Bishops blogging, after Lambeth
Sitting in airports with wifi and traveling home after the Lambeth Conference, bishops reflect on their experiences and offer thoughts on “what now?”
Sitting in airports with wifi and traveling home after the Lambeth Conference, bishops reflect on their experiences and offer thoughts on “what now?”
Now that the Bishops are on their way home, the press is trying to make summarize the just completed Lambeth Conference and the pundits are polishing their crystal balls to tell us what it all means. Here is a round up of press reports from the day after Lambeth.
In many ways the Lambeth Conference appears to have had dual personalities. There was the listening, engaging side where Bishops met face-to-face and there was the organizational side where the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Communion Office and the Bishops attempted to find a structure by which the Communion can continue to hold together.
Corey Fincher, of the University of New Mexico, has a different hypothesis for the origin of religious diversity. He thinks not that religions are like disease but that they are responses to disease—or, rather, to the threat of disease. If he is right, then people who believe that their religion protects them from harm may be correct, although the protection is of a different sort from the supernatural one they perceive.
Virginia Governor Tim Kaine and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius reportedly sit on top of Barack Obama’s vice presidential short list. What binds these two–aside from being effective Democratic governors of red (or reddish) states–is that they’re both Roman Catholic. But their similarities mask a surprising gulf: Sebelius and Kaine have had markedly different political relationships with the Church.
All of us go through transitions in life. We move away, get married, have children; we get hired and fired; relationships bloom and fracture. Flexibility may be the ultimate spiritual virtue. Because if we wait until things calm down in our lives before seeking to forge a fruitful relationship with the divine, it will never happen. God’s voice and presence is everywhere, even in the midst of the chaos that so often defines our lives.
By Luiz Coelho As a steward for the Lambeth Conference, my days have been filled with all sorts of random activities. I have carried luggage