Wild silk

A variety of wild silks, produced by caterpillars other than the mulberry silkworm have been known and used in China,Sexy silk dresses, South Asia, and Europe since ancient times. However, the scale of production was always far smaller than that of cultivated silks. They differ from the domesticated varieties in color and texture, and cocoons gathered in the wild usually have been damaged by the emerging moth before the cocoons are gathered, so the silk thread that makes up the cocoon has been torn into shorter lengths. Commercially reared silkworm pupae are killed by dipping them in boiling water before the adult moths emerge, or by piercing them with a needle, allowing the whole cocoon to be unravelled as one continuous thread. This permits a much stronger cloth to be woven from the silk. Wild silks also tend to be more difficult to dye than silk from the cultivated silkworm

Silkworm legends

In China, there is a legend that the discovery of the silkworm's silk was by an ancient empress LeiZu, the wife of the Yellow Emperor and the daughter of XiLing-Shi. She was drinking tea under a tree when a silk cocoon fell into her tea. She picked it out and started to wrap the silk thread around her finger, she slowly felt a warm sensation. When the silk ran out,womens silk pajamas, she saw a small larva. In an instant, she realized that this caterpillar larva was the source of the silk. She taught this to the people and it became widespread. There are many more legends about the silkworm.

The Chinese guarded their knowledge of silk. It is said that a Catholic priest smuggled silkworms, in a hollow stick, out of China and sold the secret to Europe
 

Silk Street engaged

Silk Street engaged domestic famous real property management company –Guibinlou Real Property in managing the whole shopping mall. Silk Street has made great effort to organize the management group. They engaged talents to make sure the management is normative and harmonious.

The establishment of Merchant Management Committee has built up a whole system including quality, service and communication. Indeed, the committee standardized and monitored the operation of the market.

Silk Street also made great effort to cooperate with many other companies, including national and international enterprises, travel agencies etc. We have a nice hope to build a perfect market for all the guests. Silk Street will join hands with its merchants and the whole society, undertaking the new task of fashion-esteem, culture-spread,Silk Queen Quilt Cover, brand -establishing, and building a “Century-Old Shop”, achieving a century's brilliance of an international shopping mall!

Maryland Students Use Speed Cameras for Revenge

Cameras for Revenge Students in Montgomery County, Maryland use fake license plates to send speed camera tickets to enemies. > > Maryland plate, photo by Amy the Nurse/FlickrHigh school students in > Maryland are using speed cameras as a tool to fine innocent drivers in > a game, according to the Montgomery County Sentinel newspaper. Because > photo enforcement devices will automatically mail out a ticket to any > registered vehicle owner based solely on a photograph of a license > plate, any driver could receive a ticket if someone else creates a > duplicate of his license plate and drives quickly past a speed camera. > The private companies that mail out the tickets often do not bother to > verify whether vehicle registration information for the accused > vehicle matches the photographed vehicle. In the UK, this is known as number plate cloning, where thieves will find the license information of a vehicle similar in appearance to the one they wish to drive. They will use that information to purchase a real license plate from a private vendor using the other vehicle's numbers. This allows the "cloned" vehicle to avoid all automated punishment systems. According to the Sentinel, two Rockville, Maryland high schools call their version of cloning the "speed camera pimping game." A speed camera is located out in front of Wootton High School,Silk Queen Quilt Cover, providing a convenient location for generating the false tickets. Instead of purchasing license plates, students have ready access to laser printers that can create duplicate license plates using glossy paper using readily available fonts. For example, the state name of "Maryland" appears on plates in a font similar to Garamond Number 5 Swash Italic. Once the camera flashes, the driver can quickly pull over and remove the fake paper plate. The victim will receive a $40 ticket in the mail weeks later. According to the Sentinel, students at Richard Montgomery High School have also participated, although Montgomery County officials deny having seen any evidence of faked speed camera tickets. Source: Local teens claim pranks on countys Speed Cams (Montgomery County Sentinel

How do silkworms make silk

Silkworms, offspring of moths,mens silk pajamas, produce their highly-desirable, pricey silk, by spewing out thread from tiny holes in their jaws, which they use to spin into their egg-bearing cocoons. This entire production takes a mere 72 hours, during which time they produce between 500-1200 silken threads. These miniature, mulberry leaf-munching marvels lay, at minimum, 500 eggs each spring, thereby increasing the number of workers for the production line.

