From here:
Abortionist Kermit Gosnell is facing the death penalty if he is convicted of the murders for which he is being tried in Philadelphia. Surely, the heinous acts of which he stands accused are depraved. They probably meet the criteria for capital punishment under Pennsylvania law. However, in the event that Gosnell is convicted, which seems likely, I am asking my fellow pro-lifers around the country to join me in requesting that his life be spared.
No.
Justin Trudeau, keen to chart new territories of shallowness while packing as many clichés into as few sentences as humanly possible, reckons the “root cause” of the Boston bombings was whatever gave the bomber a feeling of “exclusion”. If only the neighbourhood welcome wagon had got to him earlier.
There is no escape: from the Anglican Church of Canada to foppish liberal politicians, one vice rules them all – exclusion.
From here:
In an interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge that aired Tuesday night, Trudeau was asked how he would have responded to the attacks that killed three people and left about 170 injured.
Trudeau said he would offer the American material support “and at the same time, over the coming days, we have to look at the root causes.”
“Now, we don’t know now if it was terrorism or a single crazy or a domestic issue or a foreign issue,” he said. “But there is no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded. Completely at war with innocents. At war with a society. And our approach has to be, where do those tensions come from?
As of this writing, three people have died – one an eight year old boy – and 143 are injured. Two bombs went off and two others were defused. Horrible though this is, it strikes me as a far cry from the kind of mayhem America’s enemies would like to inflict: terrorists on North American soil are, for the present, a bedraggled coterie of less than effectual bumbling cowards.
Predictably, President Obama couldn’t bring himself to call the bombings a terrorist attack even though, judging by the news video footage, everyone looked terrified.
On CNN, Peter Bergen suggested the bombers could have been “right wing extremists”; he really wanted to say “right wing Christian extremists” but didn’t think he would get way with that even on CNN.
Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah clearly were not listening to Peter Bergen since, minutes after the atrocity, they made a presumption of ownership and began to celebrate:
Shortly after terror bombs exploded and murdered over 12 people [actually only 3 so far] at the Boston Marathon, members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah were reported to be dancing in the streets of Gaza, handing out candies to passers-by.
[…..]
The head of an Islamic terror organization in Jordan – the Muslim Salafi group says he’s “happy to see the horror in America” after the bombing attacks in Boston.
“American blood isn’t more precious than Muslim blood,” said Mohammad al-Chalabi, who was convicted in an al-Qaeda-linked plot to attack US and other Western diplomatic missions in Jordan in 2003.
It seems that a Saudi national is a “person of interest”; even so, no-one denounced this as racial profiling – yet.
And the church is praying.
The remarkable Canon Andrew White:
He is visiting Israel at the moment.
More here:
The “Vicar of Baghdad” is visiting Israel this week, and he’s brought a little good news, a great deal of bad, and endless reserves of faith.
The Vicar of Baghdad is a larger-than-life figure — a big, exuberant presence with a cane (he suffers from multiple sclerosis), a large silver cross around his neck, and today a deafening bow tie — and he needs to be. He’s lived in the constant shadow of death for eight years in a heavily barricaded compound surrounded by razor wire in the Iraqi capital, prevented by the Iraqi Army from taking so much as a step outside, with bombs exploding all around. He is permanently surrounded by dozens of army guards. When he wants to leave — like he did just now, to come to Israel — he is driven out of the compound in an Iraqi army convoy.
The Vicar of Baghdad reopened the Iraqi capital’s St. George’s Church in 2003, along with Justin Welby, a fellow member of the Anglican clergy with whom he had worked at England’s Coventry Cathedral. Welby is a good ally to have; three weeks ago he was enthroned as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican church. St George’s, which was founded in 1863, was closed down by Saddam Hussein. It now has the largest congregation of any church in Iraq, at 6,500. About 600 of its regulars are Muslims.
From here:
“What’s not widely understood is that the great majority of conservative Anglicans remained part of the diocese of New Westminster,” said Ingham. In fact, moderate conservatives and moderate progressives in the diocese worked to create provisions that no one should be compelled against their conscience to bless same-sex unions and to offer a visiting bishop to oversee parishes that were opposed to the decision. “I’m proud of the fact that a lot of people of goodwill on all sides came together and helped to make it work,” he said.
