I am beside myself with grief over this unnecessary action taken against my predecessor especially at a time when he is mourning the death of his son this past Friday. I am particularly saddened that with the exception of the Bishop who initiated this action those involved in determining this course have never spoken with Bishop MacBurney directly.

In the midst of this difficult time for Bishop MacBurney and his family I am really much more concerned about the implications of St Matthew 18:15-17 as it relates to how reconciliation is pursued than I am with Title IV, Canon 1, Section 6 as it relates to disciplining my dear brother.

In the meantime we are ministering to the needs of the MacBurney family.


X Keith L Ackerman, SSC
Bishop of Quincy
President, Forward in Faith North America

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • TEC Conflicts

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • TEC Conflicts

The careers of two of Africa's most prominent politicians -- Robert Mugabe and Nelson Mandela -- have striking similarities. Both were born in an era when white power prevailed throughout Africa, Mandela in 1918, Mugabe in 1924. Both were products of the Christian mission school system. Both attended the same university, Fort Hare in South Africa. Both emerged as members of the small African professional elite, Mandela a lawyer, Mugabe a teacher. Both were drawn into the struggle against white minority rule, Mandela in South Africa, Mugabe in neighboring Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Both advocated violence to bring down white-run regimes. Both endured long terms of imprisonment, Mandela, 27 years, Mugabe, 11. Both suffered the anguish of losing a son while in prison, and both were refused permission to attend the funeral.

But whereas Mandela used his prison years to open a dialogue with South Africa's white rulers in order to defeat apartheid, Mugabe emerged from prison bent on revolution, determined to overthrow white society by force. Military victory, he said, would be the "ultimate joy."

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Filed under: * International News & Commentary • Africa • Zimbabwe

The Civil War changed virtually every aspect of American society, from religion to gender roles. Drew Gilpin Faust, president of and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University, has devoted her new book to exploring how the war changed American death. In the Civil War, over 2 percent of the nation's population died—which, as Faust points out, was roughly equivalent to the entire state of Maine being killed, or twice the population of Vermont. The Victorian choreography of "the good death" was inadequate for dealing with the mind-boggling numbers, the stench, the mangled corpses of men too young to die. Americans had to overhaul their notions of what death could and should look like, and even what kind of God could be said to be present—or absent—during such death.

Many of the concrete changes in American dying that Faust documents involve the government's role in military death; indeed, it was the Civil War that created governmental responsibilities that we now take for granted, such as next-of-kin notification, which neither the Union nor the Confederacy viewed as their job in 1861. At the outset of the war, the Union had no organized method for burying, or even identifying, dead soldiers. That began to change with the 1862 passage of a law giving the president power to purchase land for a national cemetery for soldiers; cemeteries were established at Chattanooga, Stones River, Knoxville, Antietam, and, of course, Gettysburg.

In the years during and after the war, the government developed a more aggressive system for counting the war dead (the figures of Union soldiers killed were constantly revised until the 1880s, when the War Department settled on 360,222) and paying pensions and survivor's benefits. The erstwhile Confederacy didn't have a government anymore, and certainly didn't expect the Union to give money to Confederate war widows, so states stepped in.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History • * Culture-Watch • Military / Armed Forces • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

Indeed, it is precisely because I find so much to agree with in [Charles] Hodge's critique of liberal theology that I am also pleased that he added the personal footnote about Schleiermacher. I believe he was sending us a signal—one that we very much need to hear today as evangelicals.

Many evangelical commentators these days insist that salvation is closely tied to doctrinal clarity. Here, for example, is how one prominent evangelical leader criticized those of us who have endorsed the various "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" documents: "What those signers … are saying is that while they believe the doctrine of justification as articulated by the Reformers is true, they are not willing to say people must believe it to be saved. In other words, they believe people are saved who do not believe the biblical doctrine of justification."