The ancient Chinese unearthed the silkworm's secret, and were the first to spin the silkworm's threads into cloth. They kept this covert, top-secret operation, from the rest of the world by imposing the death sentence upon those who smuggled the worm and/or its eggs out of China. Eventually, however, the secret was out, and silkworms are now farmed for their silk, in China, of course, in Japan, in India, in France, in Spain, and in Italy. These countries harness the power of the silkworm through a tedious, labor-intensive, time-consuming process, a process which prominently figures into the price of silk.

Bombyx mori

The silkworm is the larva or caterpillar of the domesticated silkmoth, Bombyx mori (Latin: "silkworm of the mulberry tree"). It is an important economic insect since it is the producer of silk. A silkworm's preferred food is white mulberry leaves, but it may also eat the leaves of any other mulberry tree (ie, Morus rubra or Morus negra) as well as the Osage Orange. It is entirely dependent on humans for its reproduction and does not occur naturally in the wild. Sericulture has been practised for at least 5,silk pajamas,000 years in China, Korea, and Japan.

It was domesticated from the wild silkmoth Bombyx mandarina which has a range from northern India to northern China, Korea, Japan and far eastern Russia. It derives from Chinese rather than Japanese or Korean stock.[1] The breeding of silkworms cannot have originated before the Neolithic as the tools necessary to make use of the silk thread on a large scale only have become available since then. The domesticated B. mori and the wild B. mandarina can still breed and sometimes produce hybrids.

About the Silk Worm

Mulberry leaves contain an extremely high amount of alkaloids that inhibit enzymes that break down sucrose (sugar), and thus are potentially quite toxic. However,Sexy silk dresses, one type of sucrase called beta-fructofuranosidase is not affected by these alkaloids.

Until now, this enzyme has not been found in any animals, but Toru Shimada and colleagues believed this might explain the silkworm's unique diet.

The researchers scanned the silkworm genome and discovered two fructofuranosidase genes, although only one was actually expressed in the worm. This gene (BmSuc1) was, as expected, concentrated in the worm's gut, although surprisingly was also prevalent in the silk gland. When they isolated the enzyme from silkworms, the researchers found it could effectively digest sucrose.

Shimada and colleagues note that further work is needed to determine if this special enzyme is the sole reason for silkworm's resistance to mulberry toxins. It's possible that fructofuranosidases may turn up in other insects that cannot eat mulberry leaves, indicating additional factors are at work.

What Pulpit Freedom

The Gray Lady weighs in on Pulpit Freedom Sunday and, surprise of surprises, takes the dimmest of views. But while the editorial makes a couple of important points, it includes this odd statement: "The tax code mandate they are challenging has protected the separation of church and state by denying tax deductions for contributions to charitable organizations that engage in secular campaigning." But the mandate is not really about separation of church and state, and it does not prevent religious institutions from engaging in "secular" campaigning--if that means, say, advocating passage of this or that piece of legislation. Rather, it says that any tax-exempt (501 c 3) organization, secular or religious, cannot engage in partisan political activity--activity on behalf of a particular party or candidate for office. The principle at stake is what might be called the separation of non-profits and political partisanship.

As for the Alliance Defense Fund, it backs its position with the following bogus argument:

The bottom line is that no enforcement agency of the federal government should be telling a pastor what he can or cannot say from his pulpit about the Bible and his church's teaching on the issues of the hour--even if the pastor's sermon applies Screipture and church teaching to candidates and elections. Such agencies certainly cannot condition tax-exempt status--a status churches have always been constitutionally guaranteed since our founding--on the surrencder of cherished First Amendment rights.

ADF has the U.S. Constitution and the weight of American history on its side. Those who oppose the Pulpit Initiative have yet to make one constitutionally-derived argument against it. It is ironic that they laud the "separation of church and state" in opposition to the Pulpit Initiative, but by opposing the initiative,Silk Queen Quilt Cover, are asking for continued government control and censorshipo of a pastor's sermon. The pulpit is no place for government regulators.
In fact, churches have no constitutionally guaranteed tax-exempt status. Although it has been traditional in the West not to tax churches since the Emperor Constantine, the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment has never been interpreted to include a right not to be taxed. The remedy for the grievance here is simply for ADF to try to get the law changed.

