The Oscar for gay rights

Hearing impassioned pleas for gay rights during Oscars, Mark Silk saw no hope for last week’s well-propose compromise:

Well meaning as it is, the proposal advanced by David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch in a NYT op-ed yesterday seems to me a half-way house that will have trouble standing. But the cry of distress from Rod Dreher about the “fast erosion of religious liberty in America” paints with far too broad a brush. It’s not religious liberty that is fast eroding, but one big social norm.

Passionately felt social norms die unquiet deaths, as Silk suggests. Indeed, when their change is mirrored in shifting legal rights, they are fought out in public debate, through the halls of legislatures and in the courts. On this issue Silk predicts, and we agree, a future of pitched civil and legal battles.

Economic trouble hits churches, church organizations & congregations

A rapidly growing percentage of churches are sliding into economic difficulty, say the results of a February survey by the National Association of Church Business Administration (NACBA).

Church mission activity cutbacks have more than doubled in the past six months, keeping pace with other economy-related financial difficulties, found the NACBA survey of 800 churches in the U.S. and Canada.

The percent curtailing mission activities more than doubled from 10% in August, 2008, to 24% in February, 2009. So did the percent who said “their church was definitely having economy-related financial difficulties,” which more than doubled from 14% in August to 32% in February.

Fully 47% said staff benefits had been frozen or cut at their church, which was more than double the 18% reported in August.

Similarly, “20 percent said they had staff layoffs, and 26 percent reported postponing a major capital project.”

Despite those cautionary numbers, most churches are apparently still is good shape. In response to questions on the same survey, 63 percent “said their church saw giving stay the same or climb in 2008 over the previous year. “

NACBA graphic

“I think we are starting to see more pain felt — although nothing like in the private sector,” NACBA deputy chief executive and a veteran Baptist church administrator Phil Martin told the Associated Baptist Press. He noted that regional economic differences are having an impact on how churches fare from region to region.

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship announced last week that starting March 1, it would cut spending by 20 percent, cut partner funding by 30 percent, cut staff salaries by one percent and implement other cutbacks in anticipation of “worst-case” economic outcomes.

In Sioux City, Iowa, the economy forced 120-year-old Our Savior’s Lutheran Church to close its doors. The church held its final service Sunday, with a special luncheon afterward.

Sundaythe Rev. Deb Kociban’s at First United Methodist Church in McKeesport, Penn., prayed, “We are anxious, Lord. Help us to set aside the things that are bothering us.”

The Pittsburg Tribune-Review wrote:

One by one, congregants raised their hands when she asked if they knew someone in need of individual prayer because of illness, family struggles, lost jobs or other difficulties.

Tony Cartledge found in it all, as those of Christian faith often do, hope:

Successful dieters rejoice when they can tighten their belts and exercise longer. Perhaps some serious revisiting of vision and resources can lead churches and organizations to develop leaner, broader based, and more effective ministries.

Perhaps many of us who survive will do that personally as well.

Cometary beauty sings across tonight’s sky

Comet Lulin “should be a sweet binocular sight” during this once-in-a-million-years visit.

Detailed viewing information is available from Sky and Telescope.

The Pope’s salary

The salary and/or other remuneration of the Southern Baptist Convention president has been subject to some debate. His salary is reported to be nothing, although the SBC files no detailed, public financial reports.

As was made clear in the New York Times several years ago after a moment of confusion about the matter, the Pope in Rome has a salary of nothing.

The Vatican spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, ended speculation about the Pope’s salary, saying, ”The Pope does not and has never received a salary.” An ambiguous statement by Cardinal Sergio Sebastiani had suggested that the Pope did receive a salary. [07/20/2001]

The Holy See makes the details public:

The pope has the resources of the Holy See at his disposal. He can take out as much as he needs to carry out his mission and his duties. All the recent popes, on the occasion of their deaths, have left everything they personally owned to the Holy See, with the exception of some little gifts that Pope Paul VI left to his personal secretary and to some of his close relatives. The Holy See annually publishes a complete financial report which includes the expenses of the Pontifical Household. Gifts that come to the pope from heads of state around the world and similar gifts go to the Vatican Museums, where they are often on display for the public to view.

Vatican financial disclosures are available to the press. They are sometimes the subject of news stories, which of course are not always flattering. The British Guardian wrote last year:

The Vatican has blamed the weak dollar for pushing it into its first loss in four years.

Annual accounts published yesterday showed that the Holy See dipped into the red last year, recording a loss of €9.1m (£7.25m). It said this was “due mainly to sharp and very pronounced trend reversal in fluctuation of exchange rates, particularly the US dollar”.

Disclosure helps charitable institutions of all kinds earn and sustain the trust of their contributors.

Out of (not just) our heads

Alva Noe in his book “Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness” argues:

Our culture is obsessed with the brain—how it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It’s widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: We don’t have a clue.

His complex, unparadoxical argument is [oversimplification warning] that consciousness is our acts as we perform, perceive and indeed merge into them with every sensible aspect of ourselves, unfolding through time.