I can't speak for others who look for common ground with Roman Catholics, but he certainly has me right: I am passionate in my agreement with Martin Luther on justification by faith alone. But do I believe that a person can be confused about this doctrine and still be saved? Absolutely. I wish that many of my Catholic friends would subscribe unambiguously to the views about salvation by grace alone that I hold preciously. But is their failure to do so a reason for me to doubt their salvation? Here I side clearly with Charles Hodge: "To whomever Christ is God … Christ is a Saviour."

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Filed under: * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Evangelicals • * Theology

The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. We have all known women who remembered a novel so dimly that they had to stand for half an hour in the library skimming through it before they were certain they had once read it. But the moment they became certain, they rejected it immediately. It was for them dead, like a burnt-out match, an old railway ticket, or yesterday’s newspaper; they had already used it. Those who read great
works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life."

--C.S.Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History • * Culture-Watch • Books • * General Interest • Notable & Quotable

Not all of the essays in Wrestling with Angels command comparable attention, however. For example, there is a piece from 1984 on Don Cupitt, a thinker little known outside the UK, whose attempt to construct a kind of post-theistic theology is simply too slight and slapdash to bear the weight of much serious scrutiny. Read now, when the discussions that prompted them have long faded from memory, many of Williams’s objections to Cupitt’s project look more or less obvious, and the essay in which they appear seems of little more than archival interest. For quite different reasons, Williams’s reflections on Gillian Rose, in many ways a brilliant and original philosopher, are more likely to provoke consternation from his readers than to aid them in understanding Rose’s thought; for those unfamiliar with her work, Williams’s discussion will probably seem somewhat elliptical and vague; and, for those few who have read her, it will not necessarily be clear how Williams has further illuminated the questions he addresses.

Taken as a whole, though, this is a marvellous collection, full of riches, in equal measures provocative and profound. It is testimony to a lively and subtle mind, one unusually adept at penetrating far beyond the surfaces of texts, and at finding curiosities and rewards where most of us would not have thought to look. It is, as I have said, only a fragmentary portrait of Rowan Williams the theologian, but it is enough to mark him out as a thinker of great stature and imagination. It is, moreover, resplendent proof that there is far more to this man than a beard – however luxuriant it may be.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Abp of Canterbury Rowan Williams

The world is on course to halve extreme poverty by 2015, but Africa will fall far short of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday.

A new report by the global institutions also warned that urgent action was needed to tackle climate change, which threatens to exact a hefty toll on particularly poor countries and reverse progress in fighting poverty.

The 2008 Global Monitoring Report, released ahead of the IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington this weekend, said strong economic growth in much of the developing world had contributed to the decline in global poverty.

It said the number of extreme poor -- those living under $1 a day -- declined by 278 million between 1990 and 2004, and by 150 million in the last five years of that period.

Globally about 1 billion people still live in extreme poverty, the report added.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • * Economics, Politics • Economy

Global warming will force faith organizations to significantly increase spending on humanitarian efforts--including refugee resettlement, feeding the hungry and disaster relief--according to a new study by the National Council of Churches.

More financial resources and volunteer services will be needed due to global climate change, which is expected to increase the lack of food, shelter and water available, especially among the poor, the study said.

"Individuals or communities living in poverty in developing countries tend to rely on their surroundings more for their day-to-day needs," said Tyler Edgar, associate director of the NCC's Climate and Energy Campaign. "These people are more likely to go down to a local river or stream to bring water for their family. With climate change, those systems are extremely vulnerable."

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Energy, Natural Resources

The free ride for American consumers is ending. For two generations, Americans have imported goods produced ever more cheaply from a succession of low-wage countries — first Japan and Korea, then China, and now increasingly places like Vietnam and India.

But mounting inflation in the developing world, especially Asia, is threatening that arrangement, and not just in China, where rising energy and labor costs have already made exports to the United States more expensive, but in the lower-cost alternatives to China, too.

“Inflation is the major threat to Asian countries,” said Jong-Wha Lee, the head of the Asian Development Bank’s office of regional economic integration.

It is also a threat to Western consumers because Asian exporters, even in very poor countries, are passing their rising costs on to customers.

