We in Louisiana have seen and experienced mercy from the hands of many for the past two years. People from radically differing perspectives around sexuality have come together in a mission of mercy, and have found their lives changed and the seeming hot button issues put in the proper perspective. Why can we as Anglicans not demonstrate the same mercy toward one another?
Anita Roddick [came to see] the value of spiritual development bringing about material change to the way we live and act – her experience of the annual Greenbelt festival, showed a practical vitality and intellectual energy that was far from the stereotypes of Christianity she had often met, and the stuffiness of the church she had personally encountered.
The task of theological education really is to help us learn to do theology — to relate our own stories, and the stories of those around us, to the great stories of our faith, so that we may be able to give an account of the faith that is within us. Theological education can bless us with the ability to see the need and hurt and injustice of the world, the ways in which God’s dream is not yet being realized.
Dr Williams compares “the act of nightmare violence” of September 11, 2001 and the chain of retaliation, fear and misery” it unleashed with the public meeting in Johannesburg on September 11, 1906 (attended by people of Muslim, Hindu and Christian faiths) at which Gandhi’s non-violent protest movement – the Satyagraha movement – was born.
In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.
How can a church invite people to homecoming who have never been in the building in the first place? How can anyone understand finding a home in God if they have no spiritual language to express their longings? From the point of view of twenty-first century post-Christian people, the “Homecoming Sunday” banner may as well read “Members Only Club.”
Of course, Christian-Muslim dialogue must go on. But I am wary of the term ‘inter-faith dialogue’. It often suggests a disconnected, middle class, rather intellectual activity which is cut off from the mass of the people, both inside and outside the faith communities. To be of practical value, dialogue must be localized, honest and courageous.
Episcopalians at the Pentagon began holding services during Lent 1987. The mid-week services were well received, and continued after Easter, with local clergy and military