In his presidential address to the General Synod, which meets once a year, Harper described his April 29-May 2 visit to the Holy Land as "harrowing but not hopeless."

Joined by Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh Seán Brady, the Rev. Roy Cooper, president of the Methodist Church in Ireland, and the Rev. John Finlay, moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Harper said he had been "deeply moved by the resilience of West Bank Palestinians in circumstances of intolerable hardship, denial of dignity and severe restriction of freedom of movement."

Following his address Harper, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland since February 2007, told a news conference that the Church of Ireland remains in communion with every part of the Anglican Communion and spoke about his hopes for this summer's Lambeth Conference of bishops. "I believe that we will find a way to manage the differences that we have with respect to everyone's ethically held positions," he said.

Read the article here.

Archbishop Harper's complete address is here in pdf.

Chanting "Save our children; No more guns," hundreds marched on the eve of Mother's Day in the Bronx, New York to honor the victims and families of gun violence and bring about awareness for change.

"It is true that 'it takes a village'," said Gloria Cruz, founder and organizer of the annual 'Walk Against Gun Violence.' "In order to change your community, you have to be active in it."

For the third consecutive year, Cruz gathered family members, the community, fellow advocates and elected officials in the Bronx, at the playground where the life her 10-year-old niece Naiesha Pearson was abruptly ended by a bullet at a Labor Day picnic in 2005.

Cruz, a member of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in the Bronx, said the senseless event compelled her to do something.

The featured speaker at the rally was the Rev. Canon Petero Sabune spoke out for education as an antidote to violence.

Noting that 40 percent of the inmates at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, in Ossining, New York cannot read or write, and that 75 percent do not have a high school diploma, the Rev. Canon Petero Sabune, protestant chaplain at Sing Sing, said that the "antidote to violence is education."

"The reality of all of this is that we either get them on this end and prevent them from committing a crime, or get them on the other end in prison," he stated.

Sabune, the keynote speaker at the rally, said several members of his family "have died due to some form of violence."

While serving as dean of St. Philip's Cathedral in Newark, New Jersey, Sabune said he gained further insight into violence which allowed him to organize families and local faith communities to respond when an 8-year-old boy named Terrell James was killed in a drive-by shooting.

"Today's gathering is important because I believe every diocese, bishop, and parish across the country needs to declare peace on this issue," he said. "The Episcopal Church has had a clear unequivocal message against gun violence."

He makes the environment-friendly plea in the latest edition of ‘People and Places’, a podcast series profiling a wide range of people who work in today’s Church of England.

When prompted for practical energy-saving advice that anyone could employ, he replies: "I think my tip would be for everybody to make sure if they don't have any to go out and buy some clothes pegs - because I think more and more we should use the benefits of the environment, and I do think tumble-dryers should be turned off and a lot more clothes put out in the sunshine to dry, and that would save an awful lot of energy."

Church of England website Shrinking the Footprint is here.

Podcasts are here and also available at iTunes.

... with an increasing number of troops being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, the modern military is debating an idea Gen. Washington never considered -- awarding one of the nation's top military citations to veterans with psychological wounds, not just physical ones.

While many, especially families of the wounded warriors, are pressing for this award to go to victims of PTSD, The Rev. Robert Certain, retired Air Force colonel and Episcopal priest who preached the homily at the funeral of President Gerald Ford has mixed feelings about the question.

The question of whether veterans suffering from PTSD should be eligible for the Purple Heart is a deeply emotional issue for military personnel and their families.

Robert Certain is a retired Air Force colonel who was shot down over Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1972 and held as a prisoner of war. He received a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts and later became an Air Force chaplain and Episcopal priest.

Mr. Certain suffered severe depression in the 1980s and was formally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2000.

Mr. Certain says that he is conflicted about whether veterans with PTSD should be eligible for the Purple Heart. In his own case, the disorder wasn't diagnosed until decades after the Vietnam War ended but he believes that making troops suffering from the disorder eligible for the award might persuade more of them to seek help.

In an email, he wrote: "The scars resulting from PTSD are almost all invisible to the observer, but always obvious to the warrior who has them.

Read it all here.

It began at a Havertown sushi bar, where he confessed his dream to a parishioner. Then, last November, his adoring congregation celebrated his 10th anniversary as rector of St. David's Episcopal Church in Wayne by surprising him with the chance to realize his dream.

