Check them both out and see what you think.

In his address, Cardinal Baldisseri revealed that the outline for the bishops’ October discussion is divided into three parts, the first focusing on the communication of the Gospel in today’s world, while the second part addresses the pastoral program for the family in light of new challenges.

The instrumentum concludes with the third part, which centers on an openness to life and parental responsibility in the upbringing of children.

“Dedicated to the Gospel of the family,” the first part of the outline “relates to God’s plan, biblical and magisterial knowledge and their reception, natural law and the vocation of the person in Christ,” the cardinal explained.

“The difficulties that arise in relation to natural law can be overcome through more attentive reference to the biblical world, to its language and narrative forms and to the proposal to thematize and deepen the biblically inspired concept of the ”˜order of creation,’” he explained.

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Stacey Irvine ate almost nothing but chicken nuggets for 15 years. She never tasted fruits or vegetables. She occasionally supplemented her diet with French fries. One day her tongue started to swell and she couldn’t catch her breath. She was rushed to the hospital, her airway was forced open, and they stuck an IV in her arm to start pumping in the nutrients she needed. After saving her life, the medical staff sent her home, but not before they warned her that she needed to change her diet or prepare herself for an early death.

I’ve heard people call it a famine. A famine of knowing the Bible. During a famine people waste away for lack of sustenance. Some people die. Those who remain need nourishment; they need to be revived. And if they have any hope of remaining alive over time, their life situation has to change in conspicuous ways.

During normal famines people don’t have access to the food they need. But Stacey Irvine could have eaten anything she wanted. She had resources, opportunity and presumably all the encouragement she needed to eat well. Can you imagine what would happen if all of us decided to follow her example and discontinued eating all but non-nutritious foodstuff? If we happened to beat the odds and live, we undoubtedly would suffer in the long run from nutrition-related chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease.

Like Stacey Irvine, we’re killing ourselves. It’s surely not for lack of resources; nevertheless, we are in fact starving ourselves to death.

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The first few years of this century are turning out to be busy ones for anti-religious polemicists. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and, soon to appear, Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great revive a tradition of impassioned criticism of religious belief and of what people do in God’s name.

The reason for the relative quiet in the closing years of the last century is plain enough. As long as religion had seemed to have little to do with anything important ”“ such as politics or war ”“ committed secularists were spared the bother of arguing that religion is bad. It is only when people do bad things in the name of their religious beliefs that atheists need to get evangelical about their creed.

Personally, I don’t feel any desire to leap to the defence of Christian faith against this renewed assault. This is not because others are doing the job well enough, but because, Christian though I am, I have some sympathy with the view that belief in God can be dangerous.

If God is not to be abused, it seems important to me to recognise that religious belief can be dangerous for individuals and for society. The fact that most of the time religious convictions in practice make believers good neighbours and good citizens does little to lessen the scandal when God is invoked to justify tyranny or terror.

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RNS: No matter where a Christian falls on the spectrum, you’ll find something in this book to love and something to ruffle your feathers. Why did you decide to pen a book that touches on so many contentious issues? Do you expect pushback?

NTW: The book emerged from many different situations over a period of a few years. I didn’t set out to ruffle feathers, but to try to bring some biblical clarity to areas in which many Christians today, in the UK as well as the USA, are genuinely confused. So much of what people take to be “Christianity” is in fact an odd combination of things that really are in the Bible with things that are part of western culture from the last two or three hundred years. Figuring out which is which and how it all works is bound to be puzzling to some people if they’ve been firmly taught something else.

A lifetime of working in some very different churches has taught me that people come with all kinds of odd ideas and that a little clear biblical teaching goes a long way, and also that sometimes people resist it nervously because “it’s not what they said in Sunday School.” I’m all for Sunday schools, but there is a time for people to grow up and see things differently.

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This Anglican Church allows for a breadth of belief and understanding while holding fast to the deposit of faith handed down by the apostles and martyrs and, indeed, by Christ Himself. Our own bishop, Mark Lawrence, has cast a vision for this diocese of “Making Biblical Anglicans for a Global Age.” We adhere to this vision, although many of you may still ask, what does it mean to be Anglican?

So, this Fall we will be embarking on a voyage of discovery which will look at the Anglican Church over the ages and from several different viewpoints. We will be engaging in bible studies and a sermon series which will hopefully allow us t
o fully embrace our Anglican heritage and seethe merits of worshipping and living in the Anglican way.

