These centres are not slinging negative slogans at each other but are working hard at trying to find a lasting peace with justice. They are taking seriously the new opportunities that arise with Israel's disengagement from Gaza and part of the West Bank in a matter of days. It is these Israelis and Palestinians that we should support. Those who are taking real risks for peace.
Read moreNow, ramifications from the consecration of Bishop V. Gene Robinson are sending shockwaves through the Anglican community, and the denomination is on the brink of imploding. The June 2003 election of Rt.
Read moreMany of the CT parishes I visited confirmed my worst expectations. The Sunday after the young gay man Matthew Shepard was murdered, the rector at one parish I was visiting declared from the pulpit that Lambeth 98 was an "abomination," and tried to imply that the Lambeth bishops were somehow responsible for that vicious act.
Read moreDo they think that given these circumstances, the Church still has the option of muddling on along the lines of the Me Inc. with its petty human concerns such as gender issues, or, worse, ecclesial blessing of wayward sexual inclinations? Do they really believe that since Sept. 11, 2001 -- or July 7, 2005 for the Brits - they can afford to further fissure the Body of Christ?
Read moreI was in touch with the Muslim Council after their statement and we are determined to speak and act in solidarity with one another. The centre we established here in the City, St Ethelburga's Centre for Preventing and Transforming conflict has been working recently with Muslim students and we have been able to contact our friends as part of an effort to ensure that no one will be able to exploit this time of grief and anxiety.
Read moreIn conversation with seven of us clergy meeting with him on June 16, 2005, The Rt. Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson Howard asked if our request for alternative episcopal oversight (appended) was the result of a "serious theological dispute." This question goes to the heart of the matter, and I will address it shortly.
But there is a preliminary question to be addressed first. What integrity and legitimate needs of these congregations (see Communiqué above) are we seeking to have protected?
Read moreNow, I am no teetotaler. Drowning one's grief in ample amounts of beer or wine is no exclusive English trait but simply a very human reaction, though not exactly the wisest.
Yet I was appalled to find only four other people kneeling in my favorite London church, Saint Paul's, Knightsbridge, when I went there that bloody Thursday afternoon, saddened even more when I discovered that these four were not even English but faithful visitors from Ohio.
Read moreSpong finds the Old Testament's homosexual prohibitions ignorant and "morally incompetent" expressions of "popular prejudices." With the New Testament, he disdains Paul's condemnations as "ill-informed" ravings from a zealot who, he hypothesizes, was a "deeply repressed, self-loathing" homosexual.
"The contending positions are mutually exclusive," he concludes, and "there can be no compromise." He dismisses conservative views as "frail, fragile and pitiful."
Read moreTwo days later, I received by mail a most delightful cover letter, thanking me for agreeing to deliver the benediction and inviting me to a number of related festivities. Included with the letter, though, was a distressing memorandum from the Office of the President of the Medical University: "Guidelines for Invocation and Benediction at Public Functions," guidelines to which I would be required to conform in order to bless the graduates.
Read moreWe began attending a local REC parish when the Episcopal parish we had been attending was taken over by the Bishop, following the abandonment by its rector and three quarters of its congregation. Half of these went with the rector to form a new Orthodox Presbyterian mission. The other half "discovered" the Reformed Episcopal Church across the street. It was described to me by one of the fleeing Episcopalians as "the Episcopal Church of the 1950's" in terms of its liturgy and atmosphere.
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