Tonight at Citizens Bank Park, before the Phillies match bats with the Atlanta Braves, the Rev. Frank Allen's dream will come true when he sings the national anthem.

"I couldn't be more thrilled," says Allen. "I'm very patriotic and I'm a baseball nut."

On hand will be more than 1,100 members of his flock, who are "going to be making a joyful noise," predicts Glenn Porter, a St. David's congregant. "When was the last time 1,100 Episcopalians gathered in public? We're not a showy bunch.".

Read it here.

At the St Francis parish in Waterfalls riot police interrupted the service during 'holy communion' and told parishioners to leave. Witnesses said the parishioners assumed it was the usual police over-zealousness and some of them remained seated. The police then began beating up people, including women, in the church.

A furious Bakare said what was happening was a 'national scandal' adding, 'even Ian Smith (former Rhodesian leader) allowed us to worship.' Sources told Newsreel that the ousted Bishop and Mugabe supporter, Nolbert Kunonga, has branded new bishop Bakare an MDC supporter who is receiving money from Britain. The accusation has provided an excuse for a crackdown on Bakare's followers, with instructions being given to the police force that all parishioners loyal to him be barred from using any of the church buildings in Harare. A High Court order that divided time for church services between Bakare and Kunonga was suspended, following the granting of an appeal to Kunonga by Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku.

On becoming Bishop, Kunonga plunged the Anglican Church into disarray after pledging his support for Mugabe's violent land-grab policy. He targeted priests who disagreed with him by posting them to remote areas, while members of the CIO threatened some with death. An attempt by Kunonga to withdraw the Harare diocese from the Province of Central Africa backfired as the province later dismissed him. Kunonga continues to defy the dismissal and has relied on state security to beat up and intimidate his opponents.

Monday, The Lead carried this story of African bishops calling for intervention in the Zimbabwean political situation.

Bishop Kunonga has not been invited to the Lambeth Conference.

From the text which is posted at Episcope:

"I understand from advertising here that you plan to visit a congregation in the Diocese of Georgia on 14 May of this year. The diocesan, Bishop Henry Louttit, has not given any invitation for you to do so, nor received any information from you about your planned visit. I must protest this unwarranted incursion into The Episcopal Church. I am concerned that you seem to feel it appropriate to visit, preach, and exercise episcopal ministry within the territory of this Church, and I wonder how you would receive similar behavior in Uganda. These actions violate the spirit and letter of the work of the Windsor Report, and only lead to heightened tensions. We are more than willing to receive you for conversation, dialogue, and reconciliation, yet you continue to act without speaking with us. I hope and pray that you might respond to our invitation and meet with representatives of this Church."

Read the full article here.

From the specific section on the process, William's writes:

"As I noted when I wrote to you in Advent, this makes it all the more essential that those who come to Lambeth will arrive genuinely willing to engage fully in that growth towards closer unity that the Windsor Report and the Covenant Process envisage. We hope that people will not come so wedded to  their own agenda  and their local  priorities that they cannot listen to those from other cultural backgrounds.  As you may have gathered, in circumstances where there has been divisive or controversial action, I have been discussing privately with some bishops the need to be wholeheartedly part of a shared vision and process in our time together.

Of course, as baptised Christians and pastors of Christ's flock, we are not just seeking some low-level consensus, or a simple agreement to disagree politely.  We are asking for the fire of the Spirit to come upon us and deepen our sense that we are answerable to and for each other and answerable to God for the faithful proclamation of his grace uniquely offered in Jesus.  That deepening may be painful in all kinds of ways.  The Spirit does not show us a way to by-pass the Cross.  But only in this way shall we truly appear in the world as Christ's Body as a sign of God's Kingdom which challenges a world scarred by poverty, violence and injustice."

Read the full article here.

The Times Online, UK, reports here.

The Pluralist comments here.

Susan Russell, President of Integrity, comments here.

The statement specifically calls for Mugabe to "abide by the results of the March 29 election".

From news reports:

"In a statement on Friday, the Bishops from Botswana, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia, who met in Pretoria, said they had noted 'with sadness' the delay in the announcement of the results of the Zimbabwe presidential election.

[...]The church said it was time for a large scale diplomatic offensive by SA and other international players."

Read the full article here.

See, also, this commentary at Project Syndicate by Archbishop Tutu and Aryeh Neier (President of the Open Society Institute and founder of Human Rights Watch).