Read it all (page 1).

Listen to it all.

Whether a lesson be mastered in obedience to conscience, or from a dread of punishment, from filial affection, or determination to beat a rival, is a question of little moment, I grant, in reference to the stock of knowledge acquired, but of incalculable consequence when asked in reference to the bearing upon moral character. The zeal to make scholars, should, in the minds of Christians at least, be tempered by the knowledge that it may repress a zeal for better things. The head should not be furnished at the expense of the heart. Surely, at most, it is exchanging fine gold for silver, when the culture of gracious affections and holy principle is neglected for any attainments of intellect, however brilliant or varied. What Christian parent, would wish his son to be a linguist or a mathematician, of the richest acquirements or the deepest science, if he must become so by a process, in which the improvement of his religious capabilities would be surrendered, or his mind accustomed to motives not recognised in the pure and self-denying discipline of the Gospel. Not that such discipline is unfriendly to intellectual superiority; on the contrary, the incentives to attain it, will be enduring, and consequently efficient, in proportion to their purity. The highest allurements to the cultivation of our rational nature, are peculiar to Christianity. Hence, literature and science have won their highest honors in the productions of minds most deeply imbued with its spirit. The effect, however, of exclusively Christian discipline in a seminary of learning, when fairly stated, is not so much to produce one or two prodigies, as to increase the average quantum of industry; to raise the standard of proficiency among the many of moderate abilities, rather than to multiply the opportunities of distinction for the gifted few.

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The six segments focus on the first six chapters of the book:

Enjoy Jesus’ Resurrection

Accept His Forgiveness

Welcome His Spirit

Feed on His Scriptures

Participate in His Meal

Bear Witness to His Reign

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Listen to it all from Saint Helena’s, Beaufort (and note there is a download option).

Proposals to convert the House of Commons chapel, St Mary Undercroft, into a multifaith centre (News, 15 March 2013) so that MPs and peers could use it to solemnise same-sex marriages, have been blocked.

Black Rod, Lt. Gen. David Leakey, confirmed that the original suggestion that the chapel be converted into a multifaith centre had been modified “so that the chapel would be a multi-denominational chapel; in other words, still a Christian place of worship rather than multifaith. None the less, there are no plans to take the proposal forward.”

The chapel is a Royal Peculiar, under the care of Westminster Abbey, and one of the few remaining areas of the Palace of Westminster still under royal control. Chris Bryant, the MP who first put forward the idea, suggested that the proposal was personally blocked by the Queen, who visited the chapel in December. “She is a very conservative woman,” he said.Read it all.

Christ Episcopal Church in Marion is inviting the public to attend a special Lenten season program on end-of-life issues and celebrate Holy Week with a symbolic meal.

“This is a season when we think about our own mortality and look at Christ’s last days on Earth,” said the Rev. Emily Edmondson. “On Ash Wednesday, we remember that we were created from dust and to dust we will return.”

Discussions will be held on Wednesday evenings from March 12 through April 9 with different topics each week led by an expert in the field. Each evening begins with a prayer and soup and sandwich dinner at 5:30 p.m. with the program following the meal.

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There are a lot of links including resolutions, workshops, etc.–read it all.

Watch it all (a little over 10 minutes).

Come hear Baroness Cox live on Friday, February 7
7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
Thy Kingdom Come – A Call to Action
Charleston Music Hall – 37 John Street

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The Anglican Church in North America is pleased to announce the release of To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism produced by the provincial Catechesis Task force.

Led by the Rev. Dr J.I. Packer, the Task Force has developed a unique and powerful resource for helping inquirers come to an understanding of the Christian faith, and for helping disciples deepen their relationship with God. Written in a “Question and Answer” format, this Catechism, in the words of Packer, “is designed as a resource manual for the renewal of Anglican catechetical practice. It presents the essential building blocks of classic catechetical instruction: the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments (the Decalogue). To these is added an initial section especially intended for those with no prior knowledge of the Gospel; as such, this catechism attempts to be a missional means by which God may bring about both conversion to Christ and formation in Christ.”

Read it all and note the link at the bottom to the text of the catechism itself.

You can find the link to listen to it all here; note you can listen by clicking the link or download by clicking the blue “download” word underneath the black line. Our thanks to Saint Helena’s, Beaufort, S.C., for making this available.