The Fourth Circle

As Congress ponders what to do to get the country out of its financial mess, and even considers some consequences to impose upon those malefactors of great wealth who brought us to this pretty pass, it may be instructive to consider the punishment that Dante imagined for the greedy--the avaricious on the one hand and the spendthrift on the other--whom he consigned to Hell's fourth circle.

Thus we descended into the fourth hollow, taking more of the
woeful bank that gathers in the evil of the whole universe. Ah,
Justice of God! Who heapeth up so many new travails and penalties
as I saw? And why doth our sin so waste us? As doth the wave,
yonder upon Charybdis, which is broken on that which it
encounters, so it behoves that here the people counterdance.

Here saw I people more than elsewhere many, and from one side and
the other with great howls rolling weights by force of chest.
They struck against each other, and then just there each turned,Sexy silk pajamas,
rolling backward, crying, "Why keepest thou?" and "Why flingest
thou away?" Thus they turned through the dark circle on either
hand to the opposite point, still crying out their opprobrious
verse; then each, when he had come through his half circle,
wheeled round to the other joust.

And I, who had my heart well-nigh pierced through, said, "My
Master, now declare to me what folk is this, and if all these
tonsured ones on our left were clerks."

And he to me, "All of these were so asquint in mind in the first
life that they made no spending there with measure. Clearly
enough their voices bay it out, when they come to the two points
of the circle where the contrary sin divides them. These were
clerks who have no hairy covering on their head, and Popes and
Cardinals, in whom avarice practices its excess."

And I, "Master, among such as these I ought surely to recognize
some who were polluted with these evils."

And he to me, "Vain thought thou harborest; the undiscerning life
that made them foul, to all recognition now makes them dim.
Forever will they come to the two buttings; these will rise from
the sepulchre with closed fist, and these with shorn hair.
Ill-giving and ill-keeping have taken from them the fair world,
and set them to this scuffle; such as it is, I adorn not words
for it. Now canst thou, son, see the brief jest of the goods that
are committed unto Fortune, for which the human race so scramble;
for all the gold that is beneath the moon, or that ever was, of
these weary souls could not make a single one repose."

Pre-debate Roundup

Melissa Rogers catches the Alliance Defense Fund in full blink mode on its forthcoming Pulpit Initiative.

The Anchorage Chabad rabbi thinks Obama would be as good for the Jews as Palin.

And last but anything but least, Bill Donohue is defending Palin from witchcraft charges. Well, nobody's charged Palin herself with being a witch, but she's been ridiculed for having received a prayer to protect her from the assaults of witches from that Kenyan pastor, who can, according to Donohue,Fantastic silk scarves, be forgiven for laying on the protection. Why? Because "[w]itchcraft is a sad reality in many parts of Africa, resulting in scores of deaths in Kenya over the past two decades." Donohue believes witches are killing people in Kenya? Maybe the League should fedex some of its copies of the Malleus Maleficarum down to Nairobi.

Pew-a-thon

Today, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released the second installment of its Landscape Survey, this one on religious beliefs and practices. I haven't had a chance to pick through it carefully, but here are a couple of items worth noting, derived from today's conference call with the press.

First, as longtime readers of this blog may recall, the first installment of the survey caught my attention for not disclosing the proportion of Muslims turned up in this 35,silk pajamas,000-strong interview screen, but rather using the number employed in the 2007 Pew report on Muslims in America. That number was .6 percent of the American population. In the course of the phone call, Pew Forum head Luis Lugo mentioned that the Landscape Survey turned up 116 Muslims, which amounts to only .3 percent of the survey. In response to a query from me, the Pew folks said that the adjusted number turned out to be .4 percent.

Why didn't they report that? They said they decided that their earlier estimate was better because it included questioning in Arabic, Urdu, and Farsee. I don't think this quite computes. It suggests that fully one-third of the American Muslim population can't or won't communicate in English, and given that over one-third of American Muslims are African Americans, that would mean that over half the non-black Muslim population doesn't do English. Given their high levels of education and income, this seems improbable to say the least. Maybe there's another explanation, and perhaps it's the one hinted at by Lugo, who noted in the phone call that they are "still pulling out the arrows" from the barrage they received from national Muslim organizations, which have preferred much higher numbers, after the 2007 report. Whatever the merits of the .6 percent estimate, there's no excuse for Pew not to have included a long footnote or appendix giving the actual number and explaining why they chose to go a different route. So saith I, anyway.