No one has ever doubted the layers of meaning in the stories of Dr. Seuss. The Lorax has obvious lessons about the environment. The Butter Battle Book took direct aim at the Cold War arms race. Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now! was one way to demand the resignation of President Nixon.

So when Horton's world of Who-ville was "saved by the Smallest of All," Robert Short saw the savior of the Whos as a symbol for the Savior of all people. From Green Eggs and Ham to How the Grinch Stole Christmas , Short has reinterpreted many of Theodor Seuss Geisel's stories as subtle messages of Christian doctrine in the new book, The Parables of Dr. Seuss.

Questions remain, however, about whether the original author intended such an interpretation or Short, a retired Presbyterian minister, is just seeing the stories through the lens of his own life.

"I was amazed at what I found when I started looking at it — all this Christian imagery was very carefully factored into his stories," Short said in an interview from his home in Little Rock.

"And that's what this book intends to do, is show how he has done this in a very carefully crafted way. It's there, and you could make an argument for it being intentionally there, because it's done with such great care."

Short has spent four decades drawing spiritual lessons from popular culture, starting with the 1965 best-seller, The Gospel According to Peanuts, the first of his eight books. The 75-year-old minister also does presentations that explore religious meanings in the popular comic strip Calvin and Hobbes and even in the last episode of the television comedy Cheers, set in a Boston bar. Short has the congregation sing the Cheers theme song before beginning his talk.

. . .

So is The Cat in the Hat really the Christ who arrives with a "BUMP" and turns the world upside down for God's children? Is the mother in the story a symbol of the old religious law? Are the fish in the bowl representative of churches that adhere to a restricting version of the Gospel? Did Dr. Seuss really intend for his stories to be interpreted this way?

It's a quandary that, for some, would puzzle even the Grinch's puzzler.

"There's so much of it," Short said. "And it fits so neatly into the configuration of the Christian message that I'm convinced that he knew what he was doing."

Read it all here.

Q: How is what you recommend different than the humanitarian work churches do already?

A: It's not working within the paradigm that a lot of Christians work — which is all that God is ultimately interested in is extracting souls for heaven. And we might do some good works here on earth, but we don't really expect any of it to work, because the world is sort of, the toilet has been flushed and it's going down.

___

Q: What do you mean by systemic change?

A: You can make incremental changes within a subsystem but in order to actually change a whole system you have to get a lot of the parts changing all at once. ... You can pour money into building a school, but then if there's a war, the war wipes out all the benefit you got from the school and the school shuts down. You can improve agriculture, but if HIV runs through, then there's so much upheaval, then you can't maintain the advances in agriculture.

___

Q: But there's an impression churches are already so active on these issues. Why does anyone need to urge churches to do this?

A: One of the really important concepts is the difference between mercy and justice. There's that famous passage from Micah 6, "Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God." One way to describe it is unjust systems throw people into misery and mercy brings us to relieve some of their misery, but until we confront the unjust systems by doing justice we're never going to make a change. ... I think what churches in America, especially evangelical churches, are just waking up to is the way they have to deal with systemic injustice, not just charitable giving to people in misery.

___

Q: Are you trying to create heaven on earth?

A: As a Christian, I'm just trying to be faithful. I'm trying to live out what I pray when I pray the Lord's prayer, 'May your kingdom come. May your will be done on earth.' ... I'm not a utopian in any way.

Read it all here. McLaren's blog is here.

A young man, heir to a fortune so vast he considers it his “cross of gold,” comes home from Guadalcanal a decorated hero, bearing scars from a bullet that just missed his heart. God has saved him, he believes, for a purpose. The vocation he heard at Yale has grown loud enough to drown out the objections of his family. Ordained an Episcopal priest in 1949, he begins his career in a blighted New Jersey parish, eventually climbing to a position so exalted that at his death in 2003 he is remembered as “a prince of the church,” “a saint.”

Already many people, whether or not they’ve read “The Bishop’s Daughter,” know it as the book in which Honor Moore outs her famous father, a man celebrated as a paragon of virtue, a priest whose vestments seemed to set him apart from passions that sully ordinary men. But Paul Moore Jr.’s bisexuality — a fact previously known only to family and a few friends — was an important and decidedly not sublimated aspect of his essential self. There is no way to write a book about him, or about being his daughter, that fails to consider its place in his life and its impact on his family.

. . .

