A new study by the American Academy of Pediatrics in their journal Pediatrics entitled: The Effects of Marriage, Civil Union, and Domestic Partnership Laws on the Health and Well-being of Children found that there is no appreciable difference in children raised by either heterosexual or homosexual parents.
A link to the study.

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I was walking along 5th Ave. in Park Slope yesterday in search of one of those little ironing boards. The weather was nice on a late Sunday afternoon, so there were lots of people on the street and it was easy to overhear all kinds of things. There were three boys (two black and one Hispanic) just hanging out and as I passed by I heard them talking, saying:
Boy one: How old are you?
Boy two: Eight, going on nine? (that ‘going on nine’ is VERY important to an eight year old!)
Boy one: You work?
Boy two: Yeah.
Boy one: Why do you work?
Boy two: To buy video games!!!! (Like, why else would I work, stupid!)
I was listening to a story on NPR the other day. The story topic was the decline in the percentage of Americans who visit our national parks. While the over all number of visitors has increased over the past twenty or so years, the percentage of the population visiting the parks has dramatically decreased. Why?
One ‘expert’ believed that he could trace the beginning of the decline to the rise of youth video-game use. How can the national parks compete with video-games? How can much of anything compete with video-games among young people?
Several months ago, I read a story of a company determined to create and sell ‘Christian video-games.’ An example: the Crusades! So, a video-game where good, strong, upstanding knights during the Crusades kill bad, evil Muslims as the godly knights battle to retake Jerusalem from the infidels. Nice, huh? I suspect that for these good Christian video-game creators, it is terrible for thugs to kill each other over cars or drugs or whatever, but it is glorious for Christian knights to kill Muslims. I guess consistency of belief goes out the window when it comes to video-games and our attempts to persuade non-Christian youth that we, as Christians, are in fact as cool as they are!

There is a discussion going on at Titus1:9 concerning the increase in the “feminization” of the Church and American Christianity focused on an article from the United Methodist Church. Interestingly, a lot of the criticism centers on the American Evangelical praise music that seems to romanticize our relationship with God – one person referred to the music as depicting “my girlfriend Jesus.”
There are elements of misogyny in some comments, but in general it is an interesting debate and one that we should be aware of. Too many articles have appeared lately in the national media on the crisis of the American male, particularly boys. In the Church, the fact is that fewer and fewer men are participating in organized religion – at least in Christianity. What is the answer? There are probably lots of answers that do not require us to look backwards to some fictionalized “glory days,” but it will benefit us to pay attention to the social problem – even as it moves into the Church.
When the rubber hits the road, however, the only people to blame for men’s disassociation with American religion are men! We men can try to blame-shift all we want, but if we want to be real men we will have to face reality and admit that individually, each guy that stops participating in the Church does so by his own volition. Quitting is not the fault of women or romanticized worship music, as much as we may not like the music. Claiming that the fault rests with women or the feminization of the church just sounds misogynist, in my humble opinion. Just be. Or, as the very manly ‘Nike’ cajoles us to “Just do it!”
Here is a poem submitted by one of posters at Titus1:9:

re: manly Christianity – I love this part of a poem by Adrian Plass(e?)

A good piece in the New York Times. I talk often about the contribution of technology and busyness to hyper-individualism and the growing isolation of people in our society. Here is a contribution to the growing social debate; a debate which I think has great significance for the Church. Hat-tip to Titus1:9
July 16, 2006
The Way We Live Now:
Confidant Crisis
By ANN HULBERT

By now, I bet almost everybody knows somebody who has joined a social networking Web site like MySpace.com, with more than 90 million members, or Facebook.com, a college-based Web site that has become a high-school favorite, too. That means most people probably also know that “friend” is no longer just a noun, but a verb, one that entails minimal exertion: “to friend” a person involves an exchange of mouse clicks, one to request a spot on someone’s (often very lengthy) list of people granted access to his or her online profile, and a click in response to accept the petitioner. If you’re too old and busy to be logging on obsessively to this Internet social scene, you’re doubtless enmeshed in your own way, e-mailing far-flung acquaintances or anticipating the spread of free Internet telephone service.

