put things right. Our whole society relies on client economies to service it.

Then there’s cosmic dependency. There’s a planet, whose ecosystem we’ve woken up and realized is more fragile than we thought. There’s my parents, without whose existence there would have been no me in the first place. There’s weather and crops and livestock and transport and food processing, and on a grander scale there are a bunch of meteors that haven’t yet struck the earth but could blow us all apart one day.

But there’s also divine dependency. We have no idea what it cost God to make all things. But we can see what it cost God to be with us in Christ. The cost of our living with God forever is a cost we could never afford, astronomically beyond our capacity or ability to pay.

Read it all.

Samuel Wells-'Consider three dimensions of dependency. There’s everyday dependency…Then there’s cosmic dependency….But there’s also divine dependency. We have no idea what it cost God to make all things' https://t.co/s2kUz9FUFw [Duke Chapel] #anthropology #books #perspective pic.twitter.com/uaq4n4IY20

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) November 2, 2022

Lord, incline thine ear unto our prayers, wherein we right devoutly call upon thy mercy, that thou wilt bestow the souls of thy servants, both men and women, which thou hast commanded to depart from this world, in the country of peace and rest, and further cause them to be made partners with thy saints. By Christ our Lord. So be it.

Read it all.

I am the Resurrection, I am the Life; to believe in me means life, in spite of death, and all who believe and live in me shall never die. #AllSouls pic.twitter.com/NJeWKZjzVK

— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) November 2, 2022

O God, the Maker and Redeemer of all believers: Grant to the faithful departed the unsearchable benefits of the passion of thy Son; that on the day of his appearing they may be manifested as thy children; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and ever. Amen.

Today is All Souls' Day. This day developed in the Middle Ages as a time for comfort and connection between the living and the dead: a day to ensure no one was left alone in death, and to reassure the living of their place within a vast community of souls. https://t.co/ZFx5Vtm3FN pic.twitter.com/MmoVRDQFiL

— Eleanor Parker (@ClerkofOxford) November 2, 2022

God of glory,
touch our lips with the fire of your Spirit,
that we with all creation
may rejoice to sing your praise;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Good morning lovely people 🥰 in my phone. Just captured this beautiful sunrise 🌅 from the work car park .. have a wonderful day 🧡❤️💛🍂 #goodmorning #sunrise #SunriseOrange #wednesdaythought #photo @StormHour @ThePhotoHour pic.twitter.com/S4anAbtymu

— Dr.P_78Glasgow (@AbhaPaulina) November 2, 2022

Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things. Blessed be his glorious name for ever; may his glory fill the whole earth! Amen and Amen!

–Psalm 72:18-19

Wel am liwie bendigedig wrth gyrradd ben hewl ni…Bore da i chi gyd 👍🏼😃

Well what wonderful colours as I get to the top of our farm lane…a very good morning to you all 👍🏼😃@StormHour @ThePhotoHour @ItsYourWales #Novembermornings pic.twitter.com/0l3SjXH91a

— Aled Hall 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@AledHall) November 2, 2022

The Archbishops’ Council has pledged £2 million of its £25-million Social Impact Investment Programme to a fund that delivers supported accommodation across the UK, it was announced on Tuesday.

The second Social and Sustainable Housing Fund (SASH II), which is managed by Social and Sustainable Capital, allows charities and organisations to acquire and own portfolios of property to provide high-quality housing and targeted support to vulnerable people.

A first SASH fund in 2019 deployed £64.5 million to 20 organisations. SASH II aims to pool £125 million to help more than 30 organisations purchase 1000 properties, which it says would provide homes for 10,000 people over the life of the fund, including people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, fleeing domestic violence, experiencing mental illness or substance addiction, ex-offenders, asylum-seekers, and young people leaving care.

Current estimates suggest that as many as 200,000 people in the UK are living in temporary, transitional housing.

Read it all.

Archbishops’ Council pledges £2 million to house vulnerable people https://t.co/rYp0bBdQmX

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) November 1, 2022

Employers across the country are worried that workers are getting less done — and there’s evidence they’re right to be spooked.

