The oldest surviving New Testament manuscript is being assembled and placed online as a resource for scholars and students. The British Library says the full text of the Codex Sinaiticus will be available to Web users by next July, digitally reconnecting parts that are held in Britain, Russia, Germany and a monastery in Egypt’s Sinai Desert.
He was diplomatic about it, but it was clearly vexing to the primate of the Southern Cone, Greg Venables, that he had neither seen nor agreed to the published response to the St Andrew’s draft Covenant, issued by GAFCON on Friday in his name and those of six African primates.
Archbishop Rowan Williams met the press this morning in a facility know as the Missing Link building, and unlike Saturday’s “interview” with Tom Wright, I did not make that up. He answered one of the key questions put to him with great clarity, another with evasion, and a third with intriguing nuance.
With so little happening, the media is parsing trivialities. It turns out that the purportedly Buddhist chant with which the Right Reverend Duleep de Chickera, the Bishop of Colombo, concluded his sermon at yesterday’s opening Eucharist was actually a profession of faith in the Trinity chanted in what struck many listeners as a Buddhist fashion.
Peter Steinfels has a provocative column in the New York Times that discusses the importance of doubt to our modern faith. The question he raises is this: is our doubt a transition to a life without faith? Or is modern faith simply more comfortable with doubt? While inconclusive, the data seems to point to the first option.
In this brief space between GAFCON and the heart of Lambeth, I have been indulging in word play. It can be a vice. It can be seen as silly. But, here’s the thing: we are people of a faith in which words have meaning. God created by speaking. God came among us in the Word; and it is in the written Word that we in our generation know of these things
Building and nurturing community—relationships with common purpose and common support—is very much like planting and nurturing a garden. Just a few weeds, if not attended to, can kill what you are trying to grow. Like the weeds in a real garden, if considered alone, they are just healthy plants; in the context of the garden they are killers.