TitusOneNine

Barack Obama gets to work on ‘very sick’ US economy

2009-01-05T23:54:53Z

Barack Obama began work in earnest yesterday, twisting arms and stroking egos in Congress to garner support for a planned $775 billion (£525 billion) recovery plan for an economy he described as “very sick”.

On his first full day back in Washington since the election, the President-elect dispatched his daughters to their new school before heading to Capitol Hill to prepare for one of the most difficult inheritances ever faced by an incoming president.

At every turn yesterday, he underlined the gravity of the crisis and the need for national unity. After speaking with his economic team, he declared: “The situation is getting worse. We have to act and act now to break the momentum of this recession.”

Read it all.

A.S. Haley on the California Supreme Court Decision

2009-01-05T22:44:46Z

In sum, the California Supreme Court has abdicated its responsibility to decide cases with regard just to the legal principles established by prior cases. In combination with a number of other State courts who have done so, it takes Justice Blackmun's dictum about how a church could change its constitution and elevates that dictum into a rule of law that overrides even the Statute of Frauds.

The Court then compounds this major misstep, as courts are wont to do, with a dictum of its own: it brushes aside any further inquiry into the validity of the Dennis Canon, saying that "this is one of those questions regarding 'religious doctrine or polity' . . . on which we must defer to the greater church’s resolution" (op. at 29). To which I say: what "resolution"? When, or where, has General Convention ever "resolved" the issue of whether it properly passed the Dennis Canon? General Convention has said absolutely nothing about the Dennis Canon ever since 1979---and the Canon itself was not even referred to by the Church's own news service for over twenty years after that. This, unfortunately, is all too typical of the way judges dispose of matters that might, if looked into, disturb the major result on which they have decided.

Read it all.

Notable and Quotable: Eugene Peterson on Scripture’s task

2009-01-05T21:45:37Z

Scripture’s task is to tell people, at the risk of their displeasure, the mystery of God and the secrets of their own hearts—to speak out and make a clean breast. There are many ways to say and write these truths: in oracles, in poems, in novels, in sermons, in satire, in journalism, in drama. Honestly written and courageously presented words reveal reality and expose our selfish attempts to violate beauty, manipulate goodness and dominate people, all the while defying God. Most of us most of the time, whether consciously or not, live this way. Honest writing shows us how badly we are living and how good life is. Enlightenment is not without pain. But the pain, accepted and endured is not a maiming but a purging. “Every significant utterance is a wound” but ‘faithful are the wounds of a friend.’”

--Eugene Peterson, Run With Horses (Downer's Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1983), p.128

LA Times: California Supreme Court says breakaway parish can’t take national church’s property

2009-01-05T21:04:28Z

In a ruling written by Justice Ming W. Chin, the state high court said the property of St. James Episcopal Church in Newport Beach is owned by the national church, not the congregation. The congregation split away after the national church ordained a gay man, V. Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire, in 2003.

"When it disaffiliated from the general church, the local church did not have the right to take the church property with it," Chin wrote for the court.

The bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles applauded the ruling even as he held out an olive branch to St. James and other parishes sued by his office.

Read it all.

California Supreme Court ruling on the Episcopal Church dispute in Los Angeles

2009-01-05T21:01:13Z

The 38 page pdf is here.

Mr. Hilarious Himself, Dave Barry: The Year in Review: Bailing out of 2008

2009-01-05T16:40:41Z

How weird a year was it?

Here's how weird:

• O.J. actually got convicted of something.

• Gasoline hit $4 a gallon -- and those were the good times.

• On several occasions, Saturday Night Live was funny.

• There were a few days there in October when you could not completely rule out the possibility that the next Treasury Secretary would be Joe the Plumber.

Read it all.

A Rise in Efforts to Spot Abuse in Youth Dating

2009-01-05T14:05:33Z

“We are identifying teen dating abuse and violence more than ever,” said Dr. Elizabeth Miller, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Davis, who began doing research on abuse in teenage dating relationships nearly a decade ago.

Dr. Miller cited a survey last year of children ages 11 to 14 by Liz Claiborne Inc., a clothing retailer that finances teenage dating research, in which a quarter of the 1,000 respondents said they had been called names, harassed or ridiculed by their romantic partner by phone call or text message, often between midnight and 5 a.m., when their parents are sleeping.

Such behavior often falls under the radar of parents, teachers and counselors because adolescents are too embarrassed to admit they are being mistreated.

Read it all.

My Favorite Advertisement of 2009

2009-01-05T13:59:27Z

Newsweek Profiles E. A. Adeboye

2009-01-05T13:23:59Z

You may never have heard of E. A. Adeboye, but the pastor of The Redeemed Christian Church of God is one of the most successful preachers in the world. He boasts that his church has outposts in 110 countries. He has 14,000 branches—claiming 5 million members—in his home country of Nigeria alone. There are 360 RCCG churches in Britain, and about the same number in U.S. cities like Chicago, Dallas, and Tallahassee, Fla. Adeboye says he has sent missionaries to China and such Islamic countries as Pakistan and Malaysia. His aspirations are outsize. He wants to save souls, and he wants to do so by planting churches the way Starbucks used to build coffee shops: everywhere.

"In the developing world we say we want churches to be within five minutes' walk of every person," he tells NEWSWEEK. "In the developed world, we say five minutes of driving." Such a goal may seem outlandish, but Adeboye is a Pentecostal preacher: he believes in miracles. And Pentecostalism is the biggest, fastest-growing Christian movement since the Reformation.

