As an American Episcopal priest, however, I feel that no one is looking at the real issue, which is not to get the archbishop to come on board the gay world cruise, but rather to deal with far more critical issues at local and regional levels. It’s really not up to Rowan to make everything all right. Why should we demand that our spiritual leaders become supermen?
“Everybody under age 35” is a priority, says Greg Rickel, who will soon be bishop of the Diocese of Olympia. Rickel, who has an 11-year-old son, Austin, with his wife of 23 years, Marti, a psychiatric nurse, says, “If we can’t master or figure out what to do with that age group, the church is dead.”
Rowan Williams tells the Telegraph that he believes our society is “broken,” in an interview that has nothing to do with the Anglican Communion. “Is
George Packer can hardly be described as a supporter of the war in Iraq, but in his latest for The New Yorker, he both skewers the architects of the war, and poses some difficult questions for those who favor a rapid pullout. On the one hand, he writes: “[T]he inadequacy of the surge is already clear, if one honestly assesses the daily lives of Iraqis.” On the other hand, he finds all of the “quick exit” strategies being advocated on the left shortsighted and superficial.
A group of young Mormons, out to counter their church’s stodgy image have hit upon the idea of a beefcake calendar. As they explain it: The 2008 Men on a Mission calendar features twelve handsome returned Mormon missionaries from across the United States who, for the first time ever, have dared to pose bare-chested in a steamy national calendar.
The publication of personal letters by Mother Teresa to Jesus, her spiritual director, a few clergy, and her bishop–letters that she specifically asked to be destroyed–raises ethical questions. The letters acknowledge God’s absence in her spiritual life for some fifty years and contrast her public persona to the private reality but this is immaterial. What right does Mother Teresa’s spiritual director have to release letters that Mother Teresa wrote either to or for him?
This hymn text is by John Greenleaf Whittier, a nineteenth-century Quaker who gave himself to the anti-slavery movement when he was twenty-five. In this hymn he extols the Quaker virtue of silence in the midst of the enthusiastic revivalism of the Great Awakening.