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This from an article in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette article yesterday concerning mainline denominations, America’s moral compass, and the Culture Wars:

The single issue hamstringing the mainline churches is homosexuality and its place in the church. At its 2004 General Conference in Pittsburgh, the United Methodist Church maintained its stance against gay ordination and same-sex blessings. Last year, it was the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The national gatherings this summer of both the Presbyterians and Episcopalians were consumed by it.
“We’ve been fighting in this ditch for 28 years and the ditch is getting deeper,” the Presbyterians’ former moderator, Marj Carpenter, of Big Spring, Texas, said in a speech at the denomination’s General Assembly last month. “It’s starting to affect our mission work, our youth ministry, and our evangelism, and I’m ready to try something else.
“Please, let’s get on with being the church, taking the gospel into the world and offering them something else other than arguments.”

I’m beginning to believe that the only honest solution to these incessant arguments and battles is a rearrangement of American Christianity. Even in the denomination that is known to be the middle-way, the Via Media, The Episcopal Church/Anglicanism is being pulled apart.
The extremes of both the liberal and conservative sides in the mainline denominations will not allow for the compromise that the middle-ground normally enforced. As the articles says below, the middle remains silent and allows the issues to be framed and debated by the extremes. It is similar to the American Culture Wars lived out in our nation’s government as extreme partisanship rules the day and the necessary element of compromise that is essential for democratic government falls by the wayside.

Derek H. Davis, dean of the college of humanities at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Texas and an expert in church-state relations, said part of the problem is that moderates in the mainline churches have gone silent.
“My own sense is it’s a voice that’s greatly needed in our present condition,” he said. “It tends to be a debate that’s vigorously pursued on the far ends. It makes the cultural wars in America seem more profound than they should be.
“The mainline churches have always represented this moderate middle. Without their voice, we’re not debating, we’re dividing.”
John C. Green, a senior fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and a professor of political science at the University of Akron, blames the churches’ divisions on the country’s deep rifts.”What we lack is a consensus on what is moral and what we should do about it,” he said. “But if history is any guide, the current warring parties — whether in the mainline churches or in the country at large — are unlikely to provide a solution.
“Quite literally, they are part of the problem.”

If the middle does not rise up to keep the extremes under control and from destroying the denominations, then the mission of the Church will never go forward and the ditch truly will become deeper and deeper, or else one side or the other will prevail and we will see the same kind of purge we witnessed when the fundamentalists gained full control of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Monday, July 17, 2006 By Steve Levin, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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The politicized Religious Right and “pro-family” groups keep pushing for victim-hood status as they claim their free speech rights are being violated. There is an element of truth here in the sense that chaplains at the air-force academy, for example, are being kept from praying and saying very sectarian things in the midst of the religiously mixed student body. Another example, see below, is a high school valedictorian who began witnessing to the assembled students, family, and friends about Jesus Christ. Her microphone was turned off shortly after she deviated from her text and began evangelizing the crowd. She and the Religious Right legal organization – The Rutherford Institute – are suing for the violation of the student’s First and Fourth Amendment rights.
There have been so much negative representations of Christianity over the past few decades – much of it self-inflicted and not as a result of blatant anti-Christian sentiments of the media, as some claim. It is not a matter of our rights to force people to listen to us as we witness to them, but we are to earn the right to be listened to. We fall far short in our actions and words, particular by those who most stringently demand their rights. Many in the politicized Religious Right claim that their imperative to “save souls” – in their particular, very American, and very sectarian understanding of how that is supposed to happen – supersedes any consideration of the rights or feelings of those who do not agree with them. They are demanding that they have the right and the ability to evangelize anyone, anywhere, no matter the venue or purpose of the event – especially when the situation is a government sponsored event, as in a public high school graduation ceremony.
It is their right to free speech. I agree that it is their right, in the same way that it is the right of a Muslim, Hindu, or a Buddhist to witness before the same crowd in the same way. (Of course, the politicized Religious Right would have a fit if a Muslim valedictorian evangelized the crowd at a graduation ceremony – because they have a right not to hear the deceptive lies of Satan spewed forth by false religions in a government sanctioned function.) I say, let them say all this stuff whenever and however they want as long as they allowed others the same right. I fear, however, that they do not want others to have that same right.
The problem is that in this day in age most people are going to react very negatively when they are confronted with blatant and sectarian evangelization – not necessarily because they hate “real Christians” or hate God, but because these “real Christians” are acting with very little respect or consideration for those before whom they are speaking. In the long run, it will be counter-productive to the Religious Right’s cause of saving the souls of everyone – again, according to their understanding of how that is supposed to happen to the exclusion of any other form or means.
The loud, shrill, arrogant, and demanding tone of speech and action being employed by the politicized Religious Right will not bring mass conversations to their form of the Christian faith, but more likely will turn more people away from the cause of Christ and Jesus’ call for all to be reconciled to God and one another. There is such a profound lack of “love your neighbor” in their actions – it’s all about securing their rights, regardless of the rights of anyone else.
Yes, anyone who claims to be a Christian can express their faith and their experience, but there are times and places and means of doing so that truly will be effective and others that will not be. A lot has to be undone at this point before earning the right to be heard from here on out.