I doubt that the 800 people in St. John’s Shaughnessy who left the Diocese of New Westminster would agree that “the great majority of conservative Anglicans remained”. Those who did remain were tame conservatives who were duly paraded before synods as a demonstration of diocesan tolerance; no-one in the diocese actually listens to them, of course.
But the reaction was not confined to the diocese or even Canada. Same-sex blessings remain controversial in various parts of the worldwide Anglican Communion, but Ingham says New Westminster’s process of dialogue serves as an example for the Communion. Indaba conversations-an African model of respectful listening and dialogue-are now being used to help heal divisions in the Communion.
“If I have a word of advice, and I did actually say this to Rowan Willliams when he was the Archbishop of Canterbury,” said Ingham, “it is that these things do pass and you do someday find yourself on the other side of these passionate differences. And the way we deal with each other in the midst of them determines the quality of life of the community afterwards.”
To stoutly assert that the storm will soon be over as the church sallies forth into a bright new future of eco-harmony and prophetic social justice making, is a fondly-held liberal self-deception born of the blind optimism of arrogance.
I remember the Diocese of Niagara’s Bishop Ralph Spence in the 1990s peering mistily above the heads of his audience, presumably into a vision of the future that was impenetrable to the rest of us, intoning with an affected piety: “don’t worry about same-sex blessings; in ten years we will be performing them and the fuss will all be forgotten.”
Ingham has also worked to promote interfaith dialogues, including writing the book Mansions of the Spirit. “I’ve seen the whole church move from the attitude, ‘We don’t need to talk to people in other religions; we need to convert them,’ all the way to what I see as a predominant sentiment throughout the churches that we need to understand our neighbours of other faiths much better, because religion needs to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.” That has been increasingly relevant as awareness grows of how religion in its extremist and fundamentalist forms is a destabilizing and violent factor in so many parts of the world, he added.
One important challenge for the church moving into the future is Canada’s increasingly secular society, Ingham said. “Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus are not our competition. All of us, of all faiths, are seriously challenged by secularism, and we need to find a language that can address people whose understanding of the world is highly secularized, where there is no sense of God or the message of Jesus in their cosmology.”
This, in a way is good news. If Ingham and his successors see no need for converting people, the diocese will gradually wither away as congregations “understand our neighbours of other faiths much better”, realise that they actually believe something and convert to their beliefs. By the time the current generation joins the choir invisible, the diocese will be nothing but a disagreeable memory.
One way is to get taxpayers who never attend your church to pay for it:
Ever wondered how to start making your creaky, leaky, drafty church building more environmentally friendly?
Until May 31, Canadian Anglican congregations can apply for grants of up to $1,000 to subsidize a green building audit—a process that will help churches identify which areas of their buildings need to become more energy efficient.
Another, better way is to turn cow dung into electricity:
At the Huckabay Ridge biogas facility in Stephenville, Texas, a life preserver and a “No Swimming” sign hanging on the concrete exterior of one chocolate-colored pool are somebody’s idea of a barnyard joke. Early this year, the manure from 10,000 cows from Texas’ Erath County began stoking this facility, which is expected to produce enough pipeline-quality methane to power 11,000 homes.
Most Anglican Church of Canada parishes are such prodigious generators of BS, that they could be self-sustaining for centuries – long after the single remaining congregant has blown out his Earth Day candle, packed up his fair trade coffee and closed the draft proof door for the last time.
When I let the dog out this morning he stood staring at the fence barking energetically. This isn’t completely abnormal for him, so I called him in and paid no attention to what I assumed was a doggy apparition that had caught his attention.
After a repeat performance in the late afternoon, my wife called me with: “there’s an animal stuck in the fence”.
Sure enough, this fellow had tried to squeeze himself through one of the chain links and, like most of us, he underestimated his girth and got stuck. We did eventually manage to extricate him from his predicament:
Incidentally, ground hogs bite quite hard even when you are trying to do them a favour.
The Church of England has issued a report on marriage, same-sex marriage and same-sex civil partnerships.
