Produced by the American Museum of Natural History, this is nothing short of “far out!”

The presentation of the Covenant to the Provinces of the AC represents an invitation to deepening of relationships among those Provinces. We have a long history of friendship, affinities and collaboration between Provinces, dioceses, parishes and people across the globe, and we celebrate these manifold expressions of our oneness in Christ.

The Covenant represents a further step in these relationships, building on and giving expression to the bonds of affection which shape our common life.

The actual text of the Covenant is available on the AC website and it can be downloaded as a PDF.

A major question that has emerged is “Will the Episcopal Church (TEC) adopt it?”  TEC is currently the province that is recognized to represent the AC in the United States of America (USA).  My favorite commentator on these matters, The Anglican Curmudgeon, has predicted that TEC will “walk apart” by refusing to adopt the Covenant.  I recommend that you read the arguments for his conclusion on his site.

Members of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) are ready and willing to adopt the Covenant but, since they are not yet recognized as a province of the AC, they can only “endorse” it at this time.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has four “Great Observatories” that shared data to construct the above picture.  The European Space Agency (ESA), which provides much of the support for the Hubble Space Telescope; the Spitzer Science Center (SSC), responsible for the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope; the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC), which operates the Chandra X-ray Telescope; and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScl), responsible for the research done with Hubble and its planned successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA has used its entire fleet of Great Observatories, and the Internet, to bring the center of our galaxy to us in greater detail and in more colors than ever seen before. A menagerie of vast star fields is visible, along with dense star clusters, long filaments of gas and dust, expanding supernova remnants, and the energetic surroundings of what likely is our galaxy’s central black hole.

Four hundred years ago today, a telescope took Galileo to the Moon to discover craters, to Saturn to discover rings, to Jupiter to discover moons, to Venus to discover phases, and to the Sun to discover spots.  NASA gives us this picture today in celebration of Galileo’s telescopic achievements and as part of the International Year of Astronomy.  Go NASA!

St. Francis Rector, Fr. David Allen, enters the convention, followed by Parish Verger, Steve Chamblis, carrying the parish banner, with Senior Warden, Bob Davis, looking on from the left. Photos by Suzanne Gill.
Fr. Allen presents a rosary to Bishop Iker, the Bishop of Ft. Worth as a sign of appreciation for the admission of the parish to the diocese.

Members of St. Francis look on as Bishop Iker holds up his present from the parish.  From the left:  Bishop Jack Iker, Fr. William Crary, Fr. David Allen (descending), Debbi Blocker, Sister Mary Elizabeth (Community of St. Mary, Greenwich, NY), Rebecca Thompson, Gene Leslie, Genie Shaw with Malachi, and Kevin McNevins.

By the way, another interesting site for Cosmos fans is the Heavens Above site by Chris Peat.  It can tell you when Destiny Station (i.e., the International Space Station) is overhead.

Seated on the left in the photo is Canadian spaceflight participant Guy Laliberte, who spent nine days on the station after launching with Expedition 21 on September 30th.  In the center is Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and on the right is NASA astronaut Michael Barratt.  Padalka and Barratt arrived at the station in March to begin Expedition 19 then transitioned to the six-member Expedition 20 crew in May. Padalka commanded both Expedition crews and Barratt was flight engineer for Expedition 20. 

The three flew back to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia outside Moscow for reunions with their families, and for Padalka and Barratt, the start of their reorientation to a gravity environment after almost seven months off the planet.

Is it just me or does the steppe in the picture behind them look like the surface of Mars, as seen by the rovers Spirit and Opportunity?  Unfortunately, Spirit became embedded in soft soilat a site called “Troy” five months ago, more than five years into a mission on Mars that was originally scheduled to last for three months.  The NASA photo above shows efforts to extract Spirit, using a mock-up to identify the best escape strategy.  See the Free Spirit NASA page for more details.

As of Sol (Martian Day) 2042 (Oct. 21, 2009), Opportunity’s total odometry is 18,322.03 meters (11.39 miles).  That works out to about 9 meters per day over a five-year period.

Archbishop of Canterbury (ABC) Rowan Williams, left, from the Anglican Communion responds to the announcement and Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, right, from the Roman Catholic Church, looks on during a news conference in London.  Is it just me or does the ABC seem a little less than enthusiastic?

Ruth Gledhill of The Times Online, in an article titled Rome Parks Tanks on Rowan’s Lawn, offers more videos and a copy of the letter that the ABC sent to his bishops.