In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus forced an overnight switch to remote work, leading some economists to suggest that the pandemic might spark longer-term growth. It also raises new questions about the shift to hybrid schedules and remote work, as employees have made the case that flexibility helped them work more efficiently. And it comes at a time when “quiet quitting” — doing only what’s expected and no more — is resonating, especially with younger workers.

Productivity is strong in manufacturing, but it’s down elsewhere in the private sector, according to Diego Comin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College. He noted that productivity is particularly tricky to gauge for knowledge workers, whose contributions aren’t as easy to measure.

Read it all.

Workers are “showing up late .. but companies can’t do anything about it because .. it is so hard to replace” them. “Back in 2019, the policy was one strike and you’re out .. Right now it’s 10 strikes, maybe you’ll be out.”@washingtonpost @taylormtelfordhttps://t.co/V438XJDg5C

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) November 1, 2022

Almighty and Everlasting God,
who dost enkindle the flame of Thy love in the hearts of the saints,
grant unto us the same faith and power of love;
that, as we rejoice in their triumphs
we may profit by their examples, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Glorious All Saints Day! pic.twitter.com/wyQJfyH6Ye

— Stained Glass Zealot (@glass_zealot) November 1, 2022

Religious leaders have backed The Independent‘s call for free school meals to be extended to more children living in poverty and urged the government to make it one of its priorities this winter.

Paul Butler, the Bishop of Durham, said: “It is heartbreaking to think of children living in poverty facing this winter without free school meals and the impact this will have on their health, wellbeing and educational outcomes.”

Our Feed the Future campaign, in partnership with the Food Foundation and a coalition of charities, calls on the government for free school meals to be extended to all children living in families that rely on universal credit.

Mr Butler, who is lead bishop for the Church of England in the House of Lords on welfare issues, added: “The Independent has shone a light on the heroic efforts of schools to step in and support their pupils and struggling families through initiatives such as school food banks but it really should not be down to them to fill this gap. I have long held that all children in families in receipt of universal credit should receive free school meals and I urge the government to give this priority in their spending plans.”

Read it all.

#FeedTheFuture 🔴

Religious leaders back our campaign to urgently extend free school meals https://t.co/fK1hGv7uTE

— The Independent (@Independent) October 31, 2022

Almighty God,
who hast knit together thine elect
in one communion and fellowship
in the mystical body of Your Son, Christ our Lord:
Give us grace so to follow Your blessed saints
in all virtuous and godly living,
that we may come
to those ineffable joys
that thou hast prepared for those
who unfeignedly love thee;
through the same Jesus Christ our Lord,
who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth,
one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

A blessing of medieval angels for All Saints' Day, from St. John the Baptist in Stamford, Lincs. The angels have been watching over the parishioners in Stamford since 1451. pic.twitter.com/3yCRO23Dga

— Andy Marshall 📸 (@fotofacade) November 1, 2022

O Blessed Jesus, who hast redeemed us to God by thy blood, and hast consecrated us in baptism to be temples of the Holy Ghost: Make us, we beseech thee, both in body and soul, meet for thy dwelling place; that our hearts may be houses of prayer and praise, of pure desires and holy thoughts of thee, whose we are and whom we serve, and to whom be glory, now and for evermore.

Good morning from North Yorkshire 🍁 pic.twitter.com/6baSAwqqXv

— Nicky (@Nicky13Johnson) November 1, 2022

For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken. On God rests my deliverance and my honor; my mighty rock, my refuge is God.

Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.

–Psalm 62:5-8

Bore glŷb,gwyntog a diflas ond ma’r olygfa yma yn neud lan am ‘na…#bendigedig
Bore Da x

A wet,windy and miserable morning but this feast for the eyes makes up for all that…#beautiful
Bore da x@StormHour @ThePhotoHour @ItsYourWales #autumnatitsbest pic.twitter.com/5yAaBBCk04

— Aled Hall 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@AledHall) November 1, 2022