As for campaign-related news, the most important takeaway is that Pew is inclined to see some opening for the Democrats when it comes to evangelicals. On very first blush, the finding that members of evangelical churches only favor Republicans by 50 percent to 34 percent suggests as much. However, there are various caveats. "Evangelicals" are not here identified by how individuals answer the question "do you consider yourself a born-again or evangelical Christian," which is how most surveys identify evangelicals. So members include Latinos and African Americans, who are normally treated separately, and do not include "born-again" members of mainline Protestant denominations, who are often very Republican-leaning. At least we can hope that Pew will soon release the cross-tabs for members of those denominations by race and ethnicity. I trust John Green's nose on this one, but am eager to see the verification.

Otherwise, while the survey broadly tells us lots of things we already know (and it's always good to have what we know confirmed), there seem to be many interesting new tidbits. Intriguingly, if oddly, whole states are looked at for levels of religious intensity--i.e. (as the Hartford Courant will report tomorrow), the distinct lukewarmness of the faithful in Connecticut. Elsewhere, there's the array of views among faith traditions on whether "Religion causes more problems in society than it solves." Leading the list of those who "completely disagree" are Mormons (54 percent), followed by members of evangelical churches (50 percent), Muslims (47 percent), and members of historically black churches (45 percent). The lowest outside of the non-believing, non-belonging types are the Buddhists (12 percent), Hindus (15 percent), and Jews (18 percent). In other words, except for the evangelicals, small and/or persecuted minority groups are clustered at both ends of the spectrum. Social circumstances, historical memory, and theology vary, o ye social scientists eager for explanations based on one or two variables.

I am a betting man

The Democratic National Committee has wasted little time putting together an attack ad on McCain and gambling. Brody thinks it could work with evangelicals, and on such matters his opinion is worth paying attention to. I have my doubts though. While It's generally believed that reports on George W. Bush's drunk driving hurt him with evangelicals in 2000, McCain is a much better known quantity,mens silk pajamas, and most evangelicals have already made up their minds who they're voting for. But as always in a close election, a percentage point here or there in a swing state can make a big difference.
 

Fool Me Twice

God-o-Meter reported yesterday that Obama's faith folks had backed out of a scheduled lunchtime debate in DC with opposite numbers on the McCain side. (Hey, wasn't it the McCain side that was supposed to be suspending its campaign?) GOM quoted at length from a statement by the Family Research Council,mens silk pajamas, which wanted everyone to know about this apparent act of bad faith by the Obamas. The scheduled moderator, Rev. Rob Schenck, was quoted as saying: "Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean assured me...that his party would do everything possible to constructively engage Evangelicals, traditional Catholics, and other moral conservatives... Barack Obama has made similar promises. They did a couple of high-profile media events, but it appears they were not serious at a grassroots level."

The Obama campaign did not deny that it had backed out, and I've got no inside poop on why it did so. But Schenck's a right-wing partisan and pro-life agitprop artist who has 1) sought to prove that Obama is a secret Muslim; and 2) called Obama's Christian faith "woefully deficient." Rick Warren was not quite the honest broker he held himself out to be at the Saddleback forum last month. If I'd been in the Obama camp, I wouldn't have showed up for this debate either, not with Schenck in the chair.

Citizen John McPaine

"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from putting their country first; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and votes of man and woman. A credit crunch, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the worse the polls, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: Remember that,Silk Queen Quilt Cover, ye subprime lenders. It is dearness only that gives every thing its value: 700 billion? Why not 700 trillion? Heaven knows, not I, how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as THE PRESIDENCY should not be highly rated. My opponent, with the leadership of Congress to enforce his tyranny, has declared that he has a right not only to DEBATE but to FORCE me to do so; and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to MYSELF."

Schönborn v. Sodano

It is a rare thing when one Catholic cardinal publicly attacks another. The most famous example occurred in the middle of the 11th century, when Humbert of Silva Candida bitterly criticized Peter Damian for claiming that bishops who had purchased their offices were still valid bishops. The saintly (later sainted) Damian was one of the circle of papal reformers who strongly opposed simony, but he was unwilling to evoke the chaos that would have ensued if half the bishops in Europe (and all the priests they had ordained) had been kicked out of their jobs. Humbert was the kind of intellectual radical whose unwillingness to compromise helped bring about Rome's permanent split with Eastern Orthodoxy.