Just in:(10/28/9) The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights published a story on Oct. 28th, titled MAJOR NEWSPAPERS BLAST CATHOLICISM, that points to articles in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe that attacked the Church on it’s offer to Anglicans (described above) and it’s position on women and gay clergy.  The Washington Post‘s blog, On Faith, recently featured an interview about the Pope’s offer with outspoken English atheist Richard Dawkins, titled Give us your misogynists and bigots,  where he said that the Catholic Church was, “surely up there among the leaders” as “the greatest force for evil in the world.”  You should read it on Christopher Johnson’s blog midwest conservative journal because he did a really good “fisking” of the whole thing.  (Fisking is taking apart statements piece by piece and revealing the fallacies and idiocy of the statements - thanks to my wife, Connie.)

Just In: (11/4/9) The Vatican has today released the formal document establishing the Personal Ordinariates and the rules for their use.  My simplistic overview is this:  the Holy Father is using his authority to invite Anglicans to reunite with the “mother church” by building a special compartment for them that lets them keep their parishes, and maybe even dioceses, essentially just as they are now.  Only Anglicans may take advantage of this offer and current Catholics are not allowed to join the Anglican groups.  Inside the compartment, Anglican priests and deacons may become Catholic priests and deacons (but those who are unmarried will have to stay that way) and unmarried Anglican bishops may become the presbyter (i.e., bishop) of an Ordinariate (i.e., a diocese within the compartment).  Married Anglican bishops will have to return to being priests, but they can be Ordinaries of an Ordinariate and retain their badges of office (e.g., crosiers) and they can petition the Holy Father to become bishops on a case-by-case basis.  This delicate balancing act permits the Anglicans to have what they want, while at the same time maintaining the status quo with the Eastern Orthodox Church and Roman tradition.  I think it is brilliant!

The Arcus efforts have not been limited to human rights activities, but have also been directed toward changing the beliefs and practices of the Episcopal Church. Last year they gave (from the Arcus Foundation Annual Report):

• Cathedral Church of St. James Chicago, IL $177,251 to support the efforts of the Chicago Consultation to promote the full inclusion of LGBT faithful in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Communion

• Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, Evanston, IL $132,162 for support of the Chicago Consultation’s efforts to promote the full inclusion of LGBT persons in the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion. (In 2007 Arcus provided $25,000 for the initial organizational meeting of what became the Chicago Consultation.)

• Integrity, Rochester, NY $60,000 for two half-time field organizers to support efforts to promote the full inclusion of LGBT faithful within the Episcopal Church. (In 2007 Arcus provided $130,000 in funding specifically targeting Lambeth and the 2009 General Convention. Of that amount, $80,000 was earmarked for 2007; $50,000 was to carry over to 2008.)

This report reveals that money from a secular organization is being used to tilt the balance of power within our churches. It also means that in 2008 while Seabury Western Seminary was slashing it’s budget, cutting staff, and dramatically ‘restructuring’ and ‘revisioning’, they were also acting as a conduit for the Chicago Consultation. And it sheds some light on the massive publicity given to +Gene Robinson at Lambeth this year, when he wasn’t even invited to attend.  Money talks.

The Diocese of Western Louisiana’s 30th annual convention has affirmed the Ridley Cambridge Draft of the Anglican Covenant. The convention met Oct. 9-10 in Alexandria, La.

The Rt. Rev. D. Bruce MacPherson, the diocese’s bishop since 2002, is among the founding bishops of Communion Partners...

“This will bring further recognition of our diocese as a part of the Episcopal Church (TEC), as a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, and in communion with the See of Canterbury. When I shared with the Archbishop of Canterbury last month the plans for a resolution of this nature, he responded favorably,” the bishop said.

+MacPherson said that he believes the diocese needs to remain within TEC, but he also said

“...in the months ahead, and depending upon the direction taken by the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion, we could well be faced with making a choice of being either provincially oriented or Communion oriented — for it is clear we cannot be both,” he said. “We know who we are, and we cannot claim to be part of a catholic body and then seek to exercise ‘local option’ over crucial issues.”

There appears to be some doubt that the convention actually did endorse the Covenant.  Delegate Joe Roberts, who voted for the resolution, says in his blog

...after reading the precise language of the amended Saint Mark’s Cathedral resolution as recorded by the convention secretary (language that the delegates did not see printed and which was read to the delegates as a previous printed text was being amended), I think that we did little more than confirm that we support the adoption of “an Anglican covenant” as the next step in the ongoing Windsor process.

In a Sept. 28 letter to the Rt. Rev. John W. Howe, Bishop of Central Florida, Archbishop Williams called the diocesan bodies’ endorsement a step in the right direction. However, he stated, “as a matter of constitutional fact, the [Anglican Consultative Council] can only offer the covenant for ‘adoption’ to its own constituent bodies (the provinces).”
The archbishop added that “I see no objection to a diocese resolving less formally on an ‘endorsement’ of the covenant.” Such an action would not have an “institutional effect” but “would be a clear declaration of intent to live within the agreed terms of the Communion’s life and so would undoubtedly positively affect a diocese’s pastoral and sacramental relations” with the wider communion, he said.

