THE next Suffragan Bishop of Ebbsfleet will be the Revd Dr Rob Munro, Downing Street announced on Friday. Although Ebbsfleet is in Canterbury diocese, under the House of Bishops Declaration, Dr Munro will function as a bishop to conservative Evangelical parishes across the whole Church of England whose PCCs have passed resolutions on the ministry of women.

The previous Bishop of Ebbsfleet was the Rt Revd Jonathan Goodall, who provided episcopal ministry to traditionalist Anglo-Catholic parishes in Canterbury Province. He resigned last year to become a Roman Catholic….

In July, the Dioceses Commission approved name changes to the bishoprics that provide episcopal ministry to conservatives and traditionalists. The commission ruled that the Ebbsfleet title would go to the successor to the Bishop of Maidstone, the Rt Revd Rod Thomas, who retired in October, and who provided episcopal ministry to parishes that held a complementarian theology (News, 8 July).

The suffragan see of Oswestry, in Lichfield diocese, was revived to provide episcopal ministry to traditionalist Anglo-Catholic parishes. It was announced last week that the Revd Paul Thomas would be the Bishop of Oswestry…

Read it all (subscription or registration).

“We need each other to be the body of Christ. We need not to be a basket of body parts, but to walk together as one body to be a witness to Jesus Christ to our world.” https://t.co/TnnIxJ3mxQ

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) December 12, 2022

“It has been 2½ years,” said advocate Michael Luciano as he tried to work a tab into a slot of the sculpture. At the first in-person World AIDS day event since the pandemic began, there is a clear need for more education and awareness of a disease overshadowed by COVID-19 in recent years.

Testing for HIV and services plummeted at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 as facilities shut down, people stayed home and others lost their jobs and their health insurance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report Dec. 1. Testing dropped off 32 percent nationwide and new diagnoses fell 26 percent. There was a partial rebound by the third quarter of 2020 as facilities reopened and people ventured back out, and fortunately many patients were able to stay connected to care and continued to receive their anti-retroviral therapy, the report found.

Now, service levels are almost back to pre-pandemic levels, said Hayley Berry, a pharmacist with the Ryan White program at Medical University of South Carolina.

“We’re getting there,” she said.

Read it all.

Overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of new HIV cases are declining across the U.S. and South Carolina but are still highest among young people who may not be aware of the disease's history and ongoing risk. https://t.co/Qbk8EV5HTx

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) December 12, 2022

One could object that it is not worthy of God to wield the sword. Is God not love, long-suffering and all-powerful love? A counter-question could go something like this: Is it not a bit too arrogant to presume that our contemporary sensibilities about what is compatible with God’s love are so much healthier than those of the people of God throughout the whole history of Judaism and Christianity? Recalling my arguments about the self-immunization of the evildoers, one could further argue that in a world of violence it would not be worthy of God not to wield the sword; if God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make the final end to violence God would not be worthy of our worship. Here, however, I am less interested in arguing that God’s violence is not unworthy of God than in showing that it is beneficial to us. Atlan has rightly drawn our attention to the fact that in a world of violence we are faced with an inescapable alternative: either God’s violence or human violence. Most people who insist on God’s “nonviolence” cannot resist using violence themselves (or tacitly sanctioning its use by others). They deem the talk of God’s judgment irreverent, but think nothing of entrusting judgment into human hands, persuaded presumably that this is less dangerous and more humane than to believe in a God who judges! That we should bring “down the powerful from their thrones” (Luke 1:51-52) seems responsible; that God should do the same, as the song of that revolutionary Virgin explicitly states, seems crude. And so violence thrives, secretly nourished by belief in a God who refuses to wield the sword.

My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.

–Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996) pp. 303-304, cited by yours truly in the Sunday sermon

After the afternoon discussion with Yale Professors Ivo Banac and Miroslav Wolf #Decani #Monastery #rfpcourse #Kosovo pic.twitter.com/SOaDS0MKSY

— Dečani Monastery (@DecaniMonastery) August 16, 2013

Debbie Sholley always imagined she would be living comfortably by the time she reached her golden years.

Instead, the 62-year-old former social worker worries she will soon be living on the streets of this growing city, after her landlord raised the rent more than she can afford.

“I think about what it would be like, and it’s scary. Where am I going to go?” said Ms. Sholley, whose ailing husband died of Covid-19 in 2020 and who suffers from various lung ailments that keep her from working anymore. “I never thought I’d be in this position.”

Ms. Sholley is one of a rising number of older people around the country who are on the verge of homelessness or now living on the streets after falling on hard times. Homeless shelters and aging-service groups in numerous cities say they are seeing more elderly people in desperate need of housing than in years past. A confluence of factors are driving the increase, they say, including soaring rents, a nationwide shortage of affordable housing and the winding down of pandemic-related aid programs such as the federal eviction moratorium.

Read it all.

Aging-services groups in numerous cities say they are seeing more elderly people in desperate need of housing than in years past https://t.co/bQACAOYH5y

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 11, 2022

Most Gracious God, who hast bidden us to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly before thee; Teach us, like thy servants Francis and Jane, to see and to serve Christ in all people; that we may know him to be the giver of all good things, through the same, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Today the Episcopal Church commemorates Francis de Sales, Bishop, and Jane de Chantal, Vowed Religious, Workers of Charity 1622/1641 https://t.co/LuV3ZUo2Qs

Image: Francis de Sales giving the Rule for the Order of the Visitation to Jane de Chantal, by Noël Hallé, Public Domain pic.twitter.com/edoSI7idsw

— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) December 12, 2022

O Lord Jesus Christ, before whose judgment-seat we must all appear and give account of the things done in the body: Grant, we beseech thee, that when the books are opened in that day, the faces of thy servants may not be ashamed; through thy merits, O blessed Saviour, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.

Blessed is he who considers the poor!
The Lord delivers him in the day of trouble;
the Lord protects him and keeps him alive;
he is called blessed in the land;
thou dost not give him up to the will of his enemies.
The Lord sustains him on his sickbed;
in his illness thou healest all his infirmities.

–Psalm 41:1-3

Une Matinée froide impressionne avec une Vue dégagée sur le Paysage montagneux de l'Ardèche. #ThePhotoHour #StormHour #SnowHour #StormHourMark #NatureLovers #NaturePhotography #rtItBot#MagnifiqueFrance#FranceMagique pic.twitter.com/mHRVuI4gEq

— Signalas (@LdeSignalas) December 12, 2022