Benedict decried the "splintering" of Christian churches over "so-called 'prophetic actions' that are based on a hermeneutic not always consonant with the datum of Scripture and Tradition." Such actions, he said, cause Christian communities to "give up the attempt to act as a unified body, choosing instead to function according to the idea of 'local options,'" thus losing their connections to Christians in other times and places. Some, but not all, interpreted that as a veiled reference to controversy in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.

"I think he did us the honor of giving us a serious address that I think needs to be read and reflected upon," said New York's Bishop Mark Sisk. Asked whether he thought Benedict had singled out the Episcopal Church in his remarks, Sisk responded, "It's possible--but I would be rather surprised. I don't think he was trying to send shots across the bow at particular churches. I think he spoke in a respectful way and I didn't see that as a shot at the Episcopal Church."

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • * Religion News & Commentary • Ecumenical Relations • Other Churches • Roman Catholic • Pope Benedict XVI

Look for Papal Vist Texts at the bottom of the page.

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

Uganda has a small but thriving Jewish community. A reporter joined them for Passover last year.

Listen to it all and note carefully the reason for the leader's conversion from Anglicanism to Judaism.

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

KIM LAWTON: The pope arrived at Andrews Air Force Base Tuesday (April 15) and was greeted by George W. Bush -- the first time this president has personally welcomed a world leader there. Experts say the gesture shows how significant this visit is on many fronts.

DAVID GIBSON (Author, "The Rule of Benedict"): Even though American Catholics are only six, seven percent of the entire Catholic global population, like America itself, the Catholic Church worldwide often follows its cues from America. So it's a really important moment in the life of the church, not only in the United States but also globally.

LAWTON: Benedict came here in a dual role -- as spiritual leader to the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics and as head of state for the independent territory of Vatican City and the Catholic Church's government called the Holy See.

During an elaborate White House ceremony Wednesday (April 17), the pope's 81st birthday, Bush praised Benedict for urging America and the world to distinguish between right and wrong.

President GEORGE W. BUSH: We need your message to reject this dictatorship of relativism and embrace a culture of justice and truth.

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

What is Christianity's proper role in American presidential politics? This question has gripped the 2008 campaign. From the dispute over the acceptability of Mitt Romney's Mormonism, to Mike Huckabee's musings about conforming the US Constitution more to the Bible and the controversy over Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor, the spiritual and secular realms have collided fiercely. Just this week, Senator Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton fielded questions from US religious leaders at a special forum broadcast on CNN.

More broadly, arguments over public policies – from war to illegal immigration – are increasingly being infused with scriptural justifications.

The media, of course, relish such controversy. So do many religious leaders, who use the occasion to offer the "real" interpretation of what Scripture says about a particular issue. As a result, religion and politics aren't just mingling – they're being wedded to the same goal: redeeming America's body politic.

A largely Protestant nation that can trace its theological taproot to Martin Luther ought to know better. As the original Reformer, Luther understood how critical it was to separate church and state and, in a more important sense, the spiritual kingdom of Christ and the secular realm where God reigns in a hidden way through humans using reason as a guide.

That is not to say that Christians today shouldn't let their Christianity inform their political values and action. They should. But the Bible is not a political playbook....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General

Watch it all.

Filed under: * International News & Commentary • Asia

Are you better off than you were eight years ago? For a growing number of middle-class Americans, the answer is "No."

Here and elsewhere, middle-class earnings aren't keeping up with the cost of living. Rising gasoline and food prices, health bills, child-care and education costs are leaving less to set aside for retirement. With the housing market in turmoil, even the asset many had come to count on -- the value of their homes -- is threatened.

It isn't just a reflection of the current economic slowdown and rise in commodity prices: Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for several years. The well-heeled keep doing better, with the wealthiest 1% of U.S. families garnering the largest share of income since 1929.

"This is a squeezing-down cycle, and people are trying to hang on," says Randy Riggs, pastor at First Presbyterian Church in this city in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country. "Five years ago, I had these visions of what the church could do and hoped to raise funds to do so. I can't be a dreamer at the moment." Mr. Riggs says he recently tabled a project to renovate the church's chapel because he sensed he couldn't raise enough money.

Read it all from the front page of today's Wall Street Journal.

Filed under: * Economics, Politics • Economy

"I was Watching You" is the title--listen to it all.

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Rosanne Cash is the daughter of country legend Johnny Cash, but has been a singer-songwriter in her own right for more than 25 years. Her family history couldn't help but play a role in her own career; but on her latest album, Black Cadillac, it takes on a different tone.

