Bishops meeting in New Orleans shifted gears today to focus on mission, spending the day working at locations in New Orleans and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The reports comes in reveal an image of people coming together to repair, rebuild, revitalize these commmunities, and of the Episcopal Church’s ongoing involvement in the process.
In Canada this past June, Canadian Anglicans and Lutherans, in their respective national meetings, voted that their ministers could hold offices in either denomination. And while this requires an amendment to provincial and diocesan canons, some have already done so. One church in Carman, Manitoba, had its beginnings 12 years ago when, as separate churches, they had found themselves accidentally booked together for their respective cook-outs at the local park. Now they are one parish: Grace St. John’s Anglican/Lutheran Church.
More update and reactions from Day 2, via Thinking Anglicans, Episcope, and the Living Church, as well as a link to the PBS backgrounder piece on the House of Bishops meeting that was the lead story on its “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly” program.
Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement—began at sundown yesterday. Jews today are fasting and praying as God decides each person’s fate in the coming year. One of the metaphors that comes out of this is that of “writing the book of one’s life.” Those of us that contribute to blogs regularly have come to know many of the virtues and pratfalls of perpetually and compulsively scribbling. Jim Sollisch finds, as a writer, that the metaphor goes deeper than God writing out our fate for the year: it’s about the life we ourselves write, as the characters who have to make choices.
A California pastor has set up a nondenominational (of the Southern-Baptist variety) church inside a nightclub, and one of its most faithful and regular attendees is a member of the hip-pop group the Black-Eyed Peas. The mission of the church is laudable, but what goes on in the club the other six days of the week—to say nothing of the content of some of the music—might give some pause.
Jesus and comedy are a tricky mix. Comedian Kathy Griffin’s Emmy acceptance speech was censored because of a punchline that the Academy of Arts and
Stephen Bates writes in The Guardian overnight of his impressions of the scene in New Orleans. He describes the surreal aspects of the Archbishop Williams’ visit to the city, his admiration of our church’s involvement in the rebuilding efforts and contrasts that with the specter of the breaking apart of the same church. And he writes of the events and the atmosphere surrounding the end of the Archbishop’s time with the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops:
Let me define what I mean by famine. Famine is the reigning myth. It is king and queen, emperor and president. As the kids would say, “It rules.” Myth one is that there is not enough. You will barely get through an hour anywhere in the first-world without the subtext of “there is not enough” coming up. “I would love to come but I am so busy.”
A picture of today’s events is emerging from mainstream media reports from New Orleans. Taken individually, you might draw any number of conclusions, but together they form a collage that reveals more.