The Evangelical Theological Society held its annual meeting earlier this month, and Christianity Today’s blast email today features a piece on ETS’s most popular breakout session. CT blogger Ted Olsen reports on J.P. Moreland’s standing-room only “How Evangelicals Became Over-Committed to the Bible and What Can Be Done About It.”
Roman Catholic bishops have been providing guidance to their flock on political issues for ages, and for the past thirty-odd years they’ve even explicitly sounded off about various matters at stake in the voting booth. But this year, the bishops have taken it further by addressing how what voters tick on their ballot ties in with their salvation. But what those issues are may surprise you.
Susan Russell has the story of how Bishop Dabney Smith of the Diocese of Southwest Florida withdrew permission he had previously granted for Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire to speak at a Sarasota church. Bishop Smith appears to have taken a lesson from the Jeffrey John chapter of the Rowan Williams playbook entitled, “How to Alienate your Supporters without Placating your Adversaries.”
Evangelism isn’t about beating opponents into submission—intellectual or otherwise. At its heart, it’s about sharing love, communicating who God is and how God is about the work of redemption and reconciliation. It’s less about what we know than who we know—and how he has made himself known through the power of the resurrection at work in our lives. That having been said, there are some fundamentals that have to be covered.
My move from New York City to western South Dakota changed my sense of time and space so radically I might as well have gone to sea. In journeying on the inland ocean of the Plains, the great void at the heart of North America, I’ve discovered that time and distance, those inconveniences that modern life with its increasingly sophisticated computer technologies seeks to erase, have a reality and a terrifying beauty all their own.
So the upshot is this: I’m going to focus more on Science vs Theology here – and start posting my thoughts about the Great Anglican Upheaval over on the Cafe elsewhere. We’ll see if I can stick to that, but at least for now it’s the plan. Grin.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon visited the region and offered “all help humanly possible” to the more than 300,000 Tabasco residents whose homes were flooded or damaged and to the thousands of farmers whose entire harvests were destroyed….
Only a week or so ago, a US blogger was remarking charitably that it wasn’t worth expending a bullet on the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who is the first woman to lead a major Christian denomination. The blogger, incidentally, was herself a woman.
The Church of England had provided no bishops for the colonies prior to the Revolution and it was not prepared to do so afterwards. The consecration of Seabury was a key to the formation of the Episcopal Church. Its relationship to the Anglican Communion was figured out later.
A two-week trial began Tuesday in Fairfax County Circuit Court that will determine whether the 1867 law governs the dispute between 11 Virginia congregations that voted to leave the church and Episcopal leaders who reject the validity of those votes. At the time of enactment of the law, Protestant churches had been torn apart over slavery and abolitionism, and the splits were never amicable or formally recognized by both sides. Ironically, the Episcopal Church was an exception.