Stephen Colbert has figured out how to reach people, and Catholic educators should take notice. Since the debut of his late-night satirical news show, “The Colbert Report,” in 2005, Colbert has gained immense popularity. Each night his program opens to the thunderous applause and chanting of a packed studio audience. The show has garnered many awards, including two primetime Emmys, several additional nominations and the honor of coining the Merriam-Webster word of the year for 2006: truthiness.

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The new “pop-up” churches opening in pubs, bars and on the streets can attract and keep young people and serve to counter generations of falling attendances, a Church of England conference was told yesterday.
The Archbishop of Canterbury warned of “significant decline” in the number of people attending church and called on clergy, bishops and laity to focus on growth.
The Most Rev Justin Welby said that there was “every reason” to be hopeful about the future of the Church of England.

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Listen to it all (just under 24 minutes).

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The problem is that preachers and teachers of such messages are not telling us the whole truth. They are not giving us a full understanding of the Good News.

Proverbs is only half of wisdom. The other half is found in the Book of Job. And Ecclesiastes. And Jesus at Golgotha. The other part of wisdom””the deeper wisdom””centers on the folly of the Cross.

Not the Cross as a mere rest stop on the way to Resurrection. Not suffering as a means to an end. Not hardship that builds character and makes us better. That’s more Proverbs wisdom and is true as far as it goes. That’s the theology of glory””if we do this and that, and endure this and that with the right attitude, all will be well.

The theology of the Cross says that God is most deeply met in the suffering itself, not just on the other side of it. Forgiveness of sins is not found after the Cross, but in, with, and under the Cross. This is the “wisdom of the cross” (1 Cor. 1”“2) that is folly to the world.

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For most of us Ember Days go unno­ticed. With the excep­tion of sem­i­nar­i­ans writ­ing let­ters to bish­ops telling them of their progress, Ember Days have all but dis­ap­peared in the life of the Church. Even in farm­ing com­mu­ni­ties liv­ing closer to the earth and to the cycles of seed-time, vin­tage and har­vest there is pre­cious lit­tle atten­tion given to Ember days. Such is our loss; for knowl­edge of the sea­sons has much to teach us and not just for lessons about the soil. Last week on Sep­tem­ber 18th, 20th, and 21st the Church’s cal­en­dar rubrics noted what used to be the “vin­tage” Ember days””that is the sea­son of the grape har­vest. As a native Cal­i­forn­ian I remem­ber it well””the grape har­vest that is not the Ember days.

What brought this to mind was our lat­est dioce­san Clergy Day. Not that we in the Dio­cese of South Car­olina are in what I would call a “vin­tage season”””though cer­tainly some may feel this past year they have been like grapes in the wine press trod­dened and squeezed. No, as I looked out on the assem­bled broth­ers and sis­ters, rather than see­ing brethren in the vin­tage month, what came to mind was that more than a few had passed through or per­haps were still in a fal­low season.

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What comes into your head when you hear the word “pilgrim” ”“ not, admittedly, a frequent occurrence these days? For some it may be the Pilgrim Fathers and the Mayflower, but for many it must be: “Hobgoblin nor foul fiend/Shall him dispirit”, or some other lines from John Bunyan’s great hymn ”“ “Who would true valour see/Let him come hither”¦”, which actually has an alternative first line, “He who would valiant be”¦” Anyone brought up in one of our Protestant churches will have sung that hymn, To Be a Pilgrim. As a child I always used to belt out the hobgoblin and foul fiend line, albeit tunelessly. Even today it’s a favourite, and sometimes appropriate, funeral hymn.

Now, a group in the Church of England is so concerned about the seeping away of our inherited Christian culture that, alarmed by the discovery that even the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments are unfamiliar to many, it is offering parishes what it calls “the Pilgrim Course” to teach “the basic tenets of Christianity”. “Give us each day our daily bread”, as you might say.

This seems an excellent idea, whether you are a believer and practising Christian or not.

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A new Christian discipleship course for church congregations and groups of all traditions was launched yesterday at Lambeth Palace.

”˜Pilgrim: A course for the Christian journey’ is part of the Church of England’s focus on spiritual and numerical growth. It is the first national discipleship course to be commissioned by the House of Bishops.
The programme ”“ which promises ”˜participation, not persuasion’ ”“ seeks to reach parishes that have never run courses of this kind, as well as to offer additional approaches to churches to already running programmes such as Alpha.