Following the fine Anglican tradition of definitiveness aversion, it is sufficiently polysemous to allow some to conclude that the CofE rejects the blessing of same sex couples, others to conclude that same sex couples should be given “pastoral accommodations”, “recognition” and “compassionate attention” (in North America, dioceses called that a “generous pastoral response” shortly before launching into same sex blessings) and Giles Fraser to say:
Dr Giles Fraser, a former Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral who is now priest-in-charge of a South London church, said: ‘You cannot escape what is down in this document in black and white.
‘This is saying you can bless same-sex relationships as long as you don’t say what you are doing. It is a wink to people like me who want to go ahead.
‘It is coded language which says do it, but don’t advertise.’
And you thought Rowan Williams had left the building.
From Margaret Thatcher’s last speech in the House of Commons on November 22, 1990:
The Venerable Noah Njegovan, Executive Archdeacon of the Diocese of Brandon, has been charged with fraud for running up over $190,000 in personal expenses on a church credit card.
The spending occurred over a two and a half year period, an average of $76,000 per year in disappearing funds. This surely brings into question the diligence of the diocesan auditors and overall leadership; how can you not notice the evaporation of $76,000 per year?
Here is the article:
A priest — the son of a Brandon bishop — is accused of fraud based on an allegation that more than $190,000 in personal expenses were charged to a church credit card.
The accused appeared in court for the first time on Monday, but Father Shane Bengry said that members of the Anglican Diocese of Brandon had already been notified of the accusations.
“We wanted to be as transparent as possible to our congregations … we tried to keep people abreast of what was going on,” said Bengry, who is chairman of the communication committee for the diocese.
Noah James Bernard Njegovan, 30, is charged with fraud over $5,000.
He made his first appearance in Brandon court on Monday, and his next court date is set for May 9.
Njegovan is the son of Brandon Bishop Jim Njegovan.
Noah Njegovan was executive archdeacon and assistant to his father at the time of the alleged offence.
He worked out of the synod office on the 300-block of 13th Street.
Njegovan, an Anglican Church of Canada priest, has had his licence to officiate suspended pending the outcome of his court case. That means he presently can’t preside over church functions.
The allegations against him haven’t been proven in court.
Court documents allege that the Anglican Diocese of Brandon was defrauded when a business card was used for personal affairs between March 12, 2010, and Sept. 12, 2012.
Bengry said that a precise figure for the alleged fraud has yet to be calculated, but he said it’s clearly more than $190,000. Another estimate puts the total around $198,000.
The money represents funds gathered by diocese members through their parishes to keep the diocese running, Bengry said.
The Anglican Diocese of Brandon stretches along the length of Manitoba, along its western boundary and contains more than 50 congregations.
Losing that money has led the diocese to liquidate some of its assets to allow its work to continue.
“We’re not a wealthy diocese,” Bengry said.
An insurance claim has been filed for a significant portion of the loss, but “nowhere near” the full amount.
Bengry said that financial irregularities came to light during a regular, albeit delayed, audit performed after an employee resigned in August.
The employee left of his own choosing and wasn’t fired, Bengry said. He’d held his dual positions with the diocese for about three years.
It was only later, once the replacement employee completed the audit, that the financial irregularities were found and city police were notified in mid-January.
Noah Njegovan, who currently has a Rosenort address, was arrested in February and then released pending Monday’s court date.
Congregation members were initially notified of the financial irregularities on Dec. 2, Bengry said. A letter was read from the pulpit of each Anglican church within the diocese.
Members were later provided with an update on the investigation which included the dollar estimate for the fraud. They were also told of the charge against Noah Njegovan and that he was to appear in court.
Bengry said that Bishop Njegovan, due to his relationship with the accused, kept himself out of the matter.
Fraud allegations aren’t exclusive to the church, Bengry noted.
“This happens in all sorts of organizations … people do the best they can and yet people do fail for a variety of reasons,” he said.
However, in light of the allegations, the diocese has put new financial rules in place to prevent fraud.
For example, in this particular case it’s alleged that online transfers allowed the fraud to continue undetected.
Bengry said there are now strategies in place to better follow such transfers and allow the diocese executive to approve expenses.
