I don’t usually do anything remotely approaching scholarly discussion of the Bible, ever, but today’s Gospel reading is one that I find interesting and troubling. Here it is, starting from the part where the slave who was given one talent and hid it away, and now has to explain to the Master why he didn’t “double his investment,” so to speak: Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, `Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was…
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Naow that we can has a competent, intelligent preznit naow who is also spiritual, I’m reminded of a rarely-heard Eucharistic prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. I’m going to bug my priest, Steve, to use this one more often (he tends to either stray far from the BCP into other national church’s prayer books, or stick to the bog-standard “Eucharistic Prayer A.” When I lived in Seattle and was a member of Trinity Episcopal, we prayed “Eucharistic Prayer C” during much of the later summer and fall, when a more ecological view was appropriate to the season. One of…
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Lincoln Mitchell: Rethinking the American Electorate after an Obama Victory After properly invoking a great American philosopher, Lawrence Berra by noting “it ain’t over ’til it’s over,” HuffPost’s Lincoln Mitchell points out that an Obama victory will force all of us, right and left, to rethink our positions. I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now, ever since running across this thoughtful rumination comparing political divides to religious ones. There will be no place for polarized politics in the future; it’s a failed model that merely perpetuates itself with constant discord and conflict. We don’t have time for…
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Only Connect: Holding together but going nowhere From our viewpoint the bishops talked in secret little groups in their ‘big top’ surrounded by a ring of police and only emerged once to go to London to tell society how wicked it was not to do more about the debt. Many of us had worked in or visited Africa and experienced the poverty. We do all we can to press for justice and support the aid agencies but we also know about violence against women in Africa and the persecution of gay people. They are the real victims and scapegoats in…
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The Anglican Communion | The high price of togetherness | Economist.com On the brighter side from the Communion’s viewpoint, some Americans who went to Lambeth do now have a better sense of the social and political constraints on bishops in traditional societies. One African bishop recalls that after news reached his country of the gay-friendly stance of America’s bishops, a senior Muslim asked him, in bewilderment, whether he too had ceased to be Christian. “I came to understand as never before that there are places and cultures where it is not possible to discuss [homosexuality],†said Bishop Jeff Lee of…
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Here’s the story: The two pieces of slate, and the large rounded glacial pebbles set in crushed limestone around it, are the salvaged pieces of the altar at Holy Innocents Hoffman Estates, my former Episcopal mission parish. When we closed the church at the end of December, 2006, there were a few people who mourned the loss as if a family member died. Many of them left after trying to remain with the rest of us; they just couldn’t continue in the new place. One of the things that was discussed in the run-up to the closure and merger with…
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I just don’t know what to make of Bishop Deng Bul’s recent comments. Watch and listen to the video HERE and decide for yourself. I imagine a lot of Chicago Episcopalians are going to wonder what to make of them, too. He’s got friends here in the Diocese and long-standing ties to local parishes, and a lot of people will be hurt and disappointed, no matter how garbled Bishop Daniel’s English syntax is. I mean – there are a lot of gay clergy in this diocese. Chicago bishops have been ordaining them for years. Sure, this has turned some traditionalists…
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Dave Walker, Cartoonist of Lambeth, received a “cease and desist” letter from a current owner of the British SPCK chain of Christian bookshops. He has removed all content from his blog pertaining to the odd and ongoing story of how an Anglican bookstore chain got turned over to a group of Texans of the Orthodox faith for a song. And how a lot of people lost their jobs over the last year or so, and how one young man was driven to despair and committed suicide, all because this strangely fundamentalist Orthodox group decided to gut the bookshops, fire the…
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Our PB Katharine seems to be getting a lot of attention in Britain in the run-up to Lambeth; earlier today I read the sermon she delivered at Salisbury Cathedral, and apparently it and another service she preached at were broadcast live on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 3. There are links to both documents in the story below. Episcopal Life Online – NEWS [Episcopal News Service] As part of the pre-Lambeth Conference Hospitality Initiative, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and the bishops of the Episcopal Church of Sudan (ECS) are visiting the Church of England’s Diocese of Salisbury and…
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Episcopal Life Online – WORLD REPORT The controversial former bishop of Harare, Nolbert Kunonga, has been officially excommunicated, thereby stripping him of his ability to function as a cleric in the Anglican Church. The announcement by the dean of the Church of the Province of Central Africa, the Rt. Rev. Albert Chama, comes following disturbing reports of continued harassment and violence from local police against Anglicans trying to worship in Zimbabwes capital city.