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There is something indulgent about boredom. It makes me think of posh people in Russian plays complaining they have nothing to do while other people work their arses off in the field. As Schopenhauer insisted, life for the person of means becomes a question of how to dispose of surplus time. Maybe that’s why boredom feels like a problem especially associated with August and not least with children on long car journeys.

But according to the Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom, boredom comes to take on a particular and possibly darker inflection with modernity. Having been bored witless writing his PhD about Kant, Svendsen came to see a connection between his subject and his state of mind. With Kant, God is replaced by the self as the ultimate source of meaning. As traditional structures of meaning are wiped away, boredom comes to be regarded as a very personal sort of failing. And in order to avoid it, various distractions are entertained: travel, drink, drugs, the Xbox, sex, transgressive behaviour ”“ all strategies of avoidance, all hinting at a desperate desire to hold off the acknowledgment of meaninglessness. It is, says Svendsen, a problem characteristic of modernity. Whereas boredom has once bragged about as a mark of nobility, now it is the ultimate in personal failing. Those who are bored are losers.

Perhaps this is why the entertainment industry is more important to us that we are often prepared to admit.

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…few sites are noting that IBT has significant ties to David Jang, the Korean pastor hailed by some of his followers as a messianic figure, a “Second Coming Christ.”

Christianity Today published two major articles on Jang last year, quoting multiple sources who described an international network with Jang as its spiritual””and sometimes even operational””leader.

Jang has been a controversial figure in Asia since 2008, when a committee of Hong Kong theologians and church leaders “unanimously expressed its serious apprehensions and concerns.” His views and influence continue to be debated in South Korea and in the U.S. And last year, the National Association of Evangelicals appointed a committee to determine “theological compatibility” between the Jang-founded Olivet University and the Southern Baptist Convention’s LifeWay Christian Resources. The findings of that committee have not been publicly released, but after reviewing the committee’s report LifeWay officials withdrew from plans to sell a 2,100-acre New Mexico conference center to the school.

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Read it all. The preface alone, to his two sons and only daughter, is wonderful–KSH.

This is a very sobering time for ecclesiastically minded Americans. At a steadily growing rate, more and more Americans ”” especially the young ”” claim no religious affiliation. The figure has climbed from 15% to 20% of all Americans in the past five years. Pew researchers call the trend “nones on the rise.”

In reaction, Protestants and Roman Catholics are proving that the author of the Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes had it right when he wrote that there is nothing new under the sun. In a classic attempt to turn adversity to advantage, Christian leaders who once assumed a cultural dominance (in the beginning of the baby-boom era, Christian identification among Americans was at least 91%; today it’s down to 77%) are now arguing for a double-down strategy. Rather than softening the Gospel message to make it more marketable to an America skeptical of institutions ”” a frequent reform point of view ”” what draws the real energy among the faithful is a renewed commitment to what Christians call the Great Commission, the words the resurrected Jesus spoke to his apostles at the end of Matthew: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

At the center of this strategy of unapologetic apologetics stands George Weigel, the papal biographer and prominent Catholic writer who has just published Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church, a handbook for Catholics seeking to keep the church out of the catacombs. “It’s a recovery of the basic dynamic of New Testament Christianity, but that passionate impulse to live the Great Commission and convert the world cooled during centuries when the ambient public culture helped do the church’s job,” says Weigel.

Read it all from a recent issue.

Nearly 400 people attended the 222nd Convention of the Diocese of South Carolina at the Francis Marion Performing Arts Center in Florence, South Carolina, March 8-9, 2013.

“Wasn’t the worship incredible last night?” said Patricia Smith, remarking on the Convention’s Friday evening service of Holy Eucharist. Smith is a member of St. Paul’s, Summerville, and attended with her husband who is a delegate. “I felt like I was coming in to the gates of heaven. It had that triumphant sound. I guess, now that we’ve made a stand there was a unity, a lack of confusion. We were uniting in worship. It felt like God’s favor was there.”

For the second time the Convention voted unanimously to remove all references to The Episcopal Church from the Diocese’s constitution–the final step in severing their ties to the denomination they helped to found in 1789, five years after the South Carolina Convention first met in 1785.

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