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Questions and answers in the The Wittenburg Door
Bob Gersztyn for the Door asks, “Someone has said that Star Wars is the myth of the 21st Century, for Americans.”
Terry Mattingly responds, “…The Star Wars universe gives you good verses evil, yet then turns right around and puts you in kind of an Eastern religious, yin yang context where there are the two sides of the force, the dark side and the light side. It wants to have Eastern religion and Western religion at the same time… People are constantly telling Anakin Skywalker, later Darth Vader, to trust his feelings. Why? Why are you supposed to believe that both the good guys and the bad guys want him to trust his feelings? They guy’s feelings are all messed up. How is he suppposed to get to truth through is feelings when his feelings are a circus? You can’t have truth any way other than feelings because the culture of the 60’s, and thereafter, is all based on experience, feelings and emotions. Anything else is linear, transcendent, doctrinaire truth, and we can’t have that. That’s old fashioned Judeo-Christian or something. So, however you find truth, it’s got to be entertaining, fun, edgy and visual, and make you feel a certain way. Trusting your feelings is very close to the heart of the ’60’s, as I said earlier”
A bit later Terry Mattingly responds, “Yes, that’s what Roberto [Rivera Arcarlo] means when he says the Star Wars universe wants it both ways. It wants to have good and evil, and moral certainty but yet then again it doesn’t want to have a conceptof truth taht actually gives you that, and that’s America. We want very badly for everything to be true except the parts that kind of bug us.”
Terry Mattingly being interviewed by Bob Gersztyn of the Wittenburg Door. Mattingly writes the column On Religion and works as a journalist for the Scripts Howard News Service in D.C. His new book is entitled, Pop Goes Religion: Faith in Popular Culture
Pertaining to a question about the potential for TV and the Internet as vehicles for evangelism or church programs, “I’m of the belief, as I say in the book, that media makes lousy evangelism, but media makes tremendous pre-evangelism.”
The Wittenburg Door July/August, 2006, Issue No. 206, pp 8-9.

Here is another indication of the underlying intent of Religious Right (RR) groups. The RR has given itself over to a strange ideology and political, social, and theological fundamentalism (little “f”). They no longer reflect the Christian faith, in my humble opinion. They are not even conservatives in the classical sense.
A new organization of “family-values” organizations in Georgia have banned together to form the “Coalition for Clean Baseball” to try to stop the sale of the Atlanta Braves to a person they don’t like. I don’t necessarily like what this guy does for a living (amassing a fortune of around 4 billion dollars) – he is a large distributor of pornography (according to this new coalition).
This group has a right to advocate for their position against porn, and frankly I would support advocacy against pornography, but what concerns me is that they are taking upon themselves the role of arbiters of who is and who is not worthy or eligible to buy and sell in Georgia and regarding the national organizations nationwide.
There was a time when men held that women were not worthy of owning land. Not too long ago, certain groups determined that blacks were not worthy to buy and sell certain assets within our nation. Now, these groups are deciding that this man is not morally worthy and should be ineligible to buy the Atlanta Braves. What if a gay person was attempting to buy the Braves – would this group mount a nation campaign to keep this “reprobate homosexual” from engaging in the economic process?
You can see what would happen if these people (who are defaming the Church and the cause of Christ) every truly obtained power. Just wait, this kind of thing will only increase. It just depends on whether their influence will continue to cause people in power to listen to them. Their true intent is being slowly laid out before the American public, and while many Americans can and do agree with some of their policies, this kind of thing (the interference with commerce) goes too far. Who is next on their list of people who are not worthy of buying and selling within the United States? They can only become more extreme.

