The General Convention of the Episcopal Church has passed a resolution on same-sex blessings. The House of Bishops approved the legislation by a margin of more than 3-1 yesterday. The House of Deputies passed the legislation by a slightly smaller margin today.
The lay order voted in favor of Resolution C056 by 78-23 with seven divided deputations. The clergy passed the legislation 74-27-7.
Read Jim Naughton's live blog of the debate.
Jim Naughton's Face to Faith column for The Guardian is now live:
Click the link above to read the full article.Our church has not sought to increase the strain in the communion, but to redistribute it. The suffering on all sides of the debate over homosexuality must be borne by the entire church. Ideally, it would be borne by the entire communion in the form of generous pastoral discretion and respect for the discernment of individual provinces, but Williams and a majority of the primates have rejected this most Anglican of accommodations in favour of a single-issue magisterium on the issue of homosexuality.
Gradually, tentatively, the Episcopal Church has begun to push back. The result, in Anaheim, was a pair of resolutions that attempted to be firm yet conciliatory, recognising the need to move, but move slowly, in order to bring along as much of the church as possible. A resolution that touches obliquely on the consecration of gay bishops is best understood as a description of the conflicted state in which we find ourselves, and the tortuous road we took to get here. It recognises that gay and lesbian Christians are called to ministry in our church, notes that some people oppose their participation at certain levels, and makes clear that as we work through this issue, we aren't in a position to guarantee the outcome.
Security, Group Size, and the Human BrainIf the size of your company grows past 150 people, it's time to get name badges. It's not that larger groups are somehow less secure, it's just that 150 is the cognitive limit to the number of people a human brain can maintain a coherent social relationship with.[Emphasis mine]
Primatologist Robin Dunbar derived this number by comparing neocortex -- the "thinking" part of the mammalian brain -- volume with the size of primate social groups. By analyzing data from 38 primate genera and extrapolating to the human neocortex size, he predicted a human "mean group size" of roughly 150.
This number appears regularly in human society; it's the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village, the size at which Hittite settlements split, and the basic unit in professional armies from Roman times to the present day. Larger group sizes aren't as stable because their members don't know each other well enough. Instead of thinking of the members as people, we think of them as groups of people. For such groups to function well, they need externally imposed structure, such as name badges.
Of course, badges aren't the only way to determine in-group/out-group status. Other markers include insignia, uniforms, and secret handshakes. They have different security properties and some make more sense than others at different levels of technology, but once a group reaches 150 people, it has to do something.
( Read more... )An edited version of this essay, without links, appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of IEEE Security & Privacy.
Amazon vanishes 1984 from citizen KindlesCopyright SNAFU.Orwellian moment
In an irony-filled moment that underlines the flaws of our increasingly digital society, Amazon has removed George Orwell's 1984 from America's Kindle ebook readers.
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Bootnote
Could the fates have picked a more appropriate title to demonstrate the foibles of Amazon's model? Well, they might have chosen Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. After all, Amazon does call its ebook reader the Kindle. ®
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