Read it all.

Church of England remains divided over historic reforms to create women bishops

2009-01-05T12:51:57Z

After years of bitter wrangling over the issue, a report was published last week that advocated creating a new class of clergy to cater for traditionalists who refuse to accept women's ordination.

However, 41 per cent of respondents said they would not back such a solution, and a further eight per cent said they were undecided.

Figures on both sides of the debate argued that providing "complementary" or "flying" bishops for opponents of female bishops was unacceptable.

While traditionalists said that this did not represent a satisfactory safeguard, supporters of women bishops claimed it is too great a concession.

Read it all.

Church of England accuses Labour of failing to support the family

2009-01-05T12:39:24Z

In the straw poll of members of the General Synod, the Church's parliament, an overwhelming majority of those questioned said that the bishops were right to speak out.

The survey also uncovered serious concerns over the state of British society and Labour's lack of support for the family.

This newspaper questioned 71 members of the 467-strong Synod, one in seven of the total. Of those questioned, 86 per cent said the bishops had been "right to criticise the Government at this particular time".

Nearly half, 48 per cent, said it was time for a change of government, while 45 per cent agreed with David Cameron's claim that Britain is a "broken" society.

Read it all.

George Carey: Living with Diversity–Christians, Jews and Muslims–in a Darwinian World

2009-01-05T12:16:29Z

We need to open a second conversation concerning the role or usefulness of religion. We note from the press that shortly bill boards will appear from London to Washington saying ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’. Another humanist group in America are mounting a similar campaign which states: ‘Why believe in a god? Just be good, for goodness sake’. The inference is that all religions are bad for human flourishing; they are diseased and atrophied vestiges of human life. They make us miserable and do little good. For Dawkins, Roman Catholicism is a virulent virus that should be eradicated as doing great harm to young people, and even Anglicanism, from which he emerged, is but a milder form of the same disease. Hitchens, as we have seen, has a more aggressive approach to religion which ranges from the very crude to the most opinionated. I have to say that the polemical language of such people remind me of the Chinese saying: ‘Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead!’

So a reasonable and careful conversation is needed for us to overcome the infantile and trivial way matters of ethical behavior are being discussed these days. To those who believe that religion is regressive, the question has to be put: ‘then why is religion so active socially in the world and in society and why is it that its contribution to social capital is so highly regarded?’ Roy Hattersley, former Deputy Prime Minister wrote in a Guardian article a few years ago that his view is that ‘most believers are better human beings than atheists’. Reluctantly he acknowledges that unbelievers are less likely to care for the poor and spend time with outcasts of society. He writes: ‘Good works, John Wesley insisted, are no guarantee of a place in heaven. But they are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists’.

This candid admission is remarkable and should not detract from the fact that a large number of humanists, agnostics and atheists are also good people who seek to create a better world. My argument is not polemical – it is to say that those who wish to eradicate the world of faiths have to perceive them as they are, and to recognize the tremendous contribution they make to our world.

But does religion make a personal difference to people? Prof Keith Ward in his book ‘Is Religion Dangerous?’ emphatically says that it does. He cites a survey carried out in the States by the Pew Foundation that shows that ‘spiritually committed’ people are twice as likely to be ‘very happy’ than the ‘least religiously committed people.’

Read it all.

Sarah Hey: [Upper South Carolina] Rector, Vestry, and Majority of Congregation Depart A Parish

2009-01-05T11:57:11Z

Rob has struggled with his ministry within The Episcopal Church for some years now. From my own perspective, in observing his struggle and the instigating factors of that struggle, the decisions -- and not merely the most obvious one -- of the General Conventions of 2003 and 2006 indicated a departure from the Christian view of the primacy of Holy Scripture and the person of Christ for the majority of the leadership at the highest national levels of The Episcopal Church. This was deeply troubling to Rob.

Beyond his struggle with his ministry in The Episcopal Church, there was his belief that the diocese of Upper South Carolina had not stood sufficiently or publicly against the new direction of the national leadership of The Episcopal Church. The lack of a diocese with a clear and strong identity to counter the stances of The Episcopal Church at the national level was also deeply troubling to Rob.

Read it all.

A USA Today Editorial on the credit crisis: A system that invited bankers to make bad loans

2009-01-05T11:39:28Z

Here's a system Willie Sutton would have loved. Under the federal government's banking regime, those being regulated — the banks and savings and loans — get to pick who regulates them.

That's a sweet deal, made even sweeter by this: The two major regulatory agencies get almost all their income from assessments on the very institutions they oversee, so they have an incentive to keep the bankers happy. The largest banks and S&Ls — including some that engaged in the riskiest behavior — are big catches for the agency that can hook them.

That's not exactly a prescription for strict enforcement.

Read it all.

Could you live like Jesus for a year? This pastor tried

2009-01-05T11:30:21Z

The Rev. Ed Dobson has spent most of his life following Jesus. But only now does he realize how hard it is to live like him.

The retired megachurch pastor and one-time architect of the religious right has spent the last year trying to eat, pray, talk and even vote as Jesus would. His revelation: Being Jesus is tough.

"I've concluded that I am a follower, but I'm not a very good one," Dobson said. "If you get serious about the Bible, it will really mess you up."

Read it all.