Now comes Christoph Schönborn, the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, accusing  Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals and former Vatican secretary of state,Sexy silk dresses, of having blocked the Vatican's inquiry into sex abuse allegations against the late, disgraced cardinal of Vienna, Hans Hermann Groer. Schönborn also said that Sodano had done "massive harm" to victims of sex abuse on Easter Sunday when he waved away criticism of the church's handling of sex abuse as "idle gossip." Declared Schönborn, a sometime protege of Benedict XVI: "The days of cover up are over."

While Sodano--also protector of the late, disgraced Legionaries of Christ founder Marcial Maciel Degollado--could never be confused with Peter Damian (and Schönborn seems a far cry from Humbert), there's certain parallel with the earlier strife, which help set the terms for the papacy's massive effort to reform the medieval church. The question now is what the papacy will do to reform its own ways and means.

Marriage-olatry

Before he became Pope Innocent III in 1198, Lotario dei Conti of Segni wrote De quadripartita specie nuptiarum, a treatise defining marriage as a four-part thing according to the four ways that Parisian scholastics of the day interpreted Scripture: historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. According to Lotario,  the "historical" was the carnal marriage of man and woman, designed for the procreation of offspring and the avoidance of fornication. The "allegorical" referred to the sacramental marriage of Christ and the Church; the "tropological,Sexy silk pajamas," the marriage of God and the individual soul; and the anagogical, the marriage between the Word of God and human nature in the Incarnation of Christ. For Lotario, the four types of marriages were equally "marriage." His point was to enable each to shed light on the others--to create an interpretive web for enriching his readers' understanding of all the relationships.

This excursus is prompted by a reading of the pastoral letter on marriage issued yesterday by the USCCB. It, too, makes reference to spiritual marriages--between Christ and the Church, within the Trinity. But unlike its medieval precursor, it tends to privilege the historical sense as the only "real" marriage. It's not a medieval document, but I'm not sure it's better for that. Carnal marriage--between a man and woman, sans contraception or divorce--becomes an object of transcendant significance, the bedrock of society and even of the Church. Marriage as an idol has been a Protestant temptation, and a Mormon one--but in recent years the Catholics have embraced it too.

If the Church wants to do that, it's not for us non-Catholics to object. But it also teaches that monogamous, heterosexual marriage is a natural phenomenon, created in obedience to Natural Law, and therefore that it can intervene to try to make society at large toe the line. In that regard, the pastoral's secular argumentation with respect to non-heterosexual marriage is notably weak--mostly just ex cathedra table-thumping like the following:

The legal recognition of same-sex unions poses a multifaceted threat to the very fabric of society, striking at the source from which society and culture come and which they are meant to serve. Such recognition affects all people, married and non-married: not only at the fundamental levels of the good of the spouses, the good of children, the intrinsic dignity of every human person, and the common good, but also at the levels of education, cultural imagination and influence, and religious freedom.

When it comes to plain old cohabitation, the pastoral refers its readers to empirical data:

Social science research, however, finds that cohabitation has no positive effects on a marriage....The findings of the social sciences confirm that the best environment for raising children is a stable home provided by the marriage of their parents.
 

Getting GetReligion

Because GetReligion's Mollie Hemingway is gracious enough to concede that I've offered the "best defense" of the Goodstein/Halbfinger NYT article on Pope Benedict's performance as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and because I was perhaps ungracious enough to smack her around a little in a subsequent post,Silk Queen Quilt Cover, let me acknowledge the validity of her latest grounds for criticism.

First, G/H may fairly be charged with taking a swipe at then-Cardinal Ratzinger's position on Liberation Theology. Here's what they wrote:

As Father Gauthe was being prosecuted in Louisiana, Cardinal Ratzinger was publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed, which the cardinal saw as a Marxist-inspired distortion of church doctrine.

OK, if I'd been their editor I would have changed that to read "...for preaching that empowering the poor and oppressed was the church's central mission...." In the context of the article as a whole, I count this venial sin.

Second, and more importantly, Hemingway claims that the G/H time-line regarding when the CDF "dithered" is "a mess." With respect to the paragraph above, for example, her point is that the prosecution of Father Gauthe and the crackdown on liberation theologians took place in 1980s, but that knowledge of the CDF's full responsibility for abuse cases indicated in a letter from 1922 didn't surface until some time in the 1990s.