July 11, 2006
Campaign Launched to Stop Porn Magnate from Buying Atlanta Braves
by Pete Winn, associate editor
Baseball, apple pie and pornography?
A Colorado billionaire wants to buy the Atlanta Braves baseball team. But a pro-family grassroots campaign in Georgia is springing up to oppose the purchase because of the way he made his fortune.
Major League Baseball owners will meet Aug. 8-10 in New York City in a regularly scheduled meeting. They may discuss whether John Malone’s company, Liberty Media, can buy the struggling Braves from Time Warner.
No one doubts Malone’s financial resources. The Englewood businessman, one of the world’s richest men, is estimated by Forbes Magazine to be worth $4 billion.
But Stephen Adams, associate editor of Focus on the Family’s Citizen magazine, says Malone is not what he appears to be — and doesn’t deserve to own the Braves.

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I received the regular e-mail update from the American Anglican Council. In the update, they included a commentary by Cal Thomas covering the Episcopal Church. I have to say, I am almost shocked at the stridency of language Cal Thomas uses in his writing, which appeared in lots of newspapers around the country.
I am struck by the stridency, the incredible anger, and yes I’m going to say – hatred, that is now coming from many people found in certain segments of society and the Church. Read this from Cal:
“Bishop Schori, a former oceanographer for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle, says, ‘The Bible tells us about how to treat other human beings and that’s certainly the great message of Jesus – to include the unincluded.’
“This is so outside orthodox Christianity that only biblical illiterates or those who deny the supreme authority of the only book that gives foundation to the faith will accept it.”
Does Cal Thomas really believe that to “include the unincluded” is “so outside orthodox Christianity”? This may play well with the radicalized Religious Right, but how does it sound to the vast majority of Americans who are no longer involved in Christianity or the unchurched? The central teaching of Jesus may not have revolved around including the unincluded, but his life depicted in Scripture certainly does exhibit including the unincluded. Whatever happened to “love thy neighbor as thyself?” If that is not a call to include those who you would exclude, what is? Man, are we arrogant!
It is becoming more obvious as every day passes that large segments of the (what word is right?) Fundamentalists/neo-Puritans/radicalized Religious Right(?) is/are tipping the scale so far to one side that they face the very real danger of becoming Fascist-like. This is not conservatism and it is not traditionalism, it isn’t even traditional American Evangelicalism. It is fanaticism.
Read his entire column below

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Brad Drell also included a little sentence in his post-convention reflections that I think is very interesting:
“Nashotah House has the youngest enrollment of any Episcopal seminary. There is hope for the future of Anglicanism in North America.”
This seems in line with what I’ve been hearing from Roman Catholic seminary friends. Younger people are seeking the more traditional and ancient forms of the faith – not all, but a very significant number and perhaps a majority. If this Episcopal Church does not wake up to the fact that a high percentage of people in the younger generations (particularly the unchurched) are not 1960’s-type liberals, we will not be able to be relevant (a favorite liberal term) to the coming generations. The reigns of power in this Church, however, are held be those very same 1960’s type Baby Boomer liberals who cannot imagine that they are now “the man” and that their viewpoints are not the radical and counter-culture edge. They are descending into irrelevance, but are not able to step back and see that fact. And, in case anyone wonders, that has nothing to do with having a good Anglican broad spectrum on theological, pietistic, social, or political viewpoints under one tent.
If those who may not know, if considering all the 11 Episcopal seminaries in the U.S., Nashotah House is the extreme Anglo-Catholic seminary. They do not accept women celebrating at the alter.
This is what so frustrates me about General, my seminary. Developed in the tradition of the Oxford Movement, it is now speeding headlong towards the coming irrelevancy of American Baby Boomer liberalism. Take the best of Oxford, our heritage, and go with it.
Enough for one day. I have to get myself to church!
Okay, one more thing on generational stuff, and these are just thoughts. The Baby-Boomer generation brought us the Social-Gospel, Age of Aquarius liberalism, and Seeker Churches. Generation-X reacted against the Baby Boomer generation and moved out of the mainline and into the Evangelical/Charismatic churches. Generation-Y, where our focus should be now if we really do want to reach younger people, reacts against both former generations – the one in power and the one reacting to and reaching positions of power – and they could well have a more balanced and workable approach. Considering religion, they seek out that which is not trendy – the ancient forms of our faith. This thrills the more conservative and traditional elements. They are more willing to accept of a wide range of differences. It is in their genes to do so, and this thrills the liberals. But, they are neither 1960’s liberals nor 1980’s conservatives. They are their own thing, and frankly I believe will be more balanced. In my humble opinion, this generation fits perfectly with Anglicanism – if we can just get the word out without stone one another.