Within the two-year period preceding the album, Cash's mother, father and stepmother all died. Their names are listed in dedication on the CD's liner notes, and the album is suffused with issues of mortality and mourning. Family plays another kind of role on the album as well: Cash's husband, John Leventhal, is a co-producer.

Cash talks with Scott Simon about family, music, and the new movie about her father, Walk the Line.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Update: A very good Wall Street Journal piece on Ms. Cash's Album is here.

Another update: Marsha Steele has an interesting album review there as well.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Music

TEC's Bishops who are taking these extreme actions maintain they are simply defending their diocesan territories. The problem, they say, is that when a priest withdraws from their jurisdiction to join, say, the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, he or she does not leave and go to Argentina, but stays and conducts services (say) in the Diocese of Los Angeles, just as before. Pardon my impertinence, but so what? They cannot prevent that from happening, can they, with all of their thunderbolts? How do their threats and depositions change the situation by one whit for the better? It is the souls of fellow Christians that are at stake here, not medieval concepts of territoriality. (Depositions do not prevent the breakup of diocesan territory; they most likely exacerbate it.) Given that realization, one might think that TEC's bishops could take the Christian route, and issue letters dimissory . . . .

In all of these inhibitions and subsequent depositions, we see the results of treating the joining of other provinces of the Anglican Communion as equivalent to "abandoning the communion of the Episcopal Church." What TEC and her bishops are saying by these actions is that the only communion that matters to TEC is a communion subject to TEC's Constitution and Canons---the rest of the Anglican Communion can go hang, for all the comity that TEC cares to show to it. And as for the care of souls---the less said, the better.

TEC's Bishops have now rewritten Canons IV.9 and IV.10 so that they equate "abandonment of communion" not only with joining the Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox Church, but also with joining the Anglican Church of Uganda, or the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone. This turns the canons into measures like those of the Anglican Church of Canada, which do not differentiate between joining another religious body that is in communion with the Canadian Church, and one that is not---both acts are equally subject to inhibition and deposition for "abandonment". (Most recently, the Canadian canons were used in this way to threaten the 82-year-old evangelist Dr. J. I. Packer with inhibition.)

We should truly be cautious before proceeding down Canada's path. What is happening in front of our eyes with all of the inhibitions and depositions is the balkanization of the Anglican Communion, in violation of the very principles of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral which lie at its heart. Soon, each province of the Communion will have two classes of clergy: those who are licensed to practice in that province, and those who cannot, but who are licensed elsewhere, even though they live and minister in the province in question. Once that happens, what can one say is left of the Anglican Communion? It will have become a tradition, in Hamlet's sad words, that is "more honor'd in the breach than the observance . . .".

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Conflicts • TEC Departing Parishes • TEC Polity & Canons • * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History

...We, who live the life of grace within the Church’s communion, are called to draw all people into this mystery of light.

This is no easy task in a world which can tend to look at the Church, like those stained glass windows, “from the outside”: a world which deeply senses a need for spirituality, yet finds it difficult to “enter into” the mystery of the Church. Even for those of us within, the light of faith can be dimmed by routine, and the splendor of the Church obscured by the sins and weaknesses of her members. It can be dimmed too, by the obstacles encountered in a society which sometimes seems to have forgotten God and to resent even the most elementary demands of Christian morality. You, who have devoted your lives to bearing witness to the love of Christ and the building up of his Body, know from your daily contact with the world around us how tempting it is at times to give way to frustration, disappointment and even pessimism about the future. In a word, it is not always easy to see the light of the Spirit all about us, the splendor of the Risen Lord illuminating our lives and instilling renewed hope in his victory over the world (cf. Jn 16:33).

Yet the word of God reminds us that, in faith, we see the heavens opened, and the grace of the Holy Spirit lighting up the Church and bringing sure hope to our world. “O Lord, my God,” the Psalmist sings, “when you send forth your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth” (Ps 104:30). These words evoke the first creation, when the Spirit of God hovered over the deep (cf. Gen 1:2). And they look forward to the new creation, at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles and established the Church as the first fruits of a redeemed humanity (cf. Jn 20:22-23). These words summon us to ever deeper faith in God’s infinite power to transform every human situation, to create life from death, and to light up even the darkest night. And they make us think of another magnificent phrase of Saint Irenaeus: “where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace” (Adv. Haer. III, 24, 1).

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

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Filed under: * Religion News & Commentary • Inter-Faith Relations • Other Churches • Roman Catholic • Pope Benedict XVI • Other Faiths • Judaism

A nice slideshow.

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

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that.

But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.