I'll stipulate that there is indeed considerable fuzziness about when the 1922 letter came to be known inside the Roman Curia. For all we know, the CDF's staff canonists may have been aware of it all along. But that's not the point. The CDF had some considerable responsibility for abuse cases all along. And we know in detail from the Kiesle case in the early 1980s that the CDF under Ratzinger didn't merely dither; it brought to a standstill a proceeding that had been moving forward. As I noted, G/H allude to the Kiesle case (which Goodstein and Michael Luo looked at earlier this year). Had I been the editor, I would have made a little space to name and describe it.

Wallisite Common Ground

Jim Wallis' endless apologia pro Stupakia sua on Huffpost is an awe-inspiring exercise in injured innocence. According to him, the collapse of a compromise on abortion in the House health care bill was all the fault of the House leadership (which disrespected pro-life moderates) and pro-choice activists (who just couldn't see past their zealotry). Were there partisans on the other side to be named and blamed? Not so far as Wallis is concerned.

Now as Sarah Posner's fine blow-by-blow on Religion Dispatches makes clear, the abortion issue was badly handled by the pro-choice forces. But as usual, Wallis portrays himself, Rodney King-like, as just trying help people get along. No, in fact they can't all get along. If you're going to be for compromise in order to get health care passed, you've got to take a stand, and tell your interlocutors what to rally around.

To its credit, Third Way has done just that, criticizing the Stupak-Pitts Amendment (as it is now called) for violating the principles of abortion neutrality embraced in word by many,silk pajamas, and backing the failed (but perhaps to be revived in the Senate) Ellsworth Amendment. (See memo, after jump) Michael Sean Winters, vigorous pro-lifer that he is, recognizes that Stupak-Pitts went too far, and supports dialing it back for the greater good. Does Sojourners do the same? Tell us, Jim. And while you're at it, how about shouldering a little responsibility for what happened, O Prophet of the Common Ground?

Premeditated Murder

If ever anyone planned and carried out the killing of another human being, Scott Roeder's testimony at his trial yesterday made clear that he did. He described taking his pistol to George Tiller's church two times prior to when he actually got to the doctor, pressing the muzzle against his head and pulling the trigger. The killing had been something he'd been meditating, he said, since 1993. The Kansas City Star, has the story and the chilling video.

The real news was not Roeder's admissions, but Judge Warren Wilbert's ruling that he would not permit jurors to consider a verdict of voluntary manslaughter--something he had left open as a possibility. A defense of voluntary manslaughter is only permissible if the accused acted to stop the imminent use of unlawful force.

"There's no imminence of danger on a Sunday morning in the back of a church," Wilbert said,silk pajamas, "let alone unlawful conduct. In the state of Kansas, abortions are legal."

Under the circumstances, classic civil disobedience theory would suggest that Roeder go ahead and plead guilty, contending that he had acted in order to protest an unjust law and throwing himself on the mercy of the court. Perhaps he'll do so. But anti-abortion radicals seem to have a difficult time admitting that abortion is actually legal in America. Acknowledging that they are law-breakers seems more than they can manage.

Mainline blues

Pastordan, good UCC clergy that he is, laments the ARIS news on shrinking Mainline Protestantism. This is hardly new news, but there has been an acceleration in the shrinkage during this decade--down from 17.2 percent of the adult population in 2001 to 12.9 percent today. The good pastor stresses the importance of the Mainline maintaining and strengthening its distinctive vision of progressive morality (leave us not say moralism). The latest Mainline Protestant clergy survey, released a few days ago by Public Religion Research, shows a modest liberalizing trend among this already pretty liberal group. The question is whether they became just the voices of a few crying in the wilderness--whether there will be enough fannies in the pews to make anyone else pay attention. In this regard,Fantastic silk scarves, it's interesting the most liberal of the mainline denominations, Pastordan's own United Church of Christ, has actually increased its (modest) numbers (and percentage of the population) since 1990. So maybe there's a public out there waiting for a prophetically energized Mainline.

But there's another possiblity. The late, great church historian Bill Hutchison always used to point out that what came to be called the Mainline was historically always being replenished by the civilizing, so to speak, of evangelicalism. The main case in point was Methodism, which evolved from circuit riding revivalism to central Mainline pillar in a couple of generations. There's a real possiblity that a good segment of the new non-denominationalism will take on enough of the socially conscious, community-building role of the Mainline to be, to all intents and purposes, part of it. This is the ecclesiastical equivalent of the "common ground" politics that is exercising some of us, for better or worse, these days. While it may not make the lefties happy, it may be their salvation.