Seems to me that this is not really a surprise: it’s more of a clarification.  It just means that provinces can “adopt” but others can “endorse” the Covenant. The big question, IMHO, is will TEC be allowed to adopt it after lifting its middle finger to the Anglican Communion at General Convention?

...the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but—thank God!—still driving.)

...Thinking of our predicament has sent me back again to Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. This is a play of the Renaissance; Faustus, a man of learning, longs to possess “all Nature’s treasury,” to “Ransack the ocean… and search all corners of the new-found world” To assuage his thirst for knowledge and power, he deeds his soul to Lucifer, receiving in compensation for twenty-four years the services of the sub-devil Mephistophilis, nominally Faustus’s slave but in fact his master. Having the subject of limitlessness in mind, I was astonished on this reading to come upon Mephistophilis’s description of hell. When Faustus asks, “How comes it then that thou art out of hell?” Mephistophilis replies, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.” And a few pages later he explains:  (where “we” = the damned)

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, but where we are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.

For those who reject heaven, hell is everywhere, and thus is limitless. For them, even the thought of heaven is hell.

...John Milton in Book VII of Paradise Lost returns again to a consideration of our urge to know. To Adam’s request to be told the story of creation, the “affable Archangel” Raphael agrees “to answer thy desire of knowledge within bounds,” explaining that

Knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her temperance over appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain;
Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.

Raphael is saying, with angelic circumlocution, that knowledge without wisdom, limitless knowledge, is not worth a fart; he is not a humorless archangel.

Dr. William Megill at the University of Bath in the UK has developed a robot fish called Gymnobot that swims by rippling a fin on its belly. They say it may lead to lighter, more efficient robotic submersibles. Would this make a super-quiet missile submarine go faster?

To qualify for the Level 2 prize, Armadillo Aerospace’s rocket vehicle “Scorpius” took off from one concrete pad, ascended to 50 meters, moved 60 meters horizontally, then landed on a second pad that featured boulders and craters to simulate the lunar surface. After refueling at that pad, the vehicle then repeated the flight back and landed at the original pad. The vehicle completed the round trip, including fueling and refueling operations, in one hour and 47 minutes, well within the two and half hour time limit. Armadillo Aerospace also met the requirement to remain aloft under rocket power for three minutes during each of the flights.  Two other companies are entered in the contest and one of them has had an unsuccessful trial.

The Scorpius single-engine vehicle weighs about 1,900 pounds fully loaded with liquid oxygen and ethanol fuel and is flown with a combination of automatic controls and remote-manual commands. Andrew Petro, NASA’s Centennial Challenge program manager said, “It was a great demonstration of reusable rocket technology and the use of non-toxic propellants, which is of great value to NASA and important to the future of spaceflight.

The full name of this piece is “Beglückt darf nun dich, o Heimat, ich schauen”, which means something like,“Fortunate am I, oh my homeland, now to behold thee again” in English.  My friend, A. S. Haley (The Anglican Curmudgeon), wrote

The pilgrims are returning from their pilgrimage to Rome, and they are expressing their gratitude at being safely back in their own country again. Tannhäuser, however (who is not among them, but comes later), is “beglückt” only in a completely different sense from what he imagines. His great love, Elisabeth, on failing to see him among the pilgrims returning from Rome, concludes that he has not obtained forgiveness there, and perishes on the spot, thereby (with her purity) earning him the redemption that he sought. (Well, it is Wagner, after all.)

You can find out more about the opera in Wikipedia.  Heinrich Tannhäuser is a young singer who breaks the spell of Venus with the words, “My salvation rests in Mary, the mother of God.” Don’t miss the “Alleluias” near the end. Tannhäuser was written 100 years before I was born.

The building in the video somehow reminds me of where things seem to be headed in the Episcopal Church. I can imagine a choir of angels looking down on what’s happened.  (A friend tells me the building is actually the old Detroit train depot, but doesn’t it look like a huge church?)

NOTE:  Use the button under the “You” in “YouTube” to get the full-screen view.  It is awesome.

While on the space station, Buzz supported NASA’s education outreach program—STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)—by creating a series of fun educational online outreach programs. Following his return, Disney is partnering with NASA to create a new online educational game and an online mission patch competition for school kids across America. NASA will fly the winning patch in space. In addition, NASA plans to announce on Oct. 2, 2009, the details of a new exciting educational competition that will give students the opportunity to design an experiment for the astronauts on the space station.

Image Credit: NASA.  Reprinted from the NASA Image of the Day