As Moore describes her father, who retired in 1989 as the Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of New York, Paul Moore was always conscious of, and in conflict with, his own sexual nature, considered deviant and sinful during the decades he served his church. He suffered his transgressions with the understanding that his fallen human state offered him the one experience he could share with his God, who had been crucified for man’s sins. Standing nearly 6-foot-5, regarding the world from pulpits that granted him national and sometimes international attention, Bishop Moore was a gifted preacher who projected a palpable sympathy by placing himself among “the sinful brotherhood of mankind, so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself.”

That description was written not by Honor Moore but by Nathaniel Hawthorne, about another renowned, if fictional, minister whose sexual transgressions remained a hidden source of anguish and spiritual power. It’s unlikely Moore imagined “The Scarlet Letter” as prefiguring her story of her father and the adulterous temptations to which he succumbed. But both books explore the repressive hysteria peculiar to American sexual mores, as well as the split between public and private selves; and Hawthorne’s Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whose virtue cannot be teased apart from his sins, is a useful model for approaching the complex, flawed and extraordinary Paul Moore. And like “The Scarlet Letter,” whose exultant climax is Dimmesdale’s disclosure of a secret sexual sin, “The Bishop’s Daughter” is an eloquent argument for speaking even the most difficult truths.

. . .

“If only they knew the truth,” Paul Moore said in his daughter’s therapist’s office, “thinking of people who praised his life,” “his body moving in large waves of sobbing.” “It is inconceivable,” Hawthorne wrote of Dimmesdale, “the agony with which this public veneration tortured him!” The remarkable and loving accomplishment of “The Bishop’s Daughter” is that in revealing Paul Moore as he could never disclose himself, in showing him humbled and suffering, Honor Moore does not diminish but enlarges him.

Read it all here. We have previously written about this Book here , here and here.

Serena Perkins and Elliot Turiel came up with six situations in which lying might be justified, then asked 64 teens aged 12 to 17 which ones were acceptable and which were not. The situations are below:

Moral:
* Parents don't want their child to befriend another teen because he/she is of a different race
* Parents want their child to fight another teen because he/she had been teased by them

Personal:
* Parents don't want their child dating a teen they don't like
* Parents think the club their child wants to join is a waste of time

Prudential:
* Parents object to their child not wanting to finish her/his homework
* Parents don't want their child to ride a motorcycle

In each case, the participants were asked whether it would be acceptable for a 16-year-old to lie about doing (or not doing) these things despite their parents' objections. . . .

[N]early all teens believe it's okay to lie to your parents when you've defied their expectations to commit an immoral act. A statistically significant portion of older teens (age 15-17) believe lying is okay when the parents have personal objections to their behavior, but significantly fewer younger teens (age 12-14) believe this type of lie is acceptable. When the parents seem to be looking out for the child's best interests (the prudential domain), most teens believe lying is wrong -- though significantly more older teens still believe lying is acceptable in this case as well.

But Perkins and Turiel went further: They asked a separate group of 64 teens the same questions, except the role of parents was completely replaced by the role of a friend. Is it okay to lie to a friend? . . .

Both groups were significantly less likely to say it was okay to lie to friends in the moral and personal domains -- even if a friend asked you to do something immoral, about 50 percent of teens still said it was not okay to lie to them about the fact that you took the moral high ground (of course, telling the truth might be the higher moral course in this situation). In the prudential domain, the pattern was reversed, and lies were seen as more justified by both groups of teens.

In many ways these results aren't especially surprising, but it is interesting to note when the differences in age groups come into play. Younger teens are less likely to believe lying about personal / prudential situations is okay compared to older teens, suggesting that older teens justify their lies based on their sense of autonomy.

But there are limits to this trend: the researchers also asked both groups whether it was acceptable to lie about a misdeed (breaking their parents' / friends' cell phone), and all agreed that this was unacceptable.

Read it all here.

A parish priest at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena and an outspoken critic of the religious right, Susan Russell travels around the county to lobby for LGBT inclusion in the church. Russell is the president of Integrity USA, a nonprofit organization for LGBT Episcopalians and their supporters, and she is a member of the Human Rights Campaign’s Religion Council. She and her partner—who wed in a ceremony at All Saints—collaborated on Voices of Witness, a documentary about LGBT people in the church. She blogs about her work at http://inchatatime.blogspot.com/.

Turns out she was reticent to post the news on her own blog but was urged to do so by some friends who'd seen the video that introduced her at the event:

Read her news here.