Developing countries have had bouts of inflation before. Indeed, some are famous for them, like Brazil, which experienced triple-digit inflation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But two things make this time different, and together promise to send prices higher at Wal-Mart and supermarkets alike in the United States, just as the possibility of recession looms.

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Filed under: * Economics, Politics • Economy

Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the storied organizations that propelled the modern-day civil rights movement alongside him are either struggling to stay relevant or struggling to stay alive.

In Atlanta, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) -- which was founded in 1957 after Alabama's Montgomery bus boycott and was led by King through the most difficult days of the movement -- clings to life. Three years ago, utilities shut off the lights and the phones when the group did not pay its bills.

In New York, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which helped shape the movement's philosophy after adopting Mohandas K. Gandhi's doctrine of nonviolent protest, is scarcely known outside Manhattan. CORE conceded that it now has about 10 percent of the 150,000 members it listed in the 1960s.

In Baltimore, the near-century-old NAACP, which tore down racial barriers with deft lawyering in the courts, recently cut a third of its administrative staff because of budget shortfalls. For decades, the NAACP asserted that it was the largest civil rights group, with about half a million dues-paying members, but one of its former presidents recently acknowledged that it has fewer than 300,000.

Some groups have disappeared, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized the Freedom Rides that drew sympathy to their cause and which was later led by firebrands such as Stokley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. Others, such as the National Urban League, remain viable but have diminished visibility.

"They don't really exist now," said the Rev. C.T. Vivian, a former interim director of the SCLC, who spoke with pain in his voice. He added: "They're just names. There has been so little activity from so many of them. SCLC rose from the dead, but we're not so certain life has been blown into it yet. And the NAACP is vital, but they're not doing what I'd expect."

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Race/Race Relations

There is something terribly sad about the fighting between the Anglican Church and parishes that wish to break away over the issue of same-sex unions. The fact that people of a shared faith, facing a world with so many physical and spiritual challenges, are wasting time, energy and money in the courts sparks both despair and anger.

Our editorials, as a rule, don't enter into debates of faith. Those are matters for those directly involved to resolve. And beliefs are not subject to the kinds of arguments editorials usually make.

But this division has become more than an internal debate over religious doctrine. The battle for control of St. Mary of the Incarnation Church in Metchosin brings all religion into disrepute.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church of Canada • Sexuality Debate (in Anglican Communion) • Same-sex blessings • * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues

Meanwhile, some members of the Anglican-Catholic team in Rome seem to live in a world of their own. Monsignor Donald Bolen, a Canadian priest at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, recently printed once again the list of ecumenical documents signed by the clerical academics from both sides over some 30 years, implying that they represent a real advance in communications between the two bodies. (“Dialogue beyond the media sensationalism”, L’Osservatore Romano--English edition--February 13, 2008). But as Anglicanim in the West has been disintegrating since 1930, causing a splitting off from official national Anglican churches, this view seems highly dubious. Today, the “Traditional Anglican Church” community is a large umbrella for groups of Anglicans who broke relations with their national bodies as long as three decades ago.

Recently, their representatives in Britain asked for formal talks with Rome. The Church should work with them, not with the British/North American/Australian dissenting liberals whose intellectual and spiritual confusion is severing the last links with Orthodox Christianity.

Similarly, the Anglicans have split already worldwide. Contact should be taken up with groups in Africa and Asia who are defending traditional Christian doctrines against the rejection of biblical and moral teaching by the post-modernist secularizers among Western Anglicans. Canadian Catholic bishops, too, should discourage contact with dissembling Anglicans.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • - Anglican: Latest News • * Religion News & Commentary • Ecumenical Relations • Other Churches • Roman Catholic

As Prime Minister, Tony Blair spoke little about his faith, believing that religion in Britain is a private matter that does not sit comfortably with public life. But he made no secret of his Christianity and acknowledged, in office and afterwards, the enormous help and sustenance he received from his religious beliefs. His decision to set up a Faith Foundation to encourage interfaith dialogue and rescue religion from extremism is therefore particularly welcome: not only does it draw on his deep personal convictions and long political experience, but also it comes at a time when faith plays an ever more central part in politics and policy. Rarely have faith issues intruded as forcefully into Britain's largely secular society, or religious extremism been as critical to fanning and prolonging conflicts around the world.

