The Bishop of New Hampshire’s day ended with Chinese food and chocolate ice cream. He sat with some 15 friends in a second floor conference room in St. Mary’s Church in Putney, talking about nothing in particular, as though he had passed a normal day, with another on the horizon.
The BBC reports that as Bishop Robinson began his sermon at St. Mary’s, Putney, a heckler interrupted the sermon and was escorted from the congregation.
When the Chinese government instituted the policy in 1979, it touched off a wave of sex-selective abortions as pregnant couples decided that if they could have only one child they would benefit most from having a boy. That helped leave modern China with the largest gender imbalance in the world. Today, there are 37 million more men than women in China. As the first generation of one-child boys have reached adolescence, the youth crime rate in China has more than doubled.
Just four years ago, during the last Presidential election, leaders on the religious right were the only white evangelicals whose voices were heard in the public arena. This year, however, is very different.
Just so you know the proper protocol.
As Lambeth nears, we are starting to notice some interesting items in the U.K. Press. Here are a few items that caught our attention this morning.
The Telegraph finished its series on the 50 most influential Anglicans with the list of the ten most influential Anglicans. No big surprise here: the Archbishop of Canterbury tops the list. But guess who comes in second.
All right, enough of the travelogue I suppose. I go back to the church in a few hours to begin a day of media wrangling. Gene is doing about 14 brief interviews between noon and when he preaches at the 6:30 p. m. Eucharist at Giles’ church. Five of them are television interviews and two or three of those are live, so it could get rather hectic.
I remember seeing this parable [of the sower] acted out in the stage production of “Godspell,” a good-humored play based on the gospel according to Matthew. . . . Watching all of that, I had the same response I always do to this parable: I started worrying about what kind of ground I was on with God.