If you love baseball—the church of baseball—then don’t miss the Rev. Anne Gardner’s piece in today’s Boston Globe. In addition to being a correspondent for the paper and chaplain/director of community service at Endicott College, she’s a loyal Red Sox fan—and a staff member at Fenway Park.
Early this morning, Politico author Andrew Glass wrote a tribute to Michael Deaver, who passed away Aug. 18. Deaver’s funeral had been scheduled for today to allow people interested in attending to return from vacations and whatnot. No one, least of all Deaver, realized just how many people would want to come.
An op-ed in Uganda’s Weekly Observer reflects on the state of the Anglican Communion and Africa’s role in ongoing disputes over homosexuality and the church. The unbylined article expresses a sympathy for people who find homosexuality “revolting,” but notes that African churches may hurt people more by exerting so much energy over the matter when there are other, graver issues threatening God’s flocks in Uganda and beyond.
Bishop John Shelby Spong has written an open letter to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury that rehashes old complaints and seems calculated to give offense. It is perhaps best seen as an act of unconscious self-marginalization (not to mention bad manners.) Spong, like N. T. Wright, has become one of those figures whose public utterances frequently do more to bolster the cause of his adversaries than his allies.
Churches and their clergy have played an important role in the rebuilding of New Orleans and the healing of the city’s people. But these clergy are just as vulnerable to the trauma experienced by victims of catastrophe. New Orleans Bishop Charles Jenkins, talks about his experience in an Associated Press article on the pastoral needs of clergy.
Alongside his social justice activism, Stringfellow was a surprisingly bold critic of Mainline Protestantism’s “virtual abandonment of the Word of God in the Bible” for a mess of modernistic philosophical porridge. He thought mainline churches were neither “intimate with nor reliant upon the Word of God in the Bible, whether in preaching, in services in the sanctuaries, or in education and nurture.
Although I had just finished writing a lengthy doctoral dissertation on the history of the Episcopal Church, my truest self was silent. I do not know how or where I learned it, but I had learned not to say what I really thought or truly believed or most desired.