In outlining his hopes for this new forum to The Times, Mr Blair has focused on two key challenges: the reconciliation of faith with modernity; and the interfaith dialogue between the world's main religions. Already, this dialogue is gathering pace: not only are academic and church bodies playing an ever more visible role in current debates on multiculturalism, extremism, identity and Britishness, but also in the wider world there have been potentially momentous initiatives to end historic schisms and enmities - the Vatican's overtures to Eastern Orthodoxy, the Pope's readiness to reassess Martin Luther and the call by 138 Muslim leaders for an institutional dialogue with Christianity. What could Mr Blair's initiative add to the work of the Three Faiths Forum, St Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace and the Cambridge Interfaith programme, to name but three?

The answer is much needed political weight and experience. Religious leaders speak from the heart; they are not often versed in the pitfalls of politics or public relations.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Religion News & Commentary • Inter-Faith Relations

Alan Greenspan's reputation is under siege, and he's incredulous.

Hailed three years ago as "the greatest central banker who ever lived," the retired chairman of the Federal Reserve now is being criticized for his management of the U.S. economy before he retired in 2006. The Fed's low rates and laissez-faire regulatory oversight during his final years are widely blamed for sowing the seeds of today's financial crisis -- one that began in the U.S. housing market and is now battering banks, stock markets, borrowers and consumers around the world.

For much of his 18 years atop the world's most-influential economic institution, Mr. Greenspan was lionized for the economy's performance. Now, he notes, he's being second-guessed for it.

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I have just hung up; why did he telephone? I don’t know…Oh! I get it…

I talked a lot and listened very little.

Forgive me, Lord, it was a monologue and not a dialogue. I explained my idea and did not get his; Since I didn’t listen, I learned nothing, Since I didn’t listen, I didn’t help, Since I didn’t listen, we didn’t commune.

Forgive me, Lord, for we were connected, and now we are cut off.

--Michel Quoist, Prayers (English translation of the 1963 French original, Avon Books, 1975), p.19

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Spirituality/Prayer

The moment the war ended, I believed — we all did — that anyone who survived death must bear witness. Some of us even believed that they survived in order to become witnesses. But then I knew deep down that it would be impossible to communicate the entire story. Nobody can. I personally decided to wait, to see during 10 years if I would be capable to find the proper words, the proper pace, the proper melody or maybe even the proper silence to describe the ineffable.

For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share. When we endure an experience, the experience cannot stay with me alone. It must be opened, it must become an offering, it must be deepened and given and shared. And of course I am afraid that memories suppressed could come back with a fury, which is dangerous to all human beings, not only to those who directly were participants but to people everywhere, to the world, for everyone. So, therefore, those memories that are discarded, shamed, somehow they may come back in different ways — disguised, perhaps seeking another outlet.

Granted, our task is to inform. But information must be transformed into knowledge, knowledge into sensitivity and sensitivity into commitment.

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Filed under: * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Judaism

Dear Brothers, each one of you feels the great responsibility to do everything possible to support marriage and family life, which is the primary source of cohesion in communities and hence of vital importance in the eyes of the government authorities. In this perspective, the great network of Catholic schools throughout your region can make a great contribution. Values rooted in the way of truth presented by Christ illuminate the spirit and heart of young people and encourage them to continue along the path of faithfulness, responsibility and real freedom. Good young Christians make good citizens. I am sure that everything will be done to encourage the Catholicity of your schools, which, for generations, have offered a remarkable service to your people. In this way, I do not doubt that the young adults of your dioceses will know to discern their return, in an urgent way, to contribute to the economic and social development of region, because it will be an essential dimension of their Christian witness.

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Filed under: * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic • Pope Benedict XVI