He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics. He claimed falsely that his handwriting wasn’t on a questionnaire about gun control. He claimed that he had never attacked Clinton for her exaggerations about the Tuzla airport, though his campaign was all over it. Obama piously condemned the practice of lifting other candidates’ words out of context, but he has been doing exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100 years in Iraq comment.

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Filed under: * Economics, Politics • US Presidential Election 2008

These differences are significant because they put into relief what these accounts have in common. Whatever the particular gospel tradition, two elements recur in them. There is always something immediate and physical. The women running from the tomb in Matthew, and Mary Magdalene alone in John, cling to him; in John, Thomas is invited to place his finger into Jesus's wounded hands and his hand into His side; on various occasions, whether in the upper room in Jerusalem, at Emmaus, or by the lakeside, Jesus is said to eat with the Disciples or He invites them to eat. At the same time, besides this physical immediacy there is also something surprising or odd. And so Mary Magdalene, first of all, supposes Jesus to be the gardener; the Disciples on the road to Emmaus also fail at first to recognise Him; when He shows himself to the Disciples in the upper room, we are told that he entered even though the door was locked; and there is also that more general expression in Matthew's Gospel when Jesus meets the Disciples on the mountain in Galilee and we are told that “some doubted”.

There is always this combination of the immediate and the odd. My favourite example is the moment in St John's Gospel when, after an unsuccessful fishing expedition, a figure on the shore calls to Peter and the others, encouraging them to cast their nets again. They do so and haul in an immense catch. They come ashore and have breakfast with Him. They recognise it is Jesus. But we are told, “Now none of the Disciples dared to ask him, 'Who are you?' because they knew it was the Lord”. If they knew Him, why is “daring” even mentioned?

These passages are not precise descriptions of events; instead they convey an experience. The man who was with them was really there, recognisably the man they had known and loved and followed; but he was not simply as He had been before.

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Filed under: * Theology • Eschatology

Faced with these difficulties, we must first recall that the unity of the Church flows from the perfect oneness of the Trinitarian God. In John’s Gospel, we are told that Jesus prayed to his Father that his disciples might be one, “just as you are in me and I am in you” (Jn 17:21). This passage reflects the unwavering conviction of the early Christian community that its unity was both caused by, and is reflective of, the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This, in turn, suggests that the internal cohesion of believers was based on the sound integrity of their doctrinal confession (cf. 1 Tim 1:3-11). Throughout the New Testament, we find that the Apostles were repeatedly called to give an account for their faith to both Gentiles (cf. Acts 17:16-34) and Jews (cf. Acts 4:5-22; 5:27-42). The core of their argument was always the historical fact of Jesus’s bodily resurrection from the tomb (Acts 2:24, 32; 3:15; 4:10; 5:30; 10:40; 13:30). The ultimate effectiveness of their preaching did not depend on “lofty words” or “human wisdom” (1 Cor 2:13), but rather on the work of the Spirit (Eph 3:5) who confirmed the authoritative witness of the Apostles (cf. 1 Cor 15:1-11). The nucleus of Paul’s preaching and that of the early Church was none other than Jesus Christ, and “him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). But this proclamation had to be guaranteed by the purity of normative doctrine expressed in creedal formulae - symbola - which articulated the essence of the Christian faith and constituted the foundation for the unity of the baptized (cf. 1 Cor 15:3-5; Gal 1:6-9; Unitatis Redintegratio, 2).

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

Time is running out on Hillary Rodham Clinton, the long-ago front- runner for the Democratic presidential nomination who now trails Barack Obama in delegates, states won and popular votes.

Compounding Clinton's woes, Obama appears on track to finish the primary campaign fewer than 100 delegates shy of the 2,025 needed to win.

Clinton argues to Democratic officialdom that other factors should count, an unprovable assertion that she's more electable chief among them. But she undercut her own claim in Wednesday night's debate, answering "yes, yes, yes" when asked whether her rival could win the White House.

There's little if any public evidence the party's elite, the superdelegates who will attend the convention, are buying her argument anyway.

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Filed under: * Economics, Politics • US Presidential Election 2008

The media coverage, insofar as I have been able to follow it, is still excessively preoccupied with comparisons between Benedict and John Paul the Great. That is both unfair and misleading. Benedict is who he is, the 264th—or, according to some reckonings, the 265th–successor to St. Peter, doing what Peter among us is supposed to do, strengthening the faithful. They key thing, as one has occasion to say for the thousandth time, is to concentrate not so much on the person as the message. Listen, and listen carefully, to what he says! He is very much the man many of us have known and admired for years. And now he speaks as the Vicar of Christ, the shepherd of the universal Church in the service of the Good Shepherd. Remembering, of course, that this is the week